In this blistering book, David Andress shows how the West has abandoned its history and lost its memory.

The former great powers of the historic 'West' have abandoned themselves to senile daydreams of recovered youth. They have stirred up old hatreds given disturbing voice to destructive rage, and risked the collapse of their capacity for decisive, effective and just government.

At the core of this is an abandonment of political attention to history, understood as a clear empirical grounding in how we reached our present condition. In Britain, France and the USA, historical stories are deployed in public debate as little more than dangerous fantasies.

David Andress is Reader in Modern European History at the University of Portsmouth. He is the author of numerous works on the French Revolution, including French Society in Revolution, 1789-1799 (1999), Massacre at the Champ de Mars (2000) and The Terror (2005).



David Andress is Professor of Modern History at the University of Portsmouth, and one of Britain's finest interpreters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His books include The French Revolution and the People, The Terror, 1789 and Cultural Dementia: How the West Has Lost Its History and Risks Losing Everything Else.