Politics & Power Quote by Luke Ford

A tidy little brag hides inside that sentence, but it’s the kind with an asterisk. Ford isn’t just saying he liked history; he’s curating a canon and signaling membership in it. “British, American and Old Testament” reads like a three-part foundation myth: empire, republic, scripture. Together they form the spine of a certain Western self-conception where politics is destiny and morality comes pre-loaded.

The phrasing “particularly of the ... kind” is doing quiet work. It frames history less as a discipline than as a genre preference, like choosing noir over romance. That subtly dodges the obligation to justify why these histories matter more than, say, Chinese dynastic history or the Haitian Revolution. It also hints at comfort: these are narratives that offer clear protagonists, providential arcs, and familiar conflicts. The Old Testament, especially, telegraphs an appetite for origin stories and harsh ethical weather: covenants, exile, law, punishment, redemption. It’s history as a moral engine, not just a record.

There’s subtext, too, about authority. British and American history are often taught as institutional memory: parliaments, constitutions, wars that “made the world.” Pairing them with the Old Testament elevates political history into something quasi-sacred, as if nations and God belong on the same syllabus. It’s a revealing taxonomy: not “world history” or “social history,” but tradition, power, and judgment.

Contextually, for a contemporary writer, it reads like a self-portrait of intellectual formation - and a tell about what stories he trusts to explain human behavior.