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I Wish I’d Been There

Flies on the wall

edited by Byron Holinshead and Theodore K. Rabb
Macmillan, 456pp, £20,

Philip Ziegler

Tuesday, 1st April 2008

Philip Ziegler reviews a collection of history essays

To invite 20 eminent historians to describe the world-changing event in history which they most wish they had witnessed is an ingenious publishing idea likely to produce an entertaining and even modestly instructive book. Happy evenings could be spent around the dinner table debating the choices and suggesting altematives. It is perhaps a reflection of contemporary society, for instance, that none of the historians chose to witness the Crucifixion or the Resurrection — the two events (or non-events) which above all shaped the Christian world. On the whole the historians have chosen their subjects with a view to elucidating the true facts rather than merely witnessing a sensational spectacle. Sometimes they reflect on the contribution they might have made if they had been there. ‘Perhaps I could have helped,’ reflects Margaret MacMillan: if she had been present at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 she could have reminded the main protagonists that they should ‘use their own eyes and listen to their own advisers’.

Though three quarters of the contributors come from North America, their selections are heavily Eurocentric — there is no Gettysburg address, no Boston tea- party, no presidential assassination. The only events that take place outside Europe, indeed, are Alexander the Great’s death at Babylon and the Battle of the Nile — both largely concerned with Europeans. There are plenty of celebrated episodes — the brutal ending of the Peasant Revolt, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the German surrender at Lüneburg Heath — but also some quirkier choices. Frederick the Great’s first encounter with the potato at the siege of Philippsburg would not have occurred to many as being one of the seminal events of history, but William McNeill argues convincingly that the exploitation of this dreary tuber ‘reshaped Europe’s agricultural as well as its military and political history’.

‘Twenty historians,’ promises the cover of this book, ‘bring to life dramatic events that changed the world.’ The trouble is that, quite often, they don’t. The events may have changed the world but the bringing to life is hardly attempted — several authors content themselves with expounding the events that led up to the incident and explaining its significance. Katherine Fischer Drew’s piece on the signature of Magna Carta, for instance, is a perfectly sensible piece of historical analysis but hardly attempts to evoke the atmosphere at Runnymede in June 1215.

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