Professor ERIC HOBSBAWM
“Raymond Carr is a very important and also attractive figure
in British academic life and nobody could have written a better
biography than this one. This book not only brings an unusually
interesting person to life, but fills a large gap in the literature
– the profound links between British academia, historical writing
and our understanding of Spain.” SIR
JOHN ELLIOTT
“This is a very enjoyable book. María Jesús González’s account
of Raymond Carr’s life is fascinating, as is her discussion
of his contribution to the study of the history of Spain.
The research and documentation provided in this volume is
scholarly and outstanding.”
El País
SIR JOHN ELLIOTT
11 April 2012
“Carr is a great iconoclast. I greatly enjoyed his biography
by María Jesús González.”
Times Literary Supplement
EDITORIAL
29 July 2011
“Carr’s achievement was to write even-handedly about Spain
when General Franco made history hard for Spaniards — and
to inspire other British historians to do the same. González
returns a rigorously sourced compliment.”
Times Literary Supplement
REVIEW BY RONALD FRASER
29 July 2011
“María González won her biographical spurs with a study of
Antonio Maura, Spain’s great Conservative Prime Minister of
the early twentieth century. She has now come up with a biography
of Raymond Carr which quickly turns into something both more
ambitious and fascinating: a full length life of the historian
and his intellectual and high society milieux, over a large
part of the twentieth century. (…) The author’s assiduity
is reflected in her extensive bibliography of works on twentieth-century
British socio-political history, written records from mostly
personal archives, and interviews with some eighty people
connected with one or another aspect of Carr’s world. Hardly
a fact or assertion goes by without its being sourced in the
endnotes.”
St Antony’s Newsletter. St Antony’s College
ALAN ANGELL, Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College
Trinity, 2011
“It is a long book but it sustains the interest of the reader
throughout (…) The author brings to life Raymond’s insatiable
curiosity for all aspects of Spanish life, history and culture,
his encyclopaedic knowledge of so many aspects of that country,
his ability to talk with persons from aristocrats to peasants,
and from all parts of the political spectrum. (…) This book
is about the Raymond I knew. His zest for life, his complete
lack of pomposity, his breath of intellectual knowledge, his
sense of fun, his dedication to his students and his unending
fascination with Spain all feature prominently in this excellent
book. But it is more than just about Raymond. It is a portrait
of intellectual life in Oxford especially in the years after
the Second World War, it is a book about how historians approach
their subject, and it tells the story of the foundation of
the college and the crucial role that Raymond paid.”
El Mundo (Book of the Week)
BERNABÉ SARABIA, Professor of Sociology, University of Navarra,
Spain
10 December 2010
“It is our great good fortune that this latest volume from
María Jesús González, Professor of Contemporary History at
the University of Cantabria, is one destined to live long
on the library shelf. (…) Setting events and people firmly
in context, it not just a biography. Instead, it develops
into a comprehensively detailed portrait of English society
and of the central role played in that society by the unique
aristocratic milieu that was Oxford. (…) The reader is taken
on a journey that combines chronological narrative with a
stylish and racy account which does not duck the shortcomings
and failures of its central figure nor shies away from the
occasionally dubious circumstances in which he found himself
over the course of a long and varied life.”
El Pais, Babelia (Book of the
Week)
SANTOS JULIÁ Professor Emeritus of the Department of Social
History and Political Thought, UNED
8 January 2011
“Raymond Carr was the man who succeeded in disentangling the
reasons for Spain’s cultural and political backwardness and
almost single-handedly set Spanish history in the context
of Europe as a whole. The scholar and the man come alive in
María Jesús González wonderful biography. (…) The book is,
as Paul Preston says, ‘so much more than the biography of
a single individual’. As she sure-handedly paints us a picture
of Carr himself – his many friends, the world in which he
moved, the loves of his life - the author gradually recreates
an entire world: the British education system, the university,
and the social and intellectual elite of the day. The result
is not just the biography of the man but as splendid a biography
of an entire period that one could wish for.”
Diario de Cadiz
JAIME GARCÍA BERNAL, University of Seville.
12 January 2011
“No account of this latest offering from the young Spanish
historian María Jesús González, an authority on British politics
and culture who has written about leading figures in the suffragette
movement and the nineteenth century, would be complete without
a recognition of the intellectual rigour of her work and the
way it is written. Her biography, based on weeks and months
of taped interviews with Raymond Carr and his wife, is the
result, if I may coin a phrase, of ‘a Britishist’ looking
at a the great Hispanist historian who spent much of his life
in the cloistered and male-dominated world of Oxford. Many
things are changing...”
El Imparcial
JORDI CANAL, Maître de conférences, École des Hautes Études
en Sciences Sociales, París
27 March 2011
“María Jesús González of the University of Cantabria has given
us a quite outstanding biography of Raymond Carr (Bath 1919).
The Curiosity of the Fox is written with verve and passion,
goes into every aspect of Carr´s life, and uses a wealth of
sources. (…) This is an excellent work. Well conceived, well
sourced, well written. Reading it is a real pleasure.”
ABC
FERNANDO LAFUENTE
7 April 2011
“Raymond Carr, The Curiosity of the Fox is a model biography.
It is also a terrific read. María Jesús González not only
follows Carr’s idols, work, and travels; she recreates the
entire world of 20th-century England in all its complexity.
She puts flesh and sinew on the bare bones of the story gleaned
from wide reading, hundreds of primary sources, and the testimony
of those living both at the time and since. Her account makes
sense of this bewildering welter of information and charts
in delightful fashion the ups and down of an entire life of
scholarship.”
Nigel Glendinning (Emeritus Professor of
Spanish and Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London, Honorary
Fellow of the Hispanic Society of America)
May 2011
“I finished reading the biography and, like putting down a
good novel, I know that I am having symptoms of withdrawal,
and am missing not having new chapters to read. It is a magnificent
book, admirable in many different ways, and it combines Raymond
Carr’s life story and that of his friends and family quite
brilliantly with the social and political history of the UK
in his times, the history of education in this country and
changing ways of studying history and writing it. The richness
of the sources is extraordinary, yet she wove them all into
her tapestry seamlessly. I cannot say how very much I admired
her ability to stay in complete control of such varied material,
while making the book compulsive reading, informative, entertaining
and moving too.”
“Professor
González’s volume is a book that is highly recommended. Readers
interested in biography
and in English culture will find an exciting narrative of
the life of an outstanding figure who knew how to climb the
social ladder in his country, along with an overview of aspects
of the world of the English upper classes, intellectuals
and politicians. Moreover, they will discover the importance
of British Hispanism for Spanish Culture during the Franco
era and the Transition to Democracy. To historians, the book
offers the possibility of gaining an in-depth knowledge of
Raymond Carr’s life and historiography, in addition to having
a model of biography to follow.” Gonzalo Pasamar,
University of Zaragoza, Historiografias (July–December 2012)
News
Dissector Review, Danny Schechter
“Wow!
— what a thrilling work it is of scholarship, and a beautifully
written investigation, driven by a sensibility of someone with
evident personal integrity, and packed with multi-layered information
and insights.
It took Gonzalez almost a decade to complete the Spanish and
the revised English version, playfully subtitled “The Curiosity
of The Fox.” That is a reference to both famous Isaiah Berlin’s
description of the types of knowledge (“fox and hedgehog”)
and also to Carr’s aristocratic and eccentric hobby as foxhunter.
In a country known for its foxhunts, she was the hare that
trapped the fox.
Her own curiosity turned
into what seems like an impressive obsession (the biographer’s
obsession) that delved deeply into
three dimensions of Carr’s and long run voluminous work: “Life,
Milieu and Work.” She makes the subject come alive because
the book is also personal — referencing her conversations with
Carr — and also political because she never hides her critical
point of view about the situation or the intellectual ideas
and compromises that animated Carr, his colleagues and cronies
The great British biographer,
Michael Holroyd, has suggested that ‘writing the life of
a living person is to enter a minefield’.
Maria Jesus Gonzalez writes with nuance and concern about
her complex subject, Raymond Carr, but her sensibility is stirring
me to urge anyone with the time and “curiosity” to explore
this soon to be forgotten history, to read it and savor it,
as I am, for the dedication it shows, the love of language
it reveals and the intellectual ideas it wrestles with. You
won’t be sorry. She survives the minefield just as she introduces
us to its dangers.” Danny Schechter, November 7, 2013,
http://newsdissector.net/
“This
is an unusual book: a Spanish historian writes the life of
an English historian of Spain. In doing so,
as the historian in question is the extraordinary Raymond
Carr, still with us at 94, María Jesús González
also writes about the rural West Country of his childhood,
the English class system, educational
opportunities in the 1930s, social mobility, Wellington
College, the Gargoyle Club, Rosa Lewis at the
Cavendish, four Oxford colleges, Giraldo and his orchestra,
G.D.H. Cole, John Neale, Hugh Trevor-
Roper, A.J. Ayer, John Sparrow, A.L. Rowse, Oswald, Diana
and Nicholas Mosley, Isaiah Berlin,
Margaret Thatcher and even the Queen. In academia and society
— mostly high — here comes
everybody. The book has been smoothly translated from
the Spanish by Nigel Griffin, and part of its interest for
the English reader is that its detailed researches make one
realise
how peculiar so many of our institutions
look to foreign eyes. The author gets a few things wrong
— the title FRHS is about as exclusive as
membership of the RAC — but what foreigner would not? Would
an English author writing about a
longlived Spanish academic — an enterprise hard to imagine
— show the same patience and tenacity, and
get so many things right?” The Spectator, 31 August 2013. Reviewed by
Malcolm Deas, Fellow of St Antony’s
College, Oxford, and a historian of 19th- and 20th-century
Colombia
Reviewed by St Antony's College, Development Office, at:
http://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/development/giving/raymondcarr.html
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