The World's Minor Improvement

One of my medium-term projects is to read lots of the work of cultural historian Fred Inglis, in view to doing an in-depth interview with him this spring. I've been in touch and he seems up for it. So last week I read his 1982 book Radical Earnestness: British social theory 1880-1980. Of course it's the title that got me. I still think it's fantastic, the best part of the book - but the book itself has lots of good parts too. Here are some:

"...the idea of a university is powerless without the material realities of membership and friendship, as well as the rather harder and more wintry virtues of solitary independence, resistance, doggedness, and the absolute resolution to get on with the task in hand and not to be bought out by the cosy privileges and soft snobberies which are still amply available to bright young-to-middle-aged academics." p.viii

"Well, this small book can influence very little indeed, but I intend it for the world's minor improvement." p.5

"The more developed our personal self-awareness, the more we acknowledge how partially we know what a realized fulfilment would be like, and the more we strive to transcend the existing moral life and create a new, superior one." p.34

"It is in this way that historical language is a magic language, and the historian, like the poet, becomes a magus. For to redescribe the past successfully is to see it differently; it is to reorder the action of memory, either personally or collectively and therefore and quite literally to change the way one understands things and acts upon them." p.41

"...the deep difficulty of knowing what to do: of keeping your being and your culture, your feelings and your history in a sufficient union, for yuou to be able to shake off sheer fatigue and bitter frustration, and know what your purposes are." p.185