Upon closer inspection, some gift-horses require extensive mouth-looking.
This truth was impressed upon me in recent weeks when a fellow bibliophile, in an act of princely generosity, bestowed upon me one of the finest gifts I have received in years: the sumptuous two-volume set titled The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition. Its authors are two historians of formidable accomplishment, James Hankins of Harvard and Allen C. Guelzo of Princeton, both of whom in recent years have made the entirely reasonable decision to vacate their Ivy League towers in high dudgeon, declining any further participation in the pageant of self-loathing so fashionable among our institutions of cultural prestige.
The Golden Thread is, in many respects, an erudite rebuttal to such high-brow sneering. It offers a narrative of Western history that, while not suppressing the follies and deformities of the civilisation it describes, rightly foregrounds those features that have rendered it mankind’s greatest collective achievement: its moral seriousness, its intellectual restlessness, its artistic magnificence, its institutional creativity, and its pertinacious confidence that truth is worth seeking and beauty worth making.