the first review of The Great Exchange appeared – as the lead review in the Times Literary Supplement no less – while I was at Heathrow Airport about to fly to Tokyo. I found a copy at the newsagent and read it in the great atrium of Terminal 3. It was an exciting read. It was written by Noel Malcolm, whose work I’ve long found mildly terrifying.
His Agents of Empire (2015), for example, is a masterpiece, and had the pan-Mediterranean ease that I was looking for in writing The Great Exchange. However, before that, when his three-volume edition of Hobbes’ Leviathan, with the Latin text and an infinitude of context, thudded on my doorstep on 2014, I wept at its brilliance, knowing that my edition of Milton’s Defences would never be as flawlessly impressive in its inventiveness and scholarship.
I should probably tell you about the dream too. Before I gave up on Milton’s Latin, Noel Malcolm appeared to me in a dream (I have met him in person, though briefly). Very softly spoken, he said: ‘Your argument about Milton being used a teaching text for rhetoric in Europe in the 1650s, I don’t think it’s right.’ That was all. Crushingly, he didn’t reveal his evidence.
So it was with great joy (as well as with massive relief) that I read that Malcolm thought The Great Exchange “a rich, multifaceted and thought-provoking book” and that it was “a long, massively researched book … testifying not only to decades of work in this field, but also to a marvellous openness to new ideas, new sources and new approaches. The news, in this case, is that here is a book that anyone and everyone interested in early-modern Europe will enjoy reading, and from which they will learn a huge amount.” (‘The news that was fit to print‘, TLS, 24/7/25)
I think I’ll leave it there for a while.
Joad R Wren 