Alan Knight is Professor Emeritus of the History of Latin America at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Antony’s College. He works on C20 Latin America, chiefly Mexico, with a focus on revolutions, state-building, and foreign relations/‘imperialism’. He is the author of The Mexican Revolution; Repensar la Revolución Mexicana; La Revolución Cósmica; two volumes of a general history of Mexico; Revolución, Democracia y Populismo en América Latina; and (forthcoming, as of Dec. 2015), The Mexican Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. He has co-edited volumes on the Mexican oil industry, Mexican caciquismo, the Great Depression in Latin America, and superstition in history. Late in life, he has taken the cultural turn, repudiated positivistic history, and (for the purposes of this paper) masquerades as a literary critic.