What a horrible time to be reading this! Which, of course, was why I read it.

Though this analysis of late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century history doesn't quite run parallel to today, it's hard to keep the mind from wandering to current events, comparing and contrasting. It's distracting. That constant pulling away, coupled with academic prose, meant for a lot of retracing steps to find where I went off the rails.

Still quite fascinating and enlightening.