History

Saturday

Christopher Howse

Sweeter than honey

The only thing I can remember about a Tesco advertisement on the television the other night is the line: ‘No rest for the wicked.’ It was meant ironically, of course. The only thing I can remember about a Tesco advertisement on the television the other night is the line: ‘No rest for the wicked.’ It was meant ironically, of course. The suggestion was not that wicked people alone shop at Tesco’s. Nor was the phrase intended as a pious invocation of the Bible, its source, Isaiah, 57:21. An anthropologist describing the clichés, or tropes, of Western cultures might form the idea that biblical religion played a lively part in daily

Simon Heffer

Capturing the last of England

The book is interesting because it has insights and novelty, not least in taking a period and a culture regarded by many as second best compared with what was happening elsewhere at the time, and shows it to have been enlightened, intelligent and full of beauty. However, it infuriates partly because of the author’s occasionally cloying and highly adjectival style, and partly because, for all her scholarship in the subject, one gets the sense that she has spread herself too broadly and lacks a feel for the real popular currents of the Twenties and Thirties. The book is certainly ambitious. Not only does Harris examine the paradoxes of these modernists

Jasper Becker

Systematic genocide

You don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you don’t have to follow other people’s choices and paths, OK? It is about your choices and your path. It is a measure of people’s continuing admiration for Chairman Mao that last year the White House communications director, Anita Dunn, unashamedly described him as a ‘favourite political philosopher’ because, as she told an audience of American high- school graduates, Mao showed that You don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you don’t have to follow other people’s choices and paths, OK? It is about your choices and your path. In a brilliant

Jason Goodwin

In and out of favour in Iraq

Nowadays the TV cameras make Baghdad look like a suburban car park, and for Tamara Chalabi, raised in England and Beirut on memories of pre-Saddam Iraq, the first encounter in 2003 was dismal. Her family kissed the very ground as they returned from exile, but initially she felt, and recognised, nothing. She has worked hard to connect with the city where she now lives, and in this absorbing book she has wrapped up much that is important in Iraq’s history in the story of her own family’s development through the 20th century. Of course the reader may want to ask what role Chalabi’s father played in landing Iraq in the

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Welsh wizardry and venom

Paul Johnson reviews Roy Hattersley’s life of David Lloyd George No politician’s life is so difficult to write as Lloyd George’s. All who have tried have failed, and wise heavyweight historians have steered clear. I applaud Roy Hattersley’s courage in tackling this rebarbative subject and congratulate him on his success in making sense of Lloyd George’s early life up to his emergence as a major figure in parliament. Thereafter, however, he tends to lose his way in the trackless jungle of endless political crises during Lloyd George’s 16 years in office, festooned as they are with the undergrowth of his financial fecundity and the florid canopy of his love affairs.

Dan Jones

The match that sparked the Civil War

There are turbulent marriages. And then there are turbulent marriages in which the husband ends up getting beheaded on a stage. This book describes the latter. One doesn’t normally need to encourage publishers to hyperbole, but in the case of Katie Whitaker’s subtitle, there might have been a case for giving it a bit more welly. The story begins with a prissy 15-year-old French princess being taken to England, to a husband whom she’d never seen. It ends with that husband losing his crown and his head to Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarian taleban. The sad coda is the princess living out her days back in France, estranged from most of her

Interconnect

This mortal coil

Among the most famous of all living poets, Nobel Laureate, highly educated, revered for his lectures and ideas as well as for his poetry, Seamus Heaney has a daunting reputation. He remains, however, enjoyed by a broad spectrum of readers, accessible, song-like, direct, concerned with everyday details and human relationships. Essentially, Heaney’s poetry strikes to the heart through its central metaphor — the very mechanics of being human. Human Chain, his latest collection, makes this familiar territory absolutely explicit, right from the title. Not only does the image of a ‘chain’ of being human concern itself with family loyalties, connections and inheritances, but it also represents the physical labour of

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Flodden vs Culloden

Further to this post, it’s not a fair fight. Commenter Ben G asks: But isn’t Culloden more significant? The effective end of a Scottish claim to the throne. Remember, after that you became ‘North Britain’. This is a common misperception. Unlike Flodden, Culloden was not a fight between England and Scotland. As many, and perhaps more, Scots fought against the Young Pretender on Drumossie Moor as fought for him. The ’45 was as much a Highland vs Lowland conflict as a Scotland vs England affair. Which is one reason why, from a Unionist perspective, Culloden is less important than Bannockburn. The latter prevented Scotland from becoming a northern Wales and

Saturday

Caroline Moorehead

Days of wine and shrapnel

Virginia Cowles was a 27-year-old American journalist working for the Hearst newspapers when she went to Spain for the first time. It was March 1937; the battle of Guadalajara had just brought a victory to the Republicans and besieged Madrid was an exciting place to be. Up till then, Cowles had reported mainly on events of a ‘peaceful nature’. Spain would turn her into a war reporter. Arriving at the Hotel Florida with her suitcase and typewriter, an elegant, resourceful young woman with a high forehead and dark brown hair, she was soon part of the gang of foreigners cheering the Republicans on. There was the bulky Tom Delmer from

Thursday

Alex Massie

Remembering 9/9

The annual memorial service at Flodden. Photo courtesy of Grant Kinghorn. Today marked the 497th anniversary of the battle of Flodden, perhaps the gravest military disaster in Scottish history and a fiasco that’s still keenly recalled in these parts where Flodden is a bigger deal than Bannockburn. The story goes that some 50 men from Selkirk rallied to King James’s colours but that only one, a man named Thomas Fletcher*, returned alive. Commemorating that loss remains at the heart of the town’s Common Riding ceremonies each June. Outside the Borders, however, I suspect Flodden is most familiar as the inspiration for the most beautiful of all laments, The Flowers of

Saturday

Patrick Marnham

Amid the encircling gloom

Africa is the setting for several of V. S. Naipaul’s finest fictional stories — In a Free State, A Bend in the River, Half a Life. Africa is the setting for several of V. S. Naipaul’s finest fictional stories — In a Free State, A Bend in the River, Half a Life. And there is a pattern to the themes in the African works: fear, post-colonial disintegration, isolation, approaching catastrophe, a sense of being trapped in a way of life that is hovering on the borders of savagery. It is an unforgettable vision, but it remains that of an outsider. In The Masque of Africa, Naipaul goes deeper; this is

Charlotte Hobson

The motherland’s tight embrace

At nursery school, along with her warm milk, little Lena Gorokhova imbibed the essence of survival in the post-war Soviet Union. It consisted of a game called vranyo — pretence: My parents play it at work, and my older sister Marina plays it at school. We all pretend to do something, and those that watch us pretend they are seriously watching us and don’t know that we are only pretending. The school teachers pretended that their pupils’ 100 per cent attendance at Young Pioneer meetings was unconnected with the padlocked door of the meeting hall. The women standing in line pretended they saw no contradiction between reports of record harvests

Saturday

Robert Chandler

Out of the woods

These two memoirs by ladies born into the Russian elite in the 1880s have both had to wait many decades before publication in English. The Green Snake, however, has gone through eight editions in its original German, whereas The Russian Countess has never been published before. No one was in the least interested in a Russia that no longer existed. Margarita Woloschin was a painter and her husband was a well-known poet. She knew most of the key figures in the Russian Symbolist movement, and she became a disciple of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. From 1924 to her death in 1973 she lived in Stuttgart and devoted herself

Saturday

Jane Ridley

Girls from the golden West

Who was the first American to marry an English duke? Most students of the peerage would say it was Consuelo Yzagna who married the eldest son of the Duke of Manchester in 1876. But the banjo-strumming Cuban American Consuelo was not the first Yankee duchess. As early as 1828 the American Louisa Caton married the eldest son of the Duke of Leeds. This was half a century before the dollar princesses, trading titles for cash, played havoc with Burke’s Peerage. Louisa and her sisters were the pioneers of the American invasion of London society. Their conquest was so successful, and they became so assimilated, that they left barely a ripple.

Jonathan Sumption

All eyes and ears

Both of these books aim, in their different ways, to cater for Britain’s long-standing obsession with espionage and other forms of political and military intelligence. Both of these books aim, in their different ways, to cater for Britain’s long-standing obsession with espion- age and other forms of political and military intelligence. But they have virtually nothing else in common. Sinclair McKay’s The Secret Life of Bletchley Park is about daily life at the famous wartime headquarters of the Government Code and Cipher School. There is very little new material to be mined about the work done at Bletchley Park. Its contribution to the course of the second world war has

Richard Ormrod

Dramatic asides

‘I Scribble, therefore I am’: this Cartesian quip is typical of Simon Schama, as is the comprehensive subtitle: ‘Writings on Ice Cream, Obama, Churchill and My Mother,’ among other topics, of course. ‘I Scribble, therefore I am’: this Cartesian quip is typical of Simon Schama, as is the comprehensive subtitle: ‘Writings on Ice Cream, Obama, Churchill and My Mother,’ among other topics, of course. This gives the flavour of the delights on offer: a miscellany of observations, reviews, mini-lectures and reminiscences written between 1979 and 2010. Schama and Starkey, TV’s duo of history gurus, have helped to re-popularise a subject often dismissed as irrelevant; but whereas Starkey can come across

Raymond Carr

Built for eternity

The Escorial, as a monastery and a royal palace, was the brain child of Philip II of Spain. Built in the latter half of the 16th century, about 30 miles north-west of Madrid, the huge granite complex with 4,000 rooms, 16 courtyards, a basilica, a library and picture gallery as well as the king’s private apartments, came to be regarded as the creation of a cold-hearted despot cut off from the outside world. For Richard Ford, whose 1850 Handbook for Travellers in Spain is the most learned guidebook ever written, the Escorial ‘was as cold as the grey eye and granite heart of its founder’. For the 19th-century conservative Spanish

Montagu Curzon

A dream to fly

Undeniably the Hawker Hurricane has suffered the fate of the less pretty sister. It is the Spitfire, at once beautiful and deadly, that is forever the star of 1940, firmly lodged in the British military pantheon, beside the longbow and HMS Victory, and the Hurricane is in the shadow. Yet it did more of the work, in greater numbers, and with more victories in the Battles of France and Britain. It too was loved and admired. Leo McKinstry, after his definitive books on the Spitfire and the Lancaster, sets out to repair this reputational injustice. His subtitle, ‘Victor of the Battle of Britain’, states the claim clearly. Hurricanes made up

Saturday

James Buchan

A foot in both camps

As a five-year-old in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem in the 1950s, Kai Bird overheard an elderly American heiress offering $1 million to anyone who could solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Tugging on his father’s sleeve, he said: ‘Daddy, we have to win this prize.’ Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, Bird’s memoir of growing up in the Middle East, is full of such generosity and innocence. In 1956, Kai’s father, Eugene Bird, moved his young family from Oregon to East Jerusalem, where he was to serve as American vice-consul in a city divided in two by the 1949 armistice line. Kai grew up in a rented villa half a mile from the lovely

Inigo Thomas

A smooth passage

Jonathan Raban left Britain and moved to Seattle in 1990, when he was 47. He sold his Volkswagen on his way to Heathrow airport. He bought a Dodge with Washington state plates the next day, and in this second-hand car he would, over the years, travel through and write about his new country. ‘The Pacific Northwest continues to be a magnet — the strongest regional magnet in the country, I would guess — for hopefuls and newlifers of every imaginable cast,’ Raban wrote in the summer of 1993, in a piece that’s now republished in Driving Home: It feels like the last surviving corner of the United States to be