Ian Dunt, How To Be A Liberal.

- British political journalist, editor and philosopher Ian Dunt has written a fascinating story about the development of intellectual and personal freedom in the West since the mid-18th century, as we liberated ourselves from ancient regal, feudal, ecclesial and authoritarian rule. It's a stunning achievement, superbly researched and detailed.

- It is also written in clear and lucid prose, making it a pleasure to read.

- He takes us on a journey from Rene Descartes to the present day, with explorations of the thinkers, activists and economists who have shaped our times: John Stuart Mill and his extraordinary wife Harriet Taylor, French intellectuals Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Stael, Isaiah Berlin, John Maynard Keynes and his rival Frederich Hayek, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, George Orwell and others.

- Democracy was born in England and revolutions instigated in France and the United States. None of it was smooth sailing. The reality of individual and social freedoms took a battering along the way, and conservative, reactionary movements set much progress back. The horrors of war in the 20th century and the atrocities committed by cruel and vicious autocrats like Stalin and Hitler laid so much to waste. 

- The thirty year post-war period from 1945 to 1975 was a golden era of solid economic growth and progressive social policy. Then followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the birth of the EU, and the emergence of the internet and Big Tech. The financial crisis of 2007/8 brought an end to so much hope and prosperity however. Austerity became government policy in many Western countries, ushering in an age of nationalism.  

- Today we're witnessing the ugliness of right wing nationalist governments take hold in many countries around the world, including Hungary under Orban, Brexit under Theresa May and Boris Johnson, and the US under Trump. Anti-immigration policies have sidelined the 'elite' and a powerful and ignorant populism taken hold.  

- There are so many sentences and paragraphs I could quote to illustrate the power of this magnificent book. Here are just a few:

The slavery of women had lasted from the dawn of civilisation until the Victorian period almost completely intact. The liberal revolution had taken place without even noticing that it was ignoring half the population. 

[Orban's] approach provided the broad storyline that would be told around the West: the people versus the elite, the fixation on immigration as a threat to the country, the denigration of the global rules-based order and the subversion of domestic institutions in a bid to undermine the separation of power.

America...was the primary author of the rules-based international system. It was the country, out of all the liberal states, which defined itself by immigration. If it fell to nationalism, it would signal that we were entering a new era. And then a man emerged who could achieve precisely that. His name was Donald Trump.

Decades of American commitment to multilateral trade had been put into reverse. Liberalism's commitment to trade as a safeguard against war was  being destroyed.