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Tuesday 2 December 2008

I Wish I’d Been There

Flies on the wall

Philip Ziegler reviews a collection of history essays

There are honourable exceptions: Paul Kennedy’s Battle of the Nile, seen through the eyes of an Egyptian fisherman who watches with baffled excitement as an almost insanely reckless Nelson destroys the French fleet, is a splendidly vivid account of what proved to be one of the crucial engagements of the Napoleonic Wars. John Keegan’s evocation of the German surrender to Montgomery captures the pettiness, vanity and consuming energy of that most temperamentally flawed of generals. John Julius Norwich brilliantly recreates 12th-century Venice as Frederick Barbarossa makes his peace with Pope Alexander III. But on the whole this book is not as much fun to read as it should have been.

Some of the most interesting pieces relate to cultural rather than political or military events. Ross King attends the Salon des Refusés in Paris in 1863 and wonders what can have induced a relatively obscure young painter called Edouard Manet to produce a large canvas showing two serious looking young men lolling on the grass beside a self-possessed and decidedly sexy naked woman. The picture was then called ‘Le Bain’; only later did it achieve immortality as ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe’. Charles Riley eschews the rather better-known riot which disrupted the first night of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in favour of Picasso’s stage début, as co-creator with Cocteau and Erik Satie, of Parade, a ballet performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. With Massine dancing and Gide and Apollinaire commenting from the auditorium, few evenings can have been more star-studded or more outrageous. The Parisian audience was duly and gratifyingly outraged.

Inevitably one wonders whether one could not have chosen better. I think I would probably have opted for that fateful meeting in Downing Street on 9 May 1940, when Chamberlain told Halifax and Churchill that one of them must succeed him as prime minister and that personally he favoured Halifax. Did Halifax really say that he thought Churchill would be more suitable? Did Churchill’s brooding silence really decide the matter? The destiny of the nation turned on that moment; few confrontations can have been more significant or more dramatic. But there are innumerable other possibilities; it is one of the merits of this book that all readers are likely to be provoked into reviewing history and making their own selection.

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