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Monday 1 December 2008

Penultimate Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain

A return to the grand themes

Raymond Carr reviews the new book from Wm. Roger Lewis

The subject of Britain’s supposed decline was a hot potato in the 1960s. It is here discussed by Professor Ortolano. It was obvious, after Suez, that Britain was no longer a great imperial power; to this was added the fact that its economic performance was lamentable. Encounter — the foremost intellectual organ of the 1960s before we knew that it was financed by the CIA — published in 1963 a collection of essays entitled Suicide of a Nation. For its editor, Arthur Koestler, the economy was in a state of paralysis and would only be saved by embracing science technology and modern management. This was the challenge that the political system must face. For Malcolm Muggeridge, whom Isaiah Berlin would have considered a piece of the crooked timber of humanity, prime minister Harold Macmillan, as a ‘decomposing figure, giving off the flavour of moth balls’, was not up to the job since Britain was impoverished morally and spiritually in a consumer society, the product of the scientific advances that Koestler so admired. The libertarian Henry Fairlie rejected calls for modern managerial expertise. ‘We must reassert our right to be inefficient.’ If Britain’s relative performance was poor, compared, say, with that of West Germany, in absolute terms the picture was less bleak. During 1939-40 war and after the wealthier classes suffered a setback. The masses, A. J. P. Taylor argued, enjoyed a security that they had not known before.

Cultural history has always been a major concern of the Texas seminars. In the present book Hilary Spurling analyses the novelist Paul Scott’s vision of the last days of the Raj and its bloody aftermath. Over time there have been similar essays on other novelists: Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, Rose Macaulay, Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh to name but a few. This parade of literary grandees makes for culture as seen from above. Penultimate Adventures with Britannia pays scant attention to the youth culture that, from the late 1950s, was to transform society from below. Addiction to a vanishing high culture is reflected in the obsession of television producers with the novels of Jane Austen. But, if historians embody the hopes and fears of mankind — wars and rumours of wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions — against this cosmic background, in Pride and Prejudice the effect of entail on the marriage prospects of Mr Bennet’s daughters is very small beer indeed.

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