Books by Alan Ryan

I picked up these two volumes on the basis of a very favorable review reproduced on The Browser, by Noel Malcolm .  Yet the books sat around the house for months.  I figured this was another overwrought survey by a famous person, valuable mainly as an introduction for those who don’t know much about the topic.  The subtitle of volume one, by the way, is A History of Political Thought Herodotus to Machiavelli . Volume two picks up from there.