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  • The American Scholar

    The Great Convergence

    Sep 03, 2019 4 minutes
    Review by Anka Muhlstein

    THE EUROPEANS: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture

    BY ORLANDO FIGES

    Metropolitan, 592 pp., $35

    SOME WRITERS USE a telescope to look at the world, others a microscope. Orlando Figes, a British historian well known for his work on Russian history, uses both to his readers’ constant surprise and delight. His subject in his new book is the culture that took form in Europe beginning in the 1840s. Notwithstanding their political differences, intellectuals and literary and artistic types read the same books, admired the same paintings, played the same music, and enjoyed the same operas across the continent. According to Figes, this convergence would not have been

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