I really love the style of John Higgs. He connects the dots between disparate themes and somehow massages them into a coherent thread. This book covering the seismic events, movements discoveries, and social changes of the 20th century is another great example.
It’s really an extended essay about the emergence of individualism and how this impacted on world changing events – or vice versa. So for example, the fall of empires, be they British, Japanese, Austro-Hungarian etc., meant a switch from a single figurehead driving the culture top down to individuals having a plurality of their own perspectives. But this then has echos in Einstein’s Theory Of Relatively – there is no fixed objective point in space, things are realroge to an observer. And also echos of modernism in art – Picasso painted faces not from a single perspective but from many simultaneously. And so on.
It’s a really neat excuse for telling some fascinating but otherwise unconnected stories within a single book. I really enjoyed it, his prose is so very smooth and his explanations of complex subjects are just the right mix of exposition and humour.
