Dimensions | 14 × 19 × 3.5 cm |
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Language |
Tan calf spine with tan and maroon title plates, gilt decoration, banding and lettering. Maroon textured boards.
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Miscellaneous writings with a collection of speeches
Macaulay’s political writings are famous for their ringing prose and for their confident, sometimes dogmatic, emphasis on a progressive model of British history, according to which the country threw off superstition, autocracy, and confusion to create a balanced constitution and a forward-looking culture combined with freedom of belief and expression. This model of human progress has been called the Whig interpretation of history. This philosophy appears most clearly in the essays Macaulay wrote for the Edinburgh Review and other publications, which were collected in book form and a steady best-seller throughout the 19th century. But it is also reflected in History; the most stirring passages in the work are those that describe the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688.
Macaulay’s approach has been criticised by later historians for its one-sidedness and its complacency. Karl Marx referred to him as a ‘systematic falsifier of history’. His tendency to see history as a drama led him to treat figures whose views he opposed as if they were villains, while characters he approved of were presented as heroes. Macaulay goes to considerable length, for example, to absolve his main hero William III of any responsibility for the Glencoe massacre. Winston Churchill devoted a four-volume biography of the Duke of Marlborough to rebutting Macaulay’s slights on his ancestor, expressing hope ‘to fasten the label “Liar” to his genteel coat-tails.’
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, FRS FRSE PC (25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859) was a British historian and Whig politician. He is considered primarily responsible for introducing the Western education system in India
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