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The Good European

Essays and Arguments

Iain Bamforth

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Categories: 19th Century, 20th Century, 21st Century, British, Scottish
Imprint: Lives and Letters
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
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(Pub. Aug 2011)
9781847778710
£16.95 £15.25
Paperback (280 pages)
(Pub. Oct 2006)
9781857547658
£16.95 £15.25
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  • Nietzsche, warning his countrymen in the Bismarck era against the nationalism that sought to promote all that was anti-rational in the German tradition, exhorted them to be 'good Europeans', avatars of the enlightened economic man of the eighteenth-century. Yet as RG Collingwood observed in his last great inquiry into the nature of civilisation, a book written to the glory of Hobbes at the height of the London blitz, Nietzsche was himself a victim of the disease he diagnosed.

    In The Good European Iain Bamforth's reports on fifteen years of 'experimental living' during which his attachment to the old continent brought him from Berlin, in the week in which he saw the fall of the Wall in 1989, to Strasburg, heart of aboriginal Europe and the city of noses in Tristram Shandy. Thrown into a deep identity crisis by Bismarck's victories against the French in 1870, pilot region for some of the modern state's most radical policies (health insurance, public relations), Alsace's divided loyalties have affected the nature of Europe itself. With his ear attuned to the complexities of culture and politics, Bamforth attempts to discover Europe through extra-diplomatic channels: he offers essays on writers and thinkers who have done much to define the small archipelago on the edge of Asia, including classics such as Kleist, Kafka, Roth and Benjamin, WG Sebald and Mavis Gallant. He provides a portrait of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, a send-off for Bernard Pivot's classic literary chat-show Bouillon de Culture, a scrutiny of philosophising media pundit Peter Sloterdijk, landscapes from Provence and Bavaria, reports from Prague and Geneva, Franco-German shibboleths, a sarcastic letter from 'Kakania', and an anatomy of the Alsatian humorist Tomi Ungerer. Europe often reeks of the terminally nostalgic and the curatorial: here a sceptical Scots intelligence reaches out to Musil, Heine, Gogol, Sterne, Montaigne, Rabelais and beyond the 'standard average European' to the gallant, helpless, hero-smitten Don, in the hope that they can help him find the way towards a more generous Europe.
    Iain Bamforth grew up in Glasgow and graduated from its medical school. He has pursued a peripatetic career as a hospital doctor, general practitioner, translator, lecturer in comparative literature, and latterly public health consultant in several developing countries, principally in Asia. His four books of poetry were joined by a fifth, ... read more
    Praise for Iain Bamforth  'Even at its most ornate, the style is not quite ostentatious - it's more akin to the apparently effortless figurations of an Olympic-class artist of the ice rink... it exemplifies Bamforth's all-encompassing curiosity and intellectual agility.'
    Jonathan Buckley, TLS
    'The wandering mind will find bountiful rewards in Iain Bamforth's Zest: Essays on the Art of Living... It is a remarkable, sometimes provocative, tour de force as the author escorts us from the Garden of Eden to Provence, from Apulia to Papua. For a series of incidental essays that have been described as "digressive and droll," Zest actually possesses a remarkable coherence. It is the perfect volume to dip into if you want respite from the social whirl of the upcoming festive season.'
    Nicky Gardner, Hidden Europe
    'This collection is a joy to read, full of so much nuance, and persuasive language, a permanent wistfulness that never strays into the twee and the constant sense of travel, of movement and growth.'
    Matt Macdonald, Scottish Review of Books
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