She smiled on Blackadder and made him feel, briefly, wholly welcome and desired. She then became businesslike, fetching out her pad and saying, “Well, what’s important about Randolph Henry Ash?” Blackadder had an incoherent vision of his own life’s work, a fine line here, a philosophical joke tracked down there, a sense of the shape of many men’s interwoven thought, none of which would go bluntly into words. He said, “He understood the nineteenth-century loss of religious faith. He wrote about history—he understood history—he saw what the new ideas about development had done to the human idea
...more
