Donald Sassoon

Fascinating insight into probably the most famous painting in the world, and how different ages have interpreted the sitter and given the portrait particular significance. Especially interesting are photographs of Mona Lisa cartoons and ephemera, which enable you to realise exactly how overexposed this image is. This doesn't really focus overmuch on the different theories about the creation of the painting - there are ample other places to look for those. It's about how the painting has been show more displayed, criticised, reacted to, stolen and turned into a global icon. A biography of a work of art whose history - dare I say it - is far more intriguing than the painting itself. The mystery is not the smile, but why it has affected generations of people so powerfully. This book won't do anything to reduce the Mona Lisa hype, but it does at least allow us to put in context. show less

Much of the world’s population lives under revolutionary regimes. Cambodia, China, France, Greece, Haiti, Iran, Ireland, Mexico, Nicaragua, the United States, even the United Kingdom, that distant descendant of the Glorious Revolution: all entered their modern histories with a revolution. And that’s not even to speak of decolonisation in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, the post-Soviet sphere after 1991, or the ambiguous aftershocks of the Arab Spring in 2011. Most countries have put show more their revolution behind them. Others simply cannot stop rehashing it, the US most conspicuously (and not just thanks to the semiquincentennial in 2026). All helped to make revolution a hallmark of what it means to be modern.

For much of the 20th century, revolution’s role in midwifing modernity rendered it a compelling subject for historians, sociologists, and students of politics. Some of social science’s greatest hits treated revolution comparatively, from Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution (1938) via Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) to Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions (1979). But then the field fell strangely quiet. So-called and often self-styled ‘revisionists’ shrank individual revolutions to merely national or local events. Grand causal accounts gave way to histories of accident and contingent conjunctures. And the growing awareness of revolution’s human toll – the Terror and the Great Leap Forward; Stalin and Mao’s famines; the camps and the killing fields – cast a dark shadow over the promises of revolution. As a result, big thinkers moved on to other topics. The great days of revolution – that most future-oriented of collective human projects – seemed to be firmly in the past.

And yet, if Dan Edelstein’s The Revolution to Come and Donald Sassoon’s Revolutions: A New History are anything to go by, revolution is back, and in a major way, spanning two millennia in Edelstein’s case but a mere four centuries or so for Sassoon. Sassoon writes in the great tradition of Brinton and Skocpol, lining up a rollcall of revolutions – English, French, 19th-century European, Russian, Chinese – for comparative inspection. Edelstein, meanwhile, masterfully combines the intellectual history of revolution with the experience of revolution all the way from the Peloponnesian War to our populist present. Sassoon points back to the heyday of revolutionary studies; Edelstein shows the way forward.

You can read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/revolution-come-and-revolutions-new-...

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University. His most recent book is Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Yale University Press, 2017). show less

Donald Sassoon has truly created a major work of research with the book "One Hundred Years of Socialism". Despite the general title, in reality the book deals in-depth (and then I mean REALLY in-depth) with the socialist political parties of all sorts in Western Europe throughout the last century, their various interpretations of socialism, and their electoral successes and losses. Sassoon clearly emphasizes the UK and Italy, but pays attention to all major nations of Western Europe and show more quite some smaller ones too, like the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, etc. Not only this, but he also gives full attention to the social-democrats as well as the communists, various independent socialists, and their internal as well as external conflict.

The book is very well supported by copious amounts of statistics, tables, overviews etc. containing anything from election results to relative productivity increases. Each party's attitudes towards domestic issues, foreign policy, economic policy, as well as to the Wars and the Cold War is meticulously registered, and every change of leadership or strategy explained in-depth. A complaint could be that, despite promises of the entire 20th century, by far the greater part of the book is about post-war Europe (in fact only the first four chapters address the period 1900-1945). But when Sassoon engages something, he does it above all thoroughly, and so there is nothing anyone could possibly want to know about postwar socialism that is not in this book.

The writing is very dry and factual, at times encyclopedic in style. Sassoon himself takes care not to take sides in any internal disputes between various socialist views (communist vs reformist etc.), but clearly does have a general sympathy for socialism. When he assesses policy, he generally does so in a balanced and judicious manner. At most one could argue that he is probably a bit too critical of the SFIO as well as the 'unreformed' communists, who are never portrayed in a positive light, but that is a minor issue. Finally, the epilogue is a competent if somewhat vague assessment of the results of socialists in the 20th century, and a critical view towards the future.

A good indication of the encyclopedic and thorough nature of the work is that the notes, bibliography and index together already form 187 pages: truly a mastodontic work of history. If Sassoon can spend the time to make another such work about, say, socialism outside Europe, or socialism in Eastern Europe, he could be the greatest 'outsider' chronicler of socialist strategy since H.P.G. Quack. show less

El autor nos narra cómo llegó a ser este cuadro de Leonardo, la más famosa de las pinturas de todos los tiempos. En la época en que se pintó sólo era reconocida como un buen retrato, sólo con el paso de los siglos pasó de ser un icono de la alta pintura en circulos intelectuales y artísticos, a pasar a ser una figura reconocible entre las masas.
El autor nos va mostrando desde las dudas acerca de la identidad de la mujer retratada, a como en el siglo XIX los poetas la convirtiesen en show more una mujer misteriosa, o en el eterno femenino idealizado.
Una buena historia cultural. show less