Is History Made Easy

Durant's History Of Civilised Man Is History Made Easy

The monumental works of Will Durant are better known in America in here in the South Pacific where publishers’ agreements, as well as rtorical background, tend to make us take our history and culture from tropean sources.

RANT published the first volume in his Story of Civiliza in 1935; he expects to conclude volume nine, in 1965—which be pushing things more than what. Volume seven, The Age leason Begins, is just with us as the previous books have each i four or five years to produce, more on the same size and is quite a task. It perhaps is, urant hints in a preface, the final before anno domini catches up. y years producing the sort of ture in which Durant has alised would be a life’s work wo average writers, s wife Ariel has usually helped e background, but with volume i and in the coming two she

shares the by-line with Will. It had been their intention to make The Age of Reason the final volume in The Story of Civilization, covering the period from Elizabeth I of England to the French Revolution. But even in concept, the project became so crowded with personalities as to be unmanageable and hence the division of this section of the work into three.

The present volume covers the years 1558 to 1648—a golden age of art and letters, one which saw Spain at its greatest and the beginning of its decline; the renaissance of philosophy and the first of the new scientists.

The age of Elizabeth of England, of Cromwell and of Phillip II of Spain; of Shakespeare, El Greco, Murillo; of Bacon, Sir Water Raleigh and Drake; of the Great Armada and the Inquisition.

It was an age of stirring intellect, the repercussions of which are still being felt. Events of this period, viewed against the background of the rest of man’s history appear as for the first time as rather modern than as medieval.

Durant’s work is anything but superficial but he has the gift of being able to carry his great volume of facts in suspension in a stream of pleasant rhetoric. This makes history very easy.

((The Age Of Reason Begins.

Simon & Schuster, New York. Our copy from Angus and Robertson, Sydney. £AS.)