Harold Perkin

Harold Perkin book, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880, has just appeared in paperback. He is a professor of history at Northwestern University.

La Perestroika

Harold Perkin, 24 January 1991

Although she is too modest to say so directly, Tatyana Zaslavskaya is the woman who invented perestroika. ‘By an irony of fate,’ she writes, ‘I became a “supporter of restructuring” several years before the word “perestroika” was uttered for the first time, and I shared Gorbachev’s views long before he became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and made his political programme public.’ She was one of the small group of intellectuals whose critique of the Soviet economy convinced Gorbachev that there was no alternative to restructuring it.

Office Parties

Jose Harris, 10 May 1990

The Victorians, who idealised work, nevertheless reserved the palm of social esteem for persons whose private means enabled them to lead lives of pleasurable idleness. We in the late 20th century...

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