Postcards from the wrong side of history
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Postcards from the wrong side of history
There is no doubt that the Times is well within its rights in doing so. It is a private company, not an official institution, and it can make whatever decisions serve its audience, who are its customers. The problem is that this approach to history leads us down a dangerous path, one from which it can be difficult, sometimes impossible, to return.
What critics in the nineteenth century were profoundly wrong about was not the experience of reading this novel; what they were wrong about was how that experience would be valued by other people. Because that’s what we’re really talking about whenever we analyze the past.