Introduction

reface to a Project

here are several ways to write a review. One may attempt as good a recommendation as possible. Or, one may strain the good from the bad to give a balanced critique. One may assess a book’s significance, or its scholarliness, or its novelty. Many reviews try to do all of these at once.

he forthcoming series takes a different line. To be sure, I hope to do all I can to share an interest in the subject books. But though each is attached to one specific book, our articles will be essays rather than reviews. That is to say, I plan to dilate upon select ideas related to those books, and those ideas will not necessarily be either representative or obvious in the original book. The reviews will introduce the essays; the essays will revive (or resist) the subject books. In some sense they ought to vindicate the subject books: they ought to show that they are worth reading, not by mere assertion, but by a proper demonstration of the effect that they have had on my own ideas and opinions. In this matter, I ask to be understood as a specimen. I wish to be seen as an experiment in reading.

ut what are the subjects to be? Naturally, the sort of thing that I read. Equally they must be the kind of thing I may reasonably expect others to read; or leastwise things I would like others to read. The overlap is large enough: its constituents are philosophy, theology and history, its kings are poetry and prose stories, its domains – the whole of recorded history up to our own day.

o with a book each of philosophy, history and poetry, we shall begin; and once we have tried the waters, made some slight forays into the basic attitudes I shall take to each of those fields, we shall trust our sails to the winds and go forth.