SOURCE: “Collapsophe,” in The New Republic, March 20, 2000, pp. 31-4.

In the following review, Green offers an extended negative evaluation of The Plato Papers and comments unfavorably on Ackroyd's postmodern aesthetic.

I.

What drives anyone to speculate, or, worse, to prophesy, about the future? Curiosity, and an interest in self-preservation: it isn't hard to see why Delphi commanded such a market for so long. And in the longer view, there is always the fun of seeing the guesses confirmed or refuted. Jules Verne got aviation more or less right, and H. G. Wells was depressingly accurate about the atom bomb; but Arnold Toynbee's Study of History remains remarkable mainly for having got its argument so wrong on such a massive scale, and Orwell's bleak forecast of the future as a boot stamping on a human face forever never envisaged the Soviet monolith's ignominious collapse less than a decade after...