Description
The Engelsberg Ideas’ Portraits series gives pride of place to the secondary figures who make the wheels of history whir and thrum. They include Churchill’s half-forgotten right-hand man, a leading light of the Parisian Belle Epoque lost to history, and an early space pioneer virtually unknown outside of his native Russia. History belongs not only to the popularly renowned but also to the other figures, the men and women who found their energies suddenly borne along by events or who made a unique contribution to the great debates of their time.
Throughout the series, leading writers show us how individuals shaped the world as we know it, examining their successes as much as their failures and delusions. The Anglo-German novelist W.G. Sebald wrote at the turn of our century that “everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life.” In these portraits we find the dim traces left by interesting lives lived and conscientiously restore them, so that they gleam once more, bright and alive in the present.
Mattias Hessérus is a historian and broadcaster. He is the Director of Civilisation Studies at The Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, and sits on the committee of the Engelsberg Applied History Programme at the University of Cambridge and King's College London. He has worked for radio and tv and spent three years as review editor of Axess Magazine. Hessérus completed his PhD at Uppsala University on the subject of the right to privacy in Sweden during the 20th Century. He was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, and held a Swedish Institute Scholarship at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales.
Iain Martin is a political journalist, author, and commentator. He is a Times columnist, and is co-founder, editor, and publisher of Reaction. He was editor of The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday, and deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph and The Wall Street Journal Europe. He has written two books: Making it Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy (2013) about the 2008 financial crash, and Crash, Bang, Wallop: the inside story of London's Big Bang and a financial revolution that changed the world (2016) about late-80s deregulation.
