How it really was

I believed her then and I still believe her now, for she had in her eye that fierce glare of someone who really knew what she was on about. In any case, four generations of Brits have since grown wise on the Sellar and Yeatman history of Britain, 1066 and All That; that’s four generations nourished on the certainty that Henry VIII had VIII wives and that ‘the Romans were top nation on account of their classical education’. Four generations have been groomed on the toughest of history test papers set in that book: ‘Why on earth was William of Orange? (Seriously, though).’ And that, as Nanny never tired of telling me, is how history is made.

If only she had lived to read 1966 and All That how proud Nanny would have been of Mr Brown! Not because their hairstyles were similar, nor because he, like she, watched a hell of a lot of television, but because Nanny loved her history and Craig Brown, once just a funny-man from Suffolk, is now a colossus among historians, a chrono-genius whose putto features will one day be raised in marble on a pillar high above the tombs of Wedgwood, Starkey and Herodotus. For he has achieved, at his debut, that which no other historian has yet dared to attempt — a re-evaluation of the history of history. Nay, with this one book, he has shaken to its foundations the complete historical historicity of the whole history of the history of history.

This great work begins, modestly enough, at the point where Sellar and Yeatman gave up, at the end; and ends, courageously, at the beginning. In between Brown offers a panoply of rich, perceptive and detailed insight into 20th-century Britain, that turbulent era that Nanny and I loved so well. No stone is left unturned, no detail spared. Tony Blur, Margaret Thatcherism and Queen Elizabeth the Eleventh — even the Sitford Misters are all there (Decca, the recording artist; Pecca, the nymphomaniac; Recca, the anarchist; Becca, the Wimbledon champion; and Mecca, the Islamic fundamentalist); so too are the six most important British spies (a real scoop this). Correctly positioned in alphabetical order they were: ‘The Fifth Man. The First Man, The Fourth Man, The Second Man, The Sixth Man, The Third Man.’ And if I close my eyes I can just about imagine the distant tinkle of that dear old Welsh woman reciting Craig Brown’s super explanation of France’s role in the second world war:

Those against the Germans were known as the Three French. The leader of the Three French was General de Girl. Together with his partner, Viv la France, he outsmarted the Nazis by remaining in Britain while they were in France, then returned in triumph the second they left, his chest heaving with brightly coloured medals that he had bravely pinned on himself without a thought for his own safety.

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