Susan Pedersen

These​ two books will be read, inevitably, as studies of neoliberalism, a world order – and a word – that has snuck up on us in the last few decades. I say ‘snuck up’ for a reason. I remember the 1980s, when our antagonists were identifiable and embodied: the one with the handbag, the one with the cowboy hat, and then their grey successors. We were so happy when...

Was Eric Hobsbawm interested in himself? Not, I think, so very much. He had a more than healthy ego and enough self-knowledge to admit it, but all his curiosity was turned outward – towards problems, politics, literatures, languages, landscapes. Never without a book, whether bound for a tutorial or the local A&E, for decades he disappeared off for tramping holidays or conferences anywhere from Catalonia to Cuba the moment term ended. One friend, on holiday in southern Italy in 1957, saw two men in a field and said to her husband: ‘But look, it’s Eric!’ And, she recalled, ‘it really was Eric, with a peasant. He was interviewing the peasant.’

One might make the case that the women’s suffrage movement constituted a comprehensive challenge to the political order: an attempt to substitute sex for party or class as the primordial division in political life. This could not succeed, not least because many suffragists never supported it, and dynastic and caste loyalties would re-emerge once the vote was won. But if the suffrage movement didn’t change the party system, it did foster a specifically female genre of political performance.

There’s something really wonderful, and also very funny, about Beveridge’s hubris. He’d been asked to figure out how to co-ordinate insurance and pension schemes. He’d done so, but only by taking much larger commitments – full employment! a national health service! – for granted. It’s rather as if, today, an official were asked to propose a national transport policy and took as an ‘assumption’ that we’d solve global warming first.

Mass Observation​ was the brainchild of the charismatic ornithologist turned anthropologist Tom Harrisson, the Marxist poet Charles Madge and (briefly) the experimental filmmaker Humphrey Jennings. It attempted to create ‘an anthropology of ourselves’ by ‘observing’ ordinary Britons as they went about their ordinary lives – and by enlisting those same people as...