History

Thursday

Allan Massie

Clumber spaniels

For the first time in more than 30 years we have no Clumber spaniel. We have had five: Henry, Judith, Laurie, Persephone and Wattie. The last of them, Wattie the gentlest and sweetest of dogs, died a few months ago. We feel bereft. Clumbers are special: beautiful, affectionate, wilful, sometimes difficult, never dull. They take their name from Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire, once the seat of the Dukes of Newcastle. Different in appearance from other English spaniels — heavier, low-slung, with large sagacious heads — their origin is uncertain. According to one story, they came from France, being a gift from a French friend, the Duc de Noailles, to his

Thursday

Peter Jones

Henry III vs EU law

It is no surprise that the laws imposed on the UK by a European parliament in Brussels should so infuriate the ‘Leave’ campaign. England has form here going back 750 years. Roman law has been one of the wonders of the world since its codification in the Twelve Tables (449 BC). But it is not the laws themselves that are the real point. The key lies in the way that laws were later argued over by the ‘jurists’. These started out as private, freelance legal consultants, simply earning respect for the legal advice they offered. In a case fought against his jurist friend Servius, though Cicero admitted Servius was good at ‘providing

Thursday

Marcus Nevitt

Courting Sultana Isabel

The idea for a mechanical cock was never going to work. In 1595 the English ambassador to Constantinople, Edward Barton, advised Queen Elizabeth I that the surest way for her to impress Sultan Mehmed III, the new leader of the formidable Ottoman empire, was to send him a ‘clock in the form of a cock’. Knowing that Mehmed had a growing reputation for psychopathy rather than ornithology — he had his 19 brothers circumcised and then strangled to death — Elizabeth demurred and eventually sent him an elaborate clockwork organ instead. The organ was accompanied by its maker, Thomas Dallam, who spent his first month in Constantinople fixing the damage

Thursday

Frances Wilson

An electrifying politician

Just who was Benjamin Franklin? Apart, that is, from journalist, statesman, diplomat, founding father of the United States, inventor of the lightning rod, the Franklin Stove, the milometer, swimming flippers and the flexible catheter, the man who engineered the America postal system, who established the first lending library, who wrote one of the finest autobiographies in the language, and who schooled us in soundbites such as ‘Let all men know thee, but no man know thee thoroughly.’ Amen to that. Despite being the subject of a steady flow of worthy biographies, of which this is the latest, Franklin remains as cunning in heaven as he was on Earth. A master

Thursday

The Spectator

What to do with Syria?

From ‘The future of Syria’, The Spectator, 5 February 1916: We say with all the emphasis at our command, and without the slightest fear of contradiction, official or otherwise, not only that we do not want Syria for ourselves, but that nothing would induce us to take it. Englishmen of all parties; or political schools of thought — as we ought now perhaps to call them — are agreed that the British Empire is quite big enough already, and that at the close of the war the danger will be, not of our getting too little, but of our getting too much — of getting, that is, more territory than we

Thursday

Rebecca Weisser

The Clare Valley

It is a century and a half since The Spectator noted the exceptional qualities of South Australia, a colony of free settlers untainted — unlike the rest of the continent — by the convict stain. ‘Everywhere … the enclosures over miles of plain, the hedged gardens, the well-grown orchards and well-appointed homesteads, proclaim the possession of the land by an industrious and thrifty yeomanry,’ wrote a Mr Wilson in these pages in 1866. ‘It is England in miniature, England without its poverty … with a finer climate, a virgin soil … more liberal institutions and a happier people.’ These days, alas, the ‘thrifty yeomanry’ has to support a ballooning public

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Rhodes’s statue should remain, on one condition

Lobengula was the second king of the Matabele people in what is now Zimbabwe. He was also the last. Cecil John Rhodes smashed his authority, and broke his tribe. The Matabele (a breakaway people from the Zulu kingdom to the south) had been making their way north, and by the time Rhodes arrived on the scene were in effective control of a vast area of southern Africa, stretching from the Limpopo river to the Zambezi. Matabeleland was rich in -minerals and the tribe were being pestered by white prospectors. Rhodes saw his opportunity. He made an ally of Lobengula, who had been king since 1869, and in 1888 persuaded him

Thursday

Hilary Spurling

One for all

Mei Fong tells the routine story of a girl who managed to conceal an illegal pregnancy until the baby was almost due, when family planning officials surrounded her hiding place at night. ‘She ran and ran and ran until she came to a pond. Then she ran in, until the water was at her neck. She stood there and began to cry.’ Through her tears she explained that she needed the baby to stop her husband and his parents abusing her for not producing a son. This was the mid 1990s, but the same thing could have happened in rural China at any point in the past 1,000 years, except

Thursday

Peter Jones

Plato and think-tanks

In Living with Difference, a think-tank report on the problems raised by a multi-faith UK, the chair Baroness Butler-Sloss says that the recommendations amount to a ‘new settlement for religion and belief in the UK’ and are aimed at providing space and a role in society for all citizens, ‘regardless of their beliefs or absence of them’. This is what happens when good people decide this messy world needs to be hammered into an intellectually satisfying shape. Plato’s Republic is a very good example of the genre. It is an extraordinarily interesting document, telling one a very great deal about Plato and the ancient Greeks, deeply influential on intellectuals down

Bruce Anderson

Commanding vintages

As the bottles flowed, the talk ranged, to a serious vineyard, an awesome Field Marshal and a delightful restauranteur. For years, the late Tom Benham ran Monkeys as a club. He cooked game especially well and his game pudding, made of course with suet, was one of the best dishes that I have eaten. As Tom charged a fixed mark-up for wine, the better the bottle, the better the value. He always found space for his friends, although his way of doing so was often ruthless. One would telephone: ‘Completely full — but wait: there’s a name here I don’t recognise. You can have that table.’ I never actually saw

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

Curiosities for Christmas

There is not, sadly, a dedicated Trivia Books section in your local Waterstones, although at this time of year there really should be. But what would we call it? Trivia sounds too trivial. Loo Books sounds too lavatorial. Books for the Man or Woman who Has Everything, Except this Book is probably closest, but might need editing. Whatever we decide to call them, there is an unusually fine crop this year, and several are historically inclined. Gimson’s Kings and Queens (Square Peg, £10.99) is subtitled Brief Lives of the Monarchs since 1066, and gives us exactly that, in Andrew Gimson’s characteristically elegant and entertaining prose. ‘There are many admirable biographies

Thursday

Peter Jones

Corbyn, Nero and the Bomb

Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Nicholas Houghton is worried that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will never use the existing means of defence — Trident — to defend the country. Mr Corbyn is incandescent that a mere Chief of Defence Staff has the sheer effrontery to express a view on a matter that is (apparently) irrelevant to the defence of country but is purely political. One is reminded of the accession of Nero to Rome’s imperial throne in ad 54. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, it was dirty work by the controlling empress Agrippina that did for her husband Claudius, with the result that Nero, her son from an

Roy Foster

He knew he was right

A highlight of this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival was the Rough Magic Theatre Company’s production of The Train, a musical by Arthur Riordan and Bill Whelan. Political theatre at its wittiest and craziest, it told the story of the fledgling Irish Women’s Liberation Movement’s publicised trip in 1971 to Belfast to buy contraceptives, ostentatiously importing these banned Satanic devices back into the Republic, where the law obeyed the writ of the Catholic church. Watching it, one was reminded of the sheer extent of theocracy in Éamon de Valera’s Ireland (he remained president till 1973, having been Taoiseach for most of the period from 1932 to 1959), and the long journey

Michael Bywater

Sic transit: the buildings we treasure most are often the ones we’ve never seen

Here are two books which have almost nothing in common: form, function, source material, methodology, all utterly different. The surprise is that I should be surprised. Loss and rediscovery is at the core of what writers mostly deal with. We all experience loss (lovers, spectacles, innocence, our very existences) and that universality allows each of us to shape it as we will. James Crawford’s approach is structurally simple, but his narrative is beguiling. He considers the life-span of 20 buildings — including the Tower of Babel (5000 BC to 323 BC), the Library of Alexandria (300 BC to AD 650), the Berlin Wall (1961 to 1989) and, provocatively, the web

Thursday

Peter Hitchens

The Church of England’s shameful betrayal of bishop George Bell

The Church of England has produced a lot of good men and women, but very few great ones. It is in its modest, cautious nature that it should be so. Greatness requires a lonely, single-minded strength that does not sit easily with Anglicanism’s gentle compromise. And I suspect the Church has always been hesitant and embarrassed about the one undeniably great figure it produced in the 20th century. To this day, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester from 1929 to 1958, is an uncomfortable, disturbing person, like a grim obelisk set in a bleak landscape. Many British people still disapprove of his lonely public denunciation of Winston Churchill’s deliberate bombing of

Stephen Bayley

Designing the swimming car, the Doodlebug and the Panzer tank was all in a day’s work for Ferdinand Porsche

The aggressive character of the famous German sports car, in a sort of sympathetic magic, often transfers itself to owner-drivers. The joke goes: ‘When you get into a Porsche, you feel you want to invade Poland.’ In this fascinating and meticulously researched book, Karl Ludvigsen investigates the genetic spiral that gave Porsche cars the character of weaponry. All German manufacturers were forced to supply the Third Reich. The BMW-sponsored London Olympics 2012 were held on a site devastated by Luftwaffe planes powered by its engines. But the relationship between Professor Dr Ferdinand Porsche and Hitler, a motor-racing enthusiast, was altogether wider and deeper: the engineer put his design expertise exclusively

Thursday

Peter Jones

The emperors of Brussels

As both sides of the great EU debate line up their forces, it is worth reflecting on the implications of the collapse of the Roman republic in the 1st century bc and its transformation into an imperial system under the first emperor Augustus. Romans dated the start of the collapse to 133 bc. Up till then, they felt that relations between the senate, the traditional, if de facto, ruling authority, and the Plebeian assembly, with its tribunes who could veto senatorial proposals, had worked pretty well, without any serious clashes. This all changed when the ambitious aristocrat Tiberius Gracchus got himself elected tribune in order to use the Plebeian assembly

Monday

Laura Freeman

Once upon a time… history lessons weren’t so fragmented

What might a bright working-class boy from south London have learnt in his school history lessons a hundred years ago? We know something of his curriculum from notes made by the poet and painter David Jones about his own Edwardian education – paternalist, imperialist, chauvinist – at Brockley Road School, a state-funded secondary from 1906-1909. Summing up the ethos of his school history lessons he made this list: Below the belt / Natives / Sportsman / Whiteman / Boxing / Lower Deck / Club / English woman-hood / Dr Livingstone / North West Passage  / ‘but not the six hundred’ / Stock exchange / Slave trade / …sun never sets

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Can politicians say ‘crusade’ again? David Cameron thinks so

One thing grabbed my attention from David Cameron’s speech, long ago in the middle of last week. ‘We need a national crusade to get homes built.’ I’m as interested in housing as the next mother with a practically homeless grown-up daughter, but it was the word crusade that astonished me. I did not think a politician could use it now. Just after the atrocities of 11 September 2001, George Bush said: ‘This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.’ Some listeners feared this was confirmation of a ‘clash of civilisations’. But, from the Muslim side, some objections were ill-founded historically. English-speaking warriors who set off in the

Duff Hartdavis

Notes from a very small island: wonderful, eccentric Ascension

‘This is one of the strangest places on the face of the earth,’ wrote a Victorian naval officer. Another early visitor called it ‘the abomination of desolation’ — and to this day, on the 200th anniversary of the British occupation, Ascension remains decidedly odd. The summit of an extinct volcano, it pokes up out of the Atlantic eight degrees south of the Equator, and although the latest eruption is thought to have taken place 70,000 years ago, most of it still looks raw. Vegetation cloaks the summit and shoulders of the 2,800-foot Green Mountain, but steep ravines and petrified lava-flows — jet-black, grey, brown and white — plunge away towards