History

Thursday

James Walton

The decade of Delia

Proof that someone has really made it as a TV historian comes, I would suggest, when they join the likes of David Starkey and Simon Schama by getting their name into the programme’s title. So it is that Dominic Sandbrook’s The 70s, from 2012, has now been followed by The 80s with Dominic Sandbrook (BBC2, Thursday), a series that confirms his ability to put across moderately big ideas in a light easy style — and in a parka. Sometimes when watching television, you might be in the mood for a serious history documentary, and sometimes for a show that’ll just wash over you pleasantly. With Sandbrook — and I’m pretty

Mark Cocker

Trees of life and death

Was it perhaps the landscape historian Oliver Rackham who gave rise to our present preoccupation with old trees through his pioneering works on ancient woodland? He certainly pointed out more than 40 years ago that 10,000 centurion oaks ‘are not a substitute for one 500-year-old oak’. Since then, shelves of books have been written on these veterans, and in The Long, Long Life of Trees Fiona Stafford makes a welcome and entertaining contribution. She draws on material from fields including folklore, natural science, literature, cultural history, European art, ancient mythology and modern medicine to illuminate such trees’ central place in western civilisation. Sometimes all of these are skilfully blended in

Thursday

Frank Trentmann

Nothing new under the sun

Rupert Sheldrake had it coming. In A New Science of Life (1981), he argued that animals and plants have inherited a collective memory from their predecessors, thanks to ‘morphic resonance’. This also explained why animals had telepathic powers. ‘You see, I told you so,’ I said to my wife when reading about this in Steven Poole’s exciting new book, and exchanged a secret glance with our dog. Mothers, one might add, also seem to have such psychic powers and know exactly when their teenage sons are sneaking home late at night. But Sheldrake is not your average ‘new ager’ or dog lover. He is a cell biologist. The idea of

Christopher Howse

The gospel truth

More brides in Britain go down the aisle to Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ than to any other tune, Simon Loveday notes. He cannot resist adding that ‘it seems doubtful that they have fully taken in the words of the rest of the song’. That must be true. ‘I’m not that chainedup little person still in love with you,’ yells the defiant narrator in Gloria’s song. ‘You’re not welcome anymore.’ If anything, ‘I Will Survive’ belongs, it seems to me, to a genre of assertive anthems, like ‘My Way’ and ‘Invictus’, that appeal to people who are the imaginary heroes of their own Desert Island Discs and examine their lives

Stuart Kelly

Rich in legend and song

There is an immediate problem for anyone producing a guide to places in Scotland with literary connections: as Walter Scott wrote in Marmion, ‘Nor hill, nor brook we paced along/ But had its legend or its song.’ Many years ago when the Scottish Borders was marketing itself as the ‘Land of Creativity’ I assembled a database of references which stretched to well over 1,000 entries — for example, the village of Yetholm crops up in a strange extended simile in Malcolm Lowry’s posthumous October Ferry to Gabriola. Then there is Scotland’s propensity for memorialising its own writers. The Scott Monument is only the most obvious example. Within a few miles

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 21 July 2016

How Britannia got her trident Parliament voted to renew Trident as Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. But what about Britannia and her trident? — Unnoticed by some, our coinage was unilaterally disarmed in 2008 when a new 50p was issued, with a crest, not Britannia. — But then Britannia didn’t always bear a trident. When she was first put on coins by the Romans she carried a spear in one hand and an olive branch in the other. — She retained her spear until 1797 when, to celebrate Britain’s naval power, the weapon was replaced by a trident. The inspiration came from Poseidon and Neptune, Greek and Roman deities of the

Simon Barnes

What wasps do for us

Dom Perignon, Pimms, Carling Black Label, Coca-Cola — one’s as good as the other, so far as they’re concerned. Even if they don’t manage to drown in the stuff, they spoil the taste for drinkers by creating panic out of all proportion to their size. They destroy the ardour of al-fresco lovers in an instant. They are the joy-killers: the destroyers of summer, determined to prove that the wild world is a plot against humanity. Is there anything good about wasps? Is their sole purpose in life to harass humans seeking the fleeting joys of summer? Does this black-and-yellow air force exist only to ruin the few fine days reluctantly

Thursday

John Osullivan

She’s another Chamberlain

One name leapt off the text of Theresa May’s Birmingham speech, which began as the launch of her leadership campaign but morphed instantly into a programme for her government this week. It was that of Joseph Chamberlain, who was listed by the new Tory leader in her apostolic succession of great conservatives. It became clear as May developed the themes of her new Conservatism, moreover, that Chamberlain senior wasn’t being praised just because she happened to be speaking in Birmingham — the city he made into a worldwide symbol of great municipal government. She intended to follow in the footsteps of ‘Radical Joe’. And that could take her along very

The Spectator

Never again

From ‘Terms of peace’, The Spectator, 15 July 1916: As the man in the street might say, ‘The Allies are not going to give the Germans a chance to come at us a second time. Never again! is our motto.’ And if this is the object of the war, it will also be the object of the peace. We shall not dictate peace terms which will lead to the destruction of the German people or any section of them, or to any annexations of true German provinces; but we shall, as far as lies in our power, see to it that such a structure of government as that presented by militarist

Wednesday

The Spectator

Barometer | 22 June 2016

Big game hunt Wales beat Russia 3–0 to finish above England in their group at the European Football Championships. Which is bigger in Wales, football or rugby? — The Football Association of Wales was founded in 1876, five years earlier than the Welsh Rugby Union. However, rugby then took off rapidly in south Wales while football remained stronger in the north. — Wales lost their first matches to England in both football (2–1) and rugby (8–0). — Rugby and football matches have both filled Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium (capacity 76,000), though in a recent Wales Online poll, rugby was still reckoned more important, by 56% to 44%. Tall poppies A group

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

Gatton Park

Gatton Park is probably Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s least famous landscape. It is tucked away near Reigate Hill, just beyond the M25, and even in the 300th anniversary year of Brown’s birth it is an unlikely place to visit. Because it shares its plot with a school and stables, you can only go on the first Sunday of the month or if you arrange a tour in advance. A bother, I grant you, when there are so many glorious landscapes to explore elsewhere. But Gatton Park has other attractions, too. For more than 50 years, from 1888, this was the estate of the ‘Mustard King’, Sir Jeremiah Colman. An hour or

Thursday

Maggie Fergusson

That glowing feeling

On the morning of 15 October 1927, a dim, autumn day, a group of men foregathered at the Rosedale cemetery in New Jersey and picked their way through the headstones to the grave of one Amelia — ‘Mollie’ — Maggia. An employee of the United States Radium Corporation (USRC), she had died five years earlier, aged 24. To the dismay of her friends and family the cause of death had been recorded as syphilis, but, as her coffin was exhumed and its lid levered open, Mollie’s corpse was seen to be aglow with a ‘soft luminescence’. Everyone present knew what that meant. ‘My beautiful radium’, Marie Curie called the element

Thursday

George Parker

Brodie Castle

Is there a more forlornly romantic spot in Britain than the moors east of Inverness where the Jacobite dream died? There is surely no more romantic location from which to explore the area than Brodie Castle, a turreted fortress looking out towards the Moray coast. Now owned by the National Trust for Scotland, Brodie Castle allows groups of up to 14 to live like a laird, playing croquet on the lawns, eating in the grand dining room, spotting red squirrels and generally absorbing the dark history that culminated on the moors of Culloden. The adventure has to start at Euston. You could fly to Inverness and arrive with the taste

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Blue plaque blues

Blue plaque spotting is one of the mind-broadening pleasures of British life. A walk to the dentist can be transformed into a serendipitous encounter with a forgotten genius from the past. ‘Luke Howard, 1772–1864, Namer of Clouds, lived and died here,’ says the blue plaque on 7 Bruce Grove, Tottenham. Even if you’ve never heard of Luke Howard, you instantly take a liking to him — and never again will you hear the word ‘cumulonimbus’ without thinking of him. ‘Lived here’ is the key: you’re passing the very house where the person woke up for breakfast each day, and the intimacy of that is what makes the encounter so much

The Spectator

Against armistice

From ‘President Wilson and the Lessons of History’, 2 June 1916: Emphatically it is not a war of what we may call the old eighteenth-century pattern, where any one could step in and say, as if speaking to a couple of duellists: ‘You have had a good honest fight. Honour is satisfied. Now don’t you think the sensible and the humane plan would be to shake hands and try to forget all about your unfortunate quarrel?’ There is nothing whatever of that nature about the present struggle. The peoples of Europe are not arrayed upon what used to be called the field of honour, but engaged in a death-struggle in

James Walton

Impure thoughts

Spoiler alerts aren’t normally required for reviews of Shakespeare — but perhaps I’d better issue one before saying that in BBC1’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Monday) Theseus dies near the end. Not only that, but Hippolyta and Titania fly off on butterfly wings to become lovers, and the mechanicals’ play goes down a storm. Personally, I’ve never been sure about the existence of that mysterious tribe known as ‘Shakespeare purists’. If they do exist, though, Russell T. Davies’s heavily cut and cheerfully tweaked adaptation seems almost deliberately designed to flush them out. Famous, of course, for reviving Doctor Who, Davies here showed a similar fondness for jumbling together different eras

Thursday

Christopher Howse

On Moses’s mountain

A medieval party of 800 Armenians at the top of Mount Sinai suddenly found themselves surrounded by fire. Their pilgrim staffs shone like candles but, wisely chanting ‘Kyrie Eleison’, they were relieved that after an hour or so the fire abated and not an eyelash of theirs was harmed. The top of Mount Sinai is no place to be stuck in an electrical storm, even less exposed to the fire of God’s presence. A steep mass of weathered granite 7,616 ft high overlooking the Red Sea, it could be climbed on foot (but not on mule-back) with the help of 3,700 steps built into the rock. The slog was worth

Tuesday

Laura Freeman

An ode to Honour and Fleming’s World History of Art

The heaviest book on my shelves is Hugh Honour & John Fleming’s A World History of Art. I have just put its 960 pages on the kitchen scales: 8lbs 4oz – the weight of a bonny newborn. If I cradle my copy tenderly today it is because Hugh Honour died last Friday 20 May at the age of 88. A World History of Art is the most famous, certainly the biggest, of his many books. At sixteen, after GCSE exams, my sixth-form history of art teacher sent me away with a copy.  I was not to come back in September unless I’d read it. The book is the scaffolding around

Thursday

Allan Massie

Clumber spaniels

For the first time in more than 30 years we have no Clumber spaniel. We have had five: Henry, Judith, Laurie, Persephone and Wattie. The last of them, Wattie the gentlest and sweetest of dogs, died a few months ago. We feel bereft. Clumbers are special: beautiful, affectionate, wilful, sometimes difficult, never dull. They take their name from Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire, once the seat of the Dukes of Newcastle. Different in appearance from other English spaniels — heavier, low-slung, with large sagacious heads — their origin is uncertain. According to one story, they came from France, being a gift from a French friend, the Duc de Noailles, to his

Thursday

Peter Jones

Henry III vs EU law

It is no surprise that the laws imposed on the UK by a European parliament in Brussels should so infuriate the ‘Leave’ campaign. England has form here going back 750 years. Roman law has been one of the wonders of the world since its codification in the Twelve Tables (449 BC). But it is not the laws themselves that are the real point. The key lies in the way that laws were later argued over by the ‘jurists’. These started out as private, freelance legal consultants, simply earning respect for the legal advice they offered. In a case fought against his jurist friend Servius, though Cicero admitted Servius was good at ‘providing