SOURCE: “With Jane Austen as Patron Saint,” in Spectator, September 21, 1991, pp. 37–38.

In the following review of The Birth of the Modern, Hayter praises Johnson's “dazzling display of polymath erudition,” but finds the historical importance attached to the years 1815 to 1830 overstated.

On 8 January 1815 British troops unsuccessfully attacked New Orleans; on 15 September 1830 the world's first long-distance passenger train on its opening sortie from Liverpool to Manchester ran over and killed Huskisson, without whom the weakened Tory Government fell, and the way was opened for the Reform Bill. The 15 years between these two events, this book suggests, contain ‘the matrix of the modern world', and to prove this thesis it provides an immense and impressive survey of political, economic, financial, technological and social developments in Europe, North and South America and, to a lesser extent, in Asia and Africa. The intricate intrigues of American presidential elections, the vagaries of Japanese xenophobia...