Reviews
| John Laughland |
| 'This is a formidable and well-documented counterblast to a developing modern orthodoxy, expressing a point of view that many readers will not even have suspected existed, let alone read' Anthony Daniels, Spectator |
| 'A useful and controversial contribution to the debate about victor's justice, and a valuable warning that international war crimes tribunals need to operate with precision and care' Jonathan Steele, Guardian |
| 'Important, timely and cogently argued ... Laughland's highly readable book ... will provoke much opposition, but in laying out with admirable clarity the complex historical ground for an urgent contemporary debate it is invaluable' Robert Stewart, Spectator |
| 'A stupendous book' Daniel Hannan, Daily Telegraph |
| 'A welcome contribution to contemporary history' Peter Calvocoressi, New Statesman |
| 'Laughland asks some pointed questions that will discomfit even those who disagree with him. Who has the right to adjudicate the acts of another state? What accountability is there for international tribunals? To what extent are they victors' justice?' Adam LeBor, Sunday Telegraph |
| Amit Chaudhuri |
| 'This extraordinary and wide-ranging collection, through a series of highly-focussed aperçus, puts in question the key terms of self-understanding of much modern literature: "modernism" and "post-modernity", for instance; and this from the standpoint of an insightful observer who has moved between more than one Indian and several Euro-American vantage points. The book offers among other things a fascinating insight into the specificity of certain Indian itineraries within the multiple modernities we inhabit today; including that of a largely unrecognized "secular spirituality". This and much else make this book a treasure trove of acute and thought-provoking perceptions' Charles Taylor, McGill University |
| 'Amit Chaudhuri’s collected essays and reviews constitute an intellectual autobiography of the first importance' Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Global Distinguished Professor of English at NYU |
| 'Amit Chaudhuri’s career as a novelist has proceeded in tandem with an ongoing engagement as a robust critic and thinker and musician. In these essays breadth of knowledge and the fluency of thought are held in perfect balance. Clearing a Space is a compendious, quietly passionate, rigorous and unfailingly eloquent collection' Geoff Dyer |
| 'In this thought-provoking and compelling set of essays Amit Chaudhuri teases out the implications of polarities that may seem fixed and suggests new ways of exploring the narratives of Indian modernity. He asks hard questions of himself as well as others, and he engages us as readers with the warmth and acuity of his observations across a wonderful range of writing' Gillian Beer |
| 'The essays of Amit Chaudhuri are really a wonderful key to the understanding of the vitality and specificity of Indian modernity … a fascinating contribution to the understanding of this great civilization and its modern transformations. They are worth the serious attention of scholars in the social sciences as well as the humanities' Shmuel Eisenstadt, Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| 'Much to ponder and marvel at in this fascinating, subtle and humane book'
Ivan Hewitt, Daily Telegraph |
| 'Written over a 15-year period, in which he has excelled as a novelist and academic, Mr Chaudhuri’s essays elucidate an Indian modernist tradition, which he finds rooted in 19th-century Bengali humanism and is characterised by "ellipsis and disjunction". Bringing them to view - or "clearing a space" - ... involves pruning back two choking analyses of modern Indian literature: the post-colonial and post-modern. The tension between Mr Chaudhuri's intellect and aesthetic, between the theorist and artist, is engaging. It rewards a second reading of his essays' Economist |
| 'For most people in the West, "India" has come to mean an overblown but fascinating amalgam of kitsch, weird English, colours, call centres, religiosity and extravagant emotion, illustrated by Bollywood films and the early novels of Salman Rushdie. Hardly anybody expects to find high seriousness, literary, artistic or cinematic modernism, secular reformism, humanistic thought - in short, any of the manifestations of reason - on the Subcontinent. All that, it is implicitly assumed, is a monopoly of Western elites. Amit Chaudhuri's exhilarating essays on "India, literature and culture" challenge this new orthodoxy … with intelligence, erudition and civility … Brilliant essays' Chandak Sengoopra, Independent |
| 'Delightfully spiky' Guardian |
| 'Rich, provocative … no one interested in either postcolonial literature or the hegemonic discourse called postcolonial studies will be able to ignore this book' Michael Gorra, Times Literary Supplement |
| Peter Burke and Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke |
| 'Peter Burke is the leading cultural historian of our generation' Jay Winter, Yale University |
| 'The world's greatest thinking happens in many climes, contexts, and languages. To alert the English-speaking world to this fact, there are no better scholars than Peter and Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke and no better subject than Gilberto Freyre - Brazil's uomo universale, who combined literary genius, intellectual audacity, academic rigor, unrestricted vision and profound originality in work that has helped shape one of the global giants of the present and future: modern Brazil' Felipe Fernández-Armesto |
| 'As expected, the authors have produced a major work of intellectual biography of a most original and influential Latin-American thinker' José Murilo de Carvalho, Brazilian Academy of Letters |
| 'This is an excellent book focusing on the work of the leading Brazilian intellectual of the twentieth century, whose ideas had a major national and international impact' Francisco Bethencourt, University of London |
| Richard Bonney |
| 'Such books would help our efforts aimed at clearing away misunderstanding about Islam especially the Jihad by the Western World' Muhammad Ijaz-ul-Haq, Minister for Religious Affairs, Pakistan. Praise for Jihad: From Qu'ran to Bin Laden |
| 'The Clash of Civilizations is no longer an alarmist thesis; it informs the political imaginary of our age. In this survey of contemporary neoconservative polemic from the USA, Richard Bonney offers a cogent analysis, which is as incisive as it is compassionate' S. Parvez Manzoor, The Muslim World Book Review |