SOURCE: Craig, Gordon A. “The Good, the Bad, and the Bourgeois.” New York Review of Books 45, no. 13 (13 August 1998): 8–20.

In the following review, Craig praises Gay's five-volume series on The Bourgeois Experience and applauds his scholarship in both Volume V: Pleasure Wars and his memoir, My German Question.

1.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the curriculum of Rugby School in England was dominated, as was true of other public schools, by instruction in Greek and Latin. In addition, however, all students from the first to the sixth grade read history, both ancient and modern, which was interlarded with generous portions of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Livy. Dr. Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby, once gave the rationale for this by saying, “The history of Greece and Rome is not an idle inquiry about remote ages and forgotten institutions but a living picture of things present, fitted...