![]() ![]() The Crash A weekly newsletter helping you fit together the pieces of the global economic slowdown. Select and enter your email address Morning Call Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. In lieu of glib, worthless answers, Gaddis emphasises the neglected importance of framing the right questions. Gaddis’s advice does not come cheaply or off-the-peg, but is conveyed by epigrams that capture tensions, counterpoints and constraints. Despite the title and the slick marketing, this is far from being a manual for today’s cod-Churchillians. John Lewis Gaddis, an eminent historian of the Cold War, who has for 20 years co-taught a seminar at Yale University on grand strategy, offers a timely historical overview of the constituents of leadership from the classical era to the present. ![]() A Harold Wilson would be enough, or a John Major. We don’t ask for Churchills or Washingtons, Gladstones or Jeffersons. We have had enough of ignorant populists, buffoonish Brexiteers and a leader of the free world constrained in utterance by a child’s vocabulary. Many of us don’t ask for superheroic leaders our desires are modest, to witness nothing more uplifting than the return of semi-competent government-as-usual by mediocre party hacks. ![]() These days we experience disillusionment of the most deflationary kind. Where, each generation asks, are the authentic statesmanlike beasts of earlier eras who bestrode the terrain of domestic and international affairs? Every age imagines it can see its own leaders straight, as mere politicians nothing better than apparatchiks, conformists and time-servers who have wormed their way up to the topsoil of political life. ![]()
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