Who is Gertrude Himmelfarb?
… The Times claims that the top of his holiday reading list in 2005 was Gertrude Himmelfarb’s book “The Roads to Modernity”. … Thus Himmelfarb deplores – rightly in my view – the current hedonist culture, but it is a culture promoted by that epitome of anti-Victoriana Mr Rupert Murdoch. … Himmelfarb’s writings are of value in reminding us that there was a moral order, exemplified by crime statistics: … Nostalgia is peculiarly the fate of the elderly, but, as Himmelfarb herself makes clear, there was another Victorian England to which we would not wish to return. And there’s the conundrum: we cannot graft onto the current society the bits of a previous, and wholly different ‘model of reality’, in order to mend current problems. Brown’s search for solutions – if that is his reason for reading Himmelfarb – is a blind ally; the past offers warnings, but not solutions to problems it did not have to encounter. Quotations above taken from Gertrude Himmelfarb’s lecture:”From Victorian
