The present has a lot to commend it: entertainment to fill every waking hour; soothing distractions to keep sobering realities at bay, and, courtesy of the internet, the whole world seemingly at our fingertips. All this comes with a significant price tag. The present is drowning us in information, corroding our abilities to pay attention to questions that matter, and making us seriously forgetful of the past. The 'new', in whatever guise, seeks to enthral us. Denied the inclination to revisit the past and the people who made it, we become forever children of our own time. This short book is partly intended as a corrective to this condition of unacknowledged forgetfulness that needlessly curbs our hopes and understanding. It is also a portal into lives that at one level share our human limitations and longings, but also display qualities and achievements that illuminate and sometimes astonish. In an age of forgetting, Reappraisals is an invitation to wear the recent past and earlier centuries less lightly. To discover or rediscover 'lives less ordinary' - things thought, said and done, often to good and great ends, that should not be forgotten and can be read with profit today.