Light sources - Paris, Washington, London: departure points for the modern world
A review by Jonathan Clark Postmodernists dislike grand narratives; and here is a grand modernist narrative indeed, wearing its wide learning with a deceptive grace. For Gertrude Himmelfarb, a distinguished American historian of Victorian Britain, this book is an attempt to "reclaim the Enlightenment. . . from postmodernists who deny its existence and historians who belittle or disparage it". It seeks to do this by reinterpreting the Enlightenment in Britain, America and France to create a scenario for Western history. The Enlightenment begins the book in the singular but soon divides into three national examples, linked because "the three Enlightenments ushered in modernity", a modernity of which the French Revolution was "one of the most dramatic events". Whatever the claims of the postmodernists, for Himmelfarb the achievements of the people she writes about are still current: "We are, in fact, still floundering in the verities and fallacies, the