History

Thursday

Nigel Jones

A dead letter

When lists are compiled of our best and worst prime ministers (before the present incumbent), the two main protagonists of this book usually feature, holding the top and bottom positions. Attempts are periodically made to revise these verdicts, most recently in John McDonnell’s description of Churchill as a villain; and by Robert Harris’s sympathetic portrayal of Chamberlain in his thriller  Munich. By and large, however, the general view of the two PMs remains fixed: Churchill was a hero who saved his country and arguably freedom and democracy worldwide, while Chamberlain was a purblind and arrogant fool who let Hitler stomp his jackboots all over him. The revisionists who want to

Thursday

Joan Bakewell

The new freedom

For me this book evokes a Gigi duet moment: ‘You wore a gown of gold.’ ‘I was all in blue.’ ‘Am I getting old?’ ‘Oh, no, not you.’ Memory plays us false, and it takes the skill of a sympathetic historian such as Virginia Nicholson to sift the evidence, written and oral, and unfold a story that is both plausible and sound. I look back to my 1960s life and think how many of us were metaphorically clothed in gold… how we strode through the years enjoying new freedoms, new loves, music, clothes, drugs, opportunities. I have in my time contributed to the myth of unalloyed pleasure, extolling the 1960s

William Dalrymple

Bloodbath in the Punjab

On 10 April 1919, the peppery governor of the Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, ordered the immediate arrest of two leaders of the Indian National Congress in Amritsar. Doctors Satyapal and Kitchlew were both gentle, Cambridge-educated medics who had responded to Gandhi’s call for non-violent resistance to British rule, satyagraha. O’Dwyer took the view that their actions were treacherous and seditious. Like Gandhi and many other Indian political leaders, Satyapal and Kitchlew had responded dutifully when the first world war broke out; out of the one million Indians who volunteered, half had come from the Punjab. It had been expected that after such unprecedented loyalty, Britain would reward India with Dominion

Andreas Campomar

In the Zone

There is nothing new about Latin America’s fractious relationship with her northern neighbour. In 1900 the Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó published an essay in which he pitted the spiritual in the form of Latin civilisation (Ariel) against the utilitarianism and materialism of the United States (Caliban). Ariel may have been an overblown image but, by trying to construct a pan-Latin American identity, it changed the way Latin Americans thought about themselves. Only two years earlier the Spanish defeat at the hands of the United States in Cuba had hardened the continent’s intellectuals against what they saw as North American aggression. When the United States helped Panama secede from Gran

Yiannis Baboulias

The burden of a glorious past

It often proves difficult to talk about modern Greece. Not just because of the relentless stream of news coming at us this past decade in relation to the crisis; but also because Greece, both its ancestry and its more recent passions, can mean quite different things to different people. It’s a history universally revered in its ancient glory, commonly ignored in its millennium-spanning Byzantine imperial expression and often maligned in its modern incarnation as a nation state. Small in both geographical and financial terms, the Hellenic Republic has attracted more attention than is perhaps justified, often for all the wrong reasons. But do we truly understand Greece beyond the headlines?

Thursday

Simon Heffer

The might of the far right

‘Why would anyone write a historical study of it?’ asks Gavriel Rosenfeld about the Fourth Reich at the start of this rather confusing, but at times entertaining, book. His answer is that the phrase has been used as a metaphor since the earliest days of the Third Reich to mean a wide variety of things. It has permeated politics and culture, and seems to be a term susceptible to any meaning a writer or speaker wishes to impose upon it. Some of us — and I plead guilty to this — have used the term simply to describe the present German state in its reunified, Europe-dominating form. While of course

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Cardinal sins

The publication of In the Closet of the Vatican by the French gay polemicist Frédéric Martel has been meticulously timed to coincide with Pope Francis’s ‘global summit’ of bishops to discuss the sexual abuse of minors. The book appeared in eight languages on Thursday morning, just as the gathering began. It is being hyped as a ‘bombshell’ that will ‘blow apart’ the summit. We shall see. Certainly many Catholic priests are more interested in Martel’s exposé than in Francis’s initiative. The author spent four years researching the subject of high-ranking gays in the Catholic church. Forty-one cardinals spoke to him. That seems brave, given that Martel is an LGBT campaigner

Ian Sansom

Big, bold, beautiful ideas

I am undoubtedly, alas, an example of what the Fowler brothers, H.W. and F.G., of The King’s English fame, would have called ‘a half-educated Englishman of literary proclivities’. Fellow half-educateds of similar proclivities will doubtless recall that scene in the third chapter of Our Mutual Friend, when Gaffer Hexam shows Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn the handbills of the missing persons that he has pasted all over his wall: He waved the light over the whole, as if to typify the light of his scholarly intelligence. ‘They pretty well papers the room, you see; but I know ’em all. I’m scholar enough!’ For Gaffer’s handbills, I have my copies of

Thursday

Colin Greenwood

A pawn in a deadly game

On 7 November 1938, the 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan walked into the German embassy in Paris. Claiming to have secret papers, he was shown into the office of an embassy secretary, Ernst vom Rath. Drawing a tiny revolver — the price tag still attached from that morning’s purchase —  he fired five shots, shouting: ‘You’re a filthy Kraut, and in the name of 12,000 Jews, here is your document.’ Two of the bullets struck Vom Rath, who died two days later. The previous month, close to 18,000 Polish German Jews had been dumped by train on the Polish border. Among those  rounded up in Hanover for the Aktion were Grynszpan’s family:

Thursday

James Walton

The man who would be king

Last year on Who Do You Think You Are?, Danny Dyer — EastEnders actor and very possibly Britain’s most cockney man — discovered that he was a direct descendant of Edward III. Luckily, nobody had the heart to tell him that for somebody of English stock the chances of not being are estimated at 0.0000000000000000000000000001 per cent, and Dyer reacted with a memorable mix of excitement, delight and overwhelming pride. Now, in the two-part Danny Dyer’s Right Royal Family, both he and BBC1 are milking his regal lineage for all it’s worth in what might well be the oddest TV show of recent times. The first stop in Wednesday’s opening

William Leith

A deadly box of chemicals

Do you remember the swine flu panic a decade ago? Jeremy Brown, the author of this book, describes it here. In March 2009, 60 people died in Mexico. The cause: a flu-type virus. The Mexican government ‘closed schools, banned public gatherings, and ordered troops to hand out face masks at subway stations’. This flu crossed the border into the United States. The media monitored the outbreak with grim enthusiasm. Soon, people in 74 countries were infected. The WHO ‘declared it a pandemic’. Or perhaps you don’t remember the swine flu panic of 2009. Not many people do. The main reason I do is that I met an epidemiologist on a

Anthony Sattin

In the realms of gold

A thought kept recurring as I read Toby Green’s fascinating and occasionally frustrating book on the development of West Africa from the 15th to 19th centuries: that the money in my pocket was just a piece of polypropylene. And what is that worth in the greater scheme of things? The thought occured because money and its predecessor, barter goods, play a central role in the story Green has to tell in this monumental volume. The shells of the title are cowries, which for centuries were accepted as currency across the region. Cowries are not native to West Africa and had to be shipped from the Indian Ocean. But they worked

Thursday

Alex Colville

An eye in the storm

Ernst Jünger, who died in 1998, aged 102, is now better known for his persona than his work. A deeply confusing and controversial figure who loathed democracy and glorified German militarism, yet despised the Nazis, he not only bore witness to the industrial flesh-mangles of two world wars, but almost the entirety of the 20th century. His writings and insights have long earned him sage status in Germany. This, the first publication in English of his diaries from 1941–45, heightens his complexity but also makes him a more rounded figure. This will come as a surprise to those who know him as the ruthless young warrior of the infamous Great

Allan Mallinson

Their finest hour

On 22 January last year, the entrance whiteboard at London Underground’s Dollis Hill carried a brief factual statement: On this day in history On the 22–23 January 1879 in Natal, South Africa, a small British garrison named Rorke’s Drift was attacked by 4,000 Zulu warriors. The garrison was successfully defended by just over 150 British and colonial troops. Following the battle, 11 men were awarded the Victoria Cross. A female passenger complained that it was ‘celebrating colonialism’. The board was wiped clean and a suitably opaque quote from Martin Luther King substituted: ‘We are not the makers of history. We are made by history.’ Too late to avoid the Twitter

Thursday

Alex Burghart

The making of a monstrous metropolis

When Bishop Guy of Amiens looked across the Channel in the 11th century he saw ‘teeming London [which] shines bright. A most spacious city, full of evil inhabitants, and richer than anywhere else in the kingdom’. Well, plus c’est la même chose. Even then those Mammonic associations were already old. Over 300 years earlier the Venerable Bede had called London an ‘emporium of many nations who visit it by land and sea’ — a place of markets and mints, of North Sea slave-traders and missionaries seeking martyrdom east of the Rhine, of wine and wool merchants trying to make ends meet. The hubbub and hum of the city had begun.

Charlotte Hobson

Little shots of sedition

In this handsomely illustrated book Tobie Mathew makes a case for the lowly postcard’s role in the politicisation of pre-revolutionary Russia. Cheap to produce, easily transported and hidden, and conveying a simple graphic message, picture postcards were ideally suited to anti-government agitation. Too dangerous to post, these little shots of sedition were preserved and shared for years in the postcard albums that were a feature of any polite drawing-room and increasing numbers of peasant huts and workers’ barracks. Before 1905 revolutionary groups printed postcards abroad and smuggled them into the country, simultaneously spreading their message and raising funds. The Russo-Japanese war provided good material for satirical images, yet in those

Thursday

Alexandra Masters

The night has a thousand eyes

Edward S. Curtis’s 1914 photograph, ‘Dancing to Restore an Eclipsed Moon’, shows the Kwakiutl tribe of North American Indians circling a fire ‘to make a sky creature sneeze and disgorge the moon’. Raised arms are silhouetted against the sky, faces remain imperceptible, and bodies are shrouded in smoke. It is apt that such a mesmerising image should accompany the opening chapter of Nina Edwards’s beguiling book, which gallantly aims to subvert common views of darkness, both physical and metaphorical. Given the enormous scope of her subject matter (from clothing to Christianity, electricity to the Enlightenment, Islam to the Industrial revolution, black holes to Steve Bannon, and Milton to the moon),

Patrick Skene-Catling

Death at the top

Agatha Christie’s spirit must be loving this poisonous new historical entertainment. Eleanor Herman has already enjoyed the success of Sex with Kings and Sex with the Queen, thoroughly researched, gossipy revelations of promiscuity among monarchs and their noble retainers during the Renaissance. She is an American author and broadcaster, born in Baltimore, now living in Virginia, but, at 58, she still concentrates her professional attention on the historic immorality and disastrous vulnerability of western European royalty. In the Middle Ages, when monarchs commanded virtually absolute power, rivalry for every top job was sufficiently intense to motivate assassination, and the least difficult way to commit it was with poison. As viewed

Thursday

Alan Judd

Could they have tried harder?

Awareness of German opposition to Hitler is usually limited to Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempt to blow up the wretched man on 20 July 1944. Hitler was at a briefing in his Wolf’s Lair, a secret forested redoubt, when Stauffenberg entered the room with his briefcase bomb (containing British plastic explosive), placing it beneath the table where Hitler was due to sit. Stauffenberg withdrew, pleading an urgent call, but the unsuspecting subordinate who took his place moved the briefcase further under the table and away from Hitler. Standing and smoking by his car, Stauffenberg — a one-armed, eye-patched veteran of the North African and Russian campaigns — watched as the

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

‘We’re all travelling together’

‘But what must it be like for the fish?’ We’re talking about cormorants, Neil MacGregor and I, and the spectacular way they dive for food, when he pauses to consider the situation from the perspective of a fish. ‘I mean just think, there you are swimming along with lots of chums and then suddenly there’s this great whoosh and the chum next to you has just disappeared! He’s vanished! And of course you can’t see the cause of it.’ MacGregor tilts his head. The sunlight in the offices of Penguin on the Strand seems to condense to a point in his eye. ‘Can you imagine it?’ he says. I can’t.