At the end of the day: Macmillan's account of the Cuban missile crisis

Pre-publicity for the final volume of Harold Macmillan’s memoirs, At the End of the Day, stressed that it would provide the British side of the Cuban missile crisis for the first time. The Churchillian model chosen, changes required by the Cabinet Office and Macmillan’s desire to rebuke those political opponents who claimed that the crisis demonstrated a lack of British influence in Washington, however ensured a focus on his personal relationship with President Kennedy. His larding the text with contemporary observations from his diaries also skewed Macmillan’s account and, in particular, underplayed the significance of British moves at the United Nations in New York to secure a credible United Nations inspection regime and a US guarantee of the inviolability of Cuba. Careful reconstruction of Macmillan’s real-time experience of the Cuban missile crisis demonstrates the limitations of his own account of this event

Utopia and its Discontents: Dreams of Catastrophe and the End of 'the End of History'

The institutionalization of Utopia Studies in the last decade is premised upon a specifically aesthetic reception of Ernst Bloch’s theory of the “utopian impulse” during the 1980s and 1990s. A postmodern uneasiness to both left and right formulations of the "End of History" during this period imposes a resistance to concepts of historical and political closure or totality, resulting in a "Utopianism without Utopia". For all the attractiveness of this pan-utopianism, its failure to consider the relation between historical representation and fulfillment renders it consummate with liberalism as a merely inverted conservatism. In contrast to this specific recuperation of a Bloch, the continuing importance of Walter Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image and the speculative concept of historical experience which underlies it becomes apparent. The intrusion of the historical Absolute is coded throughout Benjamin’s thought as the eruptive and mortuary figure of catastrophe, which stands as the dialectical counterpart to the utopian wish images of the collective dream. Indeed, the motto under which the Arcades Project was to be constructed derives from Adorno: “Each epoch dreams of itself as annihilated by catastrophe”.