Volume 51, Number 5 · March 25, 2004
Breaking with the Past
By John Brewer
Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind
by James Buchan
HarperCollins, 436 pp., $29.95
James Buchan is the author of a large body of journalism, several sparely written and haunting novels, and one of the best works of nonfiction of the 1990s, his brilliant essay on the meaning of money entitled Frozen Desire. His writing ranges widely: his fiction is as likely to be set in Tabriz and Tehran as in London or New York, and the trenchant arguments of Frozen Desire are backed by footnotes in a dazzling array of languages, examples from four continents, and acknowledgments to Marxist intellectuals and members of the British and Florentine aristocracy. Buchan is of Scots ancestry, the grandson of John Buchan, famous in the United States for his thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps, but known in Britain as a brilliant and prolific author of history and fiction who also enjoyed a highly successful political career on three continents. Buchan follows in a family and national tradition that is both resolutely Scots and ecumenically cosmopolitan.
Review, 4072 words
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