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Politicians, especially British politicians, often write their memoirs. Political scientists seldom do. They usually meet top politicians, if at all, only in passing. They seldom witness great events, let alone participate in them. Most of them lead contented but otherwise humdrum and drama-free lives. On the whole, political scientists are a humble lot, not in any way given to self-advertisement.
In some ways, Richard Rose typifies his profession. He has never hobnobbed with the Great and the Good and has certainly never become one of them. The high point of his personal political engagement seems to have been a one-off meeting with George W. Bush in the Oval Office, which he attended along with others, to advise the President on the difficulties of governing divided societies. During the infamous Democratic Convention of 1968 in Chicago, Rose mingled with both the police and the anti-Vietnam War protesters. A generation later he found himself present at the fall of the Berlin Wall. But he personally contributed neither to the chaos of the one nor the collapse of the other. Read on its face, his CV could be taken to be that of a well-travelled and well-connected but otherwise unremarkable political- science professional.
But in other ways Rose's career has been more noteworthy. Born in suburban St Louis, he lost his heart to England as a young graduate student in the mid-1950s and has taught for decades in Scotland. He began his working life as a journalist and, unlike a large proportion of academics, still writes clearly...