Daniel Snowman – författare

As we approach the new millennium, we find ourselves reassessing the past and looking forward to the future. Has the prospect of a new century always provided a "sense of an ending"? In this timely and stimulating book, experts on every century since the fourteenth each explore the characteristics of a different final decade and find that a consciousness of time has indeed influenced the way people perceive their place in history. The writers—Paul Strohm on the 1390s (when signs of a new time consciousness first emerged), Malcolm Vale on the 1490s, Ian Archer on the 1590s, Peter Earle on the 1690s, Roy Porter on the 1790s, and Asa Briggs on the 1890s and 1990s—discuss what is common and what is distinctive to each period. Investigating cultural and intellectual attitudes, economic and technological developments, and artistic, scientific, and political change, they capture the atmosphere of each end of century. As well as the great watersheds of history, the authors explore the daily lives of ordinary citizens, recounting personal histories and subtle shifts in diet, fashion and design, sex and gender roles, and relations between rich and poor, and the emergence of language. Illustrations from both high and popular art provide arresting images of the cultural and social fabric of each community.The year 2000 will be the first millennium humankind has consciously experienced: we look back not a hundred but a thousand years, and in looking back we are better prepared to plan ahead. From the apocalyptic vision of medieval Judgment Day sermons to the decadence of the current fin de siècle, from the invention of printing to cloning and computerization, this book is a pertinent guide to the future as well as to the past.

A revised and expanded version of the 1989 BBC Reith lectures. Other work by the author includes "Arpentage de la poesie contemporaine", and "Conrad and the West". Other work by the editor includes "America since 1920" and "Kissing cousins: an interpretation of British and American culture".

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) was the Shakespeare of opera, the composer of Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, La Traviata, Aida and Otello. The Chorus of Hebrew slaves from Nabucco (1842) is regarded in Italy as virtually an alternative national anthem – and the great tragedian rounded off his career fifty years later with a rousing comedy, Falstaff.When Verdi was born, much of northern Italy was under Napoleonic rule, and Verdi grew up dreaming of a time when the peninsula might be governed by Italians. When this was achieved, in 1861, he became a deputy in the first all-Italian parliament.While in his 20s, Verdi lost his two children and then his wife (many Verdi operas feature poignant parent-child relationships). Later, he retired, with his second wife, to his beloved farmlands, refusing for long stretches to return to composition. Verdi died in January 1901, universally mourned as the supreme embodiment of the nation he had helped create.

Daniel Snowman is a social and cultural historian. His latest book is a collection of some of the more provocative essays he has published over many decades that examine how we use and abuse ‘history’. If the past is everything that has ever happened, he asks, why does what we call ‘history’ keep changing? What (or who) causes historical change? Could aspects of the past itself have been different? What do we choose to retain as our ‘heritage’ – and why? Are ‘the arts’ part of history or merely illustrative of it? Is Auschwitz in danger of becoming just another historical museum? Should the leaning Tower of Pisa be allowed to fall in the interests of ‘historical authenticity’?Daniel also wonders why historians are supposedly brilliant at explaining everything that has ever happened in the past – yet useless at predicting the future? In the wise words of the great French historian Marc Bloch (who was executed by the Nazis in 1944):‘Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past.’