Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead

 Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead: Reading the Past in Search of a Tranquil Mind

(Profile Books / Penguin Random House, 2020)

An eloquent manifesto for reading the voices of the past in all their difference and strangeness both critically but also with a generous thinking disposition of hope, neither idealising nor demonising but negotiating. This might help to free us from our presentism and give us temporal bandwidth and personal density extending a bigger here and a longer now in an age of information overload, social acceleration and algorithmic marketing which constantly presents us with more of the same (if you clicked on that, you might like this). We must get beyond a hasty triage and risk anger, boredom and confusion and, like Jacob, wrestle with the past until it yields a blessing. 

Jacobs has also made me think I might like to read some C. V. Wedgwood.