One Man’s Modern Europe

If journalism is the first draft of history, then history, Thomas Carlyle wrote, is “a kind of distilled newspapers.” The British writer David Pryce-Jones has distilled five decades of journalism into an elegant, personal and fearless tableau of the late 20th century. “Openings & Outings” records what people, then and now, would prefer to forget: passions for Nazism, complicities with communism, cowardice before Islamism, double-dealings in decolonization, hypocrisy in humanitarianism, fellow traveling from academics and false witness from reporters.