However, it was also one of the most exciting intellectual eras in European history.
No other intellectual of the era denounced racial theory and planning as Chesterton did in that book.
Liang Qichao (pictured left), the pre-eminent Chinese intellectual of the era, an erstwhile monarchist and at that moment a close ally of Yuan's, was forced to deny a rumour that he was behind the assassination (according to sources dug up by John Delury, a historian).
Among the towering intellectuals of his era, Trevor-Roper was perhaps the least dull — a sort of P. G. Wodehouse character with an avenging, steel-trap mind.
My father was a Victorian man, born in 1888, and his belief in eugenics was widely shared by most Progressive intellectuals of his era, including Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, and, as the author notes, Margaret Sanger.
You can't talk about race or other biological factors (Bentley was almost alone among Progressive Era intellectuals in dismissing eugenics as silly) or about national character: it doesn't matter what people are, it only matters what they do.
"Herbert Marcuse, a Weimar-era intellectual who had ended up in Southern California — where he handily adapted his old epistemology to his new environment — offered a helpful conflation of all these strands of thought".
His book often put me in mind of an observation by the Soviet-era poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko: "Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?" His political arguments are not easy to condense, but he suggests that in the Putin era intellectuals have "split psychologically and socially in two".
Intellectuals of the era, while in awe of Tintoretto's gifts, scolded him for being too fast, careless, and insolent; when Vasari credited him with "the most extraordinary brain that the art of painting has ever produced," it wasn't meant as unalloyed praise.
Like many intellectuals of the era, Keng's father – a pastor who was given his piano by an American – was sent to the countryside to perform back-breaking work with the peasants.
