End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, by Peter Turchin, Allen Lane, 240 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0241553480 Peter Turchin is the founder of the discipline of ‘cliodynamics’ (Clio being the ancient Greek muse of history), a big-data-enabled approach to the study of history over the very long term. He is frank in his claim that cliodynamics is a science; to aspire to being a science, of course, a discipline must discover at least approximate laws, which have robust if not absolute predictive value. Since 2011, Turchin has led a research team engaged in a remarkable programme called Seshat: The Global History Databank (named for the Egyptian goddess of wisdom), which gathers data from and extends its analyses over 10,000 years of human history, seeking macrolevel patterns that would approximate laws of human behaviour and interaction, and typical outcomes, on an aggregate scale. Explaining political integration and disintegration – the rise and decline or collapse of states and empires – has been the chief focus of the work. It has also been, says Turchin, ‘the area where our field’s findings are arguably the most robust ‑ and the most disturbing’. Turchin rose to prominence when a 2010 contribution to the journal Nature, from among a number then solicited asking for predictions for the next decade, began circulating widely during the Trump presidency: Relying on his evolving models, Turchin had predicted a rise in political tension and potential for political violence in the United States, peaking some time in the mid-to-late 2020s, possibly with a descent into civil war. End Times is a popular (that is, nonmathematical) presentation of Turchin’s work on the drivers of political disintegration, focusing especially on...

Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History, by Peter Brown, Princeton University Press, 736 pp, £38, ISBN: 978-0691242286 As a young boy growing up in the 1930s in a Dublin Protestant family, Peter Brown could have been personally acquainted with the unblessed coupling of politics with religion long before he wrote about its presence in Roman North Africa, the subject of his first published work as a scholar of late antiquity (200 to 700 CE). Ireland’s bourgeoisie tolerated a degree of mixing between Christians of different faiths, but not when it came to marriage: when one of Brown’s aunts, aged eighteen at the time, became too close to a Catholic boy she was packed off to relatives abroad and the whole business buried in silence. Seventy years would pass before he came to know about it. A distant connection with Lady Jane Grey, the executed grandniece of Henry VIII, invested the maternal line of Brown’s genealogy with impeccable Protestant credentials; the male side traced its descent from Scottish Presbyterians who had settled in the Irish capital. Brown’s father was an engineer who worked in Sudan but not, his son assures readers in Journeys of the Mind, as an empire-builder: profession and citizenship kept the railroad engineer apart from the imperialistically minded, Oxbridge-educated British elite governing the country. Peter stays with his family for three winters in Atbara, two hundred miles north of Khartoum, until the outbreak of World War II. At the age of eight he moves to Aravon, a boarding school south of Dublin. Outside the state education system, Aravon had its share of eccentric staff, including a history teacher who had been a colleague of William Joyce, the...

One thing that endeared my in-laws to me was that they held on to my wife’s collection of 45s – her records, I mean, not her (non-existent) collection of other revolvers. True, they were buried in a box under crumpled high-school decals, spineless paperbacks and ratty college notebooks. But there they were: originals of ‘Please Mr Postman’ on the butter-yellow Tamla label (Tamla 54046), ‘Johnny B Goode’ on sea-blue Chess 1691, the Cadence metronome seemingly swaying to the Everly Brothers, ‘Blueberry Hill’ on inaptly mulberry-coloured Imperial, Buddy Holly on hot-pink Coral, the whole, maybe fifty-strong, collection now and then attaining historic heights, in my goggle eyes, by such finds as Gene Chandler’s ‘Duke of Earl’ on rainbow-rimmed VeeJay. Yes, I was a teenage pop, rock, whatever, fetishist; indeed, in that respect, I was a fairly active teenager until I was thirty or more, and the fetishism can still unexpectedly twist again like they did those many summers ago. Absorption in the songs soon led me to wondering if there was any content behind their content. I mean, who exactly did put the bomp …? The music world was a prairie of trivia, and I grazed on it night and day, as though nothing more sustaining was to hand. And here now comes Ed Ward’s history of rock ’n’ roll with all my heart desired back then, an enormous fast-food meal consisting of not just staples like labels, writers, producers, DJs and other taste-makers and begetters, but to spice it all up – like so many pickles, hush puppies, slaw, mayo, hot sauce and ketchup – lashings of A&R men, engineers, session-men, talent scouts, club owners, salesmen, back-up singers, chart positions,...