Christopher Hill’s History From Below

A World Turned Upside Down

Over a career that spanned more than 60 years, Christopher Hill became one of the leading interpreters of the English Revolution and British life and politics in the 17th century. His two masterpieces on the subject, The English Revolution 1640 and The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, changed the way many social and intellectual historians did their work. Hill was a committed socialist and radical almost all his life, and part of what made his histories so enduring and provocative was that they sought to tell history from below, examining the way common folk lived their lives and pursued their interests. In an essay-review of a new biography of Hill for the most recent issue of Books & the Arts, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker consider Hill’s radical life and times—his easy egalitarian manner, his sustained radicalism, his war years, his wrestling with the consequences of his commitments and of socialism writ large. “He and his generation of historians,” Linebaugh and Rediker note, “encouraged us to think and write about working people not merely as subjects but as makers of history who dared to imagine alternative futures. He taught about the contingencies of history and the creativity of its makers.” Read “Christopher Hill’s Revolutions”

Performance Art

The quandaries of a divided self have haunted almost all of Katie Kitamura’s novels, from A Separation to Intimacies. In each, she examines the push and pull of people caught between worlds and often between loyalties and beliefs. In her latest work of fiction, Audition, Kitamura offers a story about an actress who is made to confront the possibility that her life and her family are not how she imagines them to be, after a mysterious man approaches her and says he is her son. Reviewing the novel, Lovia Gyarke finds that it is about “both orientation and disorientation. It seeks to disrupt the facts of life that we take for granted while also challenging us to embrace a new outlook.” And through the travails of her actress, “Kitamura dispenses new insights about the nature of performance and the roles we play in our own lives” and the lives of others. “There’s an occasional unsteadiness to the narrative, an imbalance that doesn’t always seem intentional, but that feels true of all performances where the riskiest leaps can yield the most satisfying rewards.” Read “Katie Kitamura’s Divided Selves”