History

Thursday

Carola Binney

History is the art of making things up. Why pretend otherwise?

In a recent interview, the celebrity historian and Tudor expert David Starkey described Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall as a ‘deliberate perversion of fact’. The novel, he said, is ‘a magnificent, wonderful fiction’. listen to ‘David Starkey on Wolf Hall’ on audioBoom But if Oxford has taught me one thing, it’s that all the best history is. Starkey is a Cambridge man, and maybe they do things differently there. But any perceptive Oxford undergraduate will soon realise that a little bit of fiction is the surest way to a First. What the admissions material opaquely describes as ‘historical imagination’ turns out to be an irregular verb: I imagine, you pervert the

Frances Wilson

Muriel and Nellie: two radical Christians build Jerusalem in London’s East End

This is the tale of Muriel Lester, once famous pacifist and social reformer, and Nellie Dowell, her invisible friend. Nellie Dowell is invisible in the sense that Claire Tomalin described Nelly Ternan in The Invisible Woman. While Ternan, the mistress of Charles Dickens, simply ‘vanished into thin air’, Nellie Dowell, who may or may not have been the mistress of Muriel, trod so lightly on the ground that she left barely a footprint behind her. Muriel Lester, the daughter of a Baptist shipbuilder with progressive ideas, has been the subject of several books already, including Vera Brittain’s The Rebel Passion: A Short History of Some Pioneer Peacemakers. Born in 1885,

Thursday

Tom Holland

Tom Holland’s diary: Fighting jihadism with Mohammed, and bowling the Crown Prince of Udaipur

As weather bombs brew in the north Atlantic, I’m roughing it by heading off to Rajasthan, and the literary festival where you are most likely to be greeted by an elephant. The life of a writer is rarely glamorous, but for one week in January — should an invitation to Jaipur be forthcoming — it decidedly is. The festival is to India what a Richard Curtis film is to London: a fusion of all the fondest stereotypes that foreigners have of a place. The talks, which run the gamut from the Mahabharata to the future of the novel, are pure literary masala. The parties are visions of perfumed candles, shimmering

Thursday

Nick Cohen

How long will it be before the climate forces us to change?

This time last year, homeowners in Oxfordshire and Berkshire were recovering after storms had brought down power lines and blocked roads. Soon, power cuts were the least of their problems. The Thames flooded. In the south-west, the emergency services evacuated the Somerset Levels, and the sea wall at Dawlish in Devon collapsed — cutting the rail line to Cornwall. Political Britain burst its banks. Ed Miliband demanded action. David Cameron convened emergency committees. TV reporters brought us urgent reports as water lapped their boots, while newspaper correspondents named the guilty men. As in twenty20 cricket, you enjoy a quick intense hit with 24/7 news, then move on to the next

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Standing firm is the price of civilisation. Are we still ready to pay it?

Reading Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, as I have recently, you cannot help but be struck by what a perfectly idyllic place rural England must have been (at least for a young man of independent means) in the run-up to the first world war. Sassoon wrote it, of course, in middle age after he’d served his time in the trenches. But none of his wartime experiences are allowed to colour the innocent tone of his fictionalised memoir. As far as his narrator George Sherston is concerned, the bliss is going to last for ever. Because the first world war is now very familiar history, the mistake I think we’re inclined

Thursday

The Spectator

Revealed: five British royals who definitely slept with underage girls

Teen queens The Duke of York denied allegations in court papers that he had had sexual relations with a girl in Florida aged 17, below the age of consent there. Some of his ancestors who might now be in trouble: — King John, who married Isabella of Angoulême in 1200 when she was 12. — Henry VI, who married Margaret of Anjou in 1445 when she was 15. — James I, who married Anne of Denmark in 1589 when she was 14. — Charles I, who married Henrietta Maria of France in 1624 when she was 15. — William III, who married his cousin Mary in 1677 when she was

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

The Krays, Dennis Nilsen – and Chris Grayling: a conversation with Sir Ivan Lawrence QC

I’m standing with Sir Ivan Lawrence QC in a narrow room at his Pump Court chambers, examining an oil painting sent to him from Broadmoor by his former client the late Ronnie Kray. It is a naive depiction of a house in a field which could, at first glance, be the work of a worryingly forceful five-year-old. Yet what it lacks in finesse it makes up for in emphasis: the signature ‘R Kray’ is daubed in thumping capitals. Sir Ivan defended Kray in his 1969 murder trial over the killing of George Cornell in the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel. Cornell, a member of the rival Richardson gang, had reportedly

Alexandra Coghlan

This Winter Journey goes far beyond expectation

You can tell a lot about a book from its bibliography. It’s the non-fiction equivalent of skipping to the final page of a novel. Turn to the end of Ian Bostridge’s Schubert’s Winter Journey — a study of the composer’s celebrated song cycle Winterreise — and you’ll find monographs on ornithology, weeping as a cultural phenomenon and wood sculpture in Renaissance Germany, essays on Samuel Beckett and the history of the mail coach, and the rather forbidding ‘Regulation of floral organ abscission in Arabidopsis thaliana’. Intrigued? Who wouldn’t be? As academic disciplines go, musicology was a slow starter. It took until 1985 for Joseph Kerman to startle academics into looking

Thursday

Matthew Dennison

Elizabeth is about to become Britain’s longest-reigning queen. Here’s how she’s changed monarchy

On 24 September 1896 Queen Victoria was given a present of a paper knife, and expressed herself ‘much delighted’. The handle was set with overlapping gold coins each bearing the portrait of a British monarch. The uppermost coin bore an image of Victoria herself; the one beneath it, that of her grandfather George III. As Victoria recorded in her journal, 23 September 1896 was ‘the day on which I have reigned longer, by a day, than any English sovereign’. She had exceeded George III’s record of 21,644 days on the throne and, unlike her grandfather, remained of sound mind (if you overlook her taste in interior decoration and her views

Nigel Jones

Game of thrones: five kings spanning five centuries launch a new series on royalty

It is a strange paradox of our egalitarian age that a progressive publisher like Penguin should commission — at considerable expense, since the series editor Simon Winder has netted some top academic authors — brief lives of all 44 English, and later British, monarchs, from Athelstan to his distant descendent, our own Queen Elizabeth. The 45th book in the series is devoted to our sole non-royal ruler, Oliver Cromwell. The biographies — each costing £10.99 — though not exactly ‘potted’, are necessarily squeezed by space — none is longer than 150 pages — into extended essays that can be comfortably devoured in a couple of hours; ideal for a railway

Christopher Caldwell

Bob Dylan and the illusion of modern times

I was talking the other day to a young woman who knows a lot about the history of rock. We shared an enthusiasm for Bob Dylan’s later work — especially Blood on the Tracks (1975). As we talked, it occurred to me that Dylan recorded this ‘late’ effort 40 years ago, only 13 years into his career. So why do we treat it as belonging more to our time than, say, his folk ballads from the early 1960s? Some baby-boomer journalist must have decided around 1970 that something Dylan did in 1965 or 1966 — maybe his switch to electric instruments or his motorcycle accident — marked a critical break

Tuesday

Andrew Roberts

The Queen’s achievement

There will be much reason to celebrate Her Majesty the Queen becoming the longest-reigning monarch in British history. Although it has been well over a century since monarchs have had regular, direct, significant influence on political decision-making in Britain, the influence the Queen has on the tone, values and sense of identity of the nation is still profound. And even politically she can make subterranean waves if she wants; her enjoining of the Scots to ‘think very carefully’ before casting their ballots in the independence referendum was taken as implying that she was opposed to it. (Rightly, it seemed, when David Cameron’s remark about her ‘purring’ with satisfaction at the

Thursday

The Spectator

When a cricket ball cost Britain an heir to the throne

A fatal shot The sad death of Australian batsman Philip Hughes was a reminder that a cricket ball can kill. A blow on the cricket field may even have cost us an heir to the throne. — One of the earliest suspected victims was Frederick, Prince of Wales, the son of George II, who is first recorded as having played cricket in 1733 when he put up a team against Sir William Gage, in a match played on Mouley Hurst, Surrey. — In 1751, a few weeks after his 44th birthday, he was said to be suffering from an abscess in the chest caused by a blow by a cricket

Matthew Walther

What makes mankind behave so atrociously? Ian Buruma and Joanna Bourke investigate

The first interaction between two men recorded in the Bible involves a murder. In the earliest classic of English literature, one of the murderer’s descendants has his arm ripped from its socket by a young warrior who celebrates his gruesome victory by drinking himself blotto; the next day, our hero wakes up (not hungover, apparently) and kills his opponent’s mother. Not my cup of tea, Beowulf, or, perhaps, yours. But this is what literature was like until the 18th century or so, when the stakes were lowered and people began writing about inheritances, bishoprics and low-key adultery. Ian Buruma is interested in the other, older kind of story because, as

Thursday

Graham Robb

Is France now the sick man of Europe? It is if it’s taking Eric Zemmour seriously

For the Figaro journalist and TV commentator Eric Zemmour, whose Le Suicide français has been topping the bestseller lists in France, France is ‘the sick man of Europe’. The land of liberty was once admired by the whole world. Then came May ’68, feminism, immigration, consumerism and homosexuality. On the surface, nothing has changed; espressos are still being plonked down on zinc counters, and ‘the legs of Parisian women still turn heads’. But ‘the soul has gone’. Gays and Muslims are taking over, and France is ‘dissolving in the icy waters of individualism and self-hatred’. The blurb calls Le Suicide français an ‘analyse’, but there is nothing analytical about it.

Wednesday

Fleur Macdonald

Ever wondered what Joan of Arc’s breasts were like? Wonder no more

Just as she arrived a bit late to the Hundred Years War – about three quarters of the way through – Joan of Arc takes a while to appear in historian Helen Castor’s biography. In fact she only turns up, with a small band of men, on page 86 in Chinon, the bolt hole of the king, when he’s apparently on the verge of quitting France because it had all got too much. Given that he was originally third in line, had been in opposition to his slightly simple father, Charles VI, le bien-aimé, and was now fighting his mother, Henry V of England, as well as the Burgundians who had

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Mindfulness, addiction, and dinner with Richard Nixon

Mind games Sir: I hope that people are not unduly put off by Melanie McDonagh’s misrepresentation of mindfulness as a cop-out for navel-gazers who lack the moral fibre to engage in ‘proper’ religion (‘The cult of mindfulness’, 1 November). She describes it as a ‘practice of self-obsession’, but it is the opposite: it creates a space in which the self can be seen for what it is as it hops around, generating superfluous judgments. You begin to obsess less about what your ‘self’ compulsively comes up with, and to approach life from a more anchored perspective. May I invite those who think that sounds bogus and flaky to engage in

Dot Wordsworth

Should ‘suicide’ mean pig-killing?

There was a marvellous man in Shakespeare’s day known as John Smyth the Sebaptist. ‘In an act so deeply shocking as to be denied by Baptist historians for two and a half centuries,’ Stephen Wright, the expert on separatist clergy wrote, ‘he rebaptised first himself and then his followers, and set out his new views in The Character of the Beast (1610).’ His former confederate Richard Bernard fired a counterblast in that year showing (to his own satisfaction) that ‘the Church of England is Apostolicall, the Separation Schismaticall’. Reading a word like sebaptist we take the prefix se- to indicate a reflexive act, a self-baptism, as we would if reading

Victor Sebestyen

What went so wrong for Vaclav Havel?

The unforgettable moment a quarter of a century ago when the Berlin Wall came down was the most vivid drama in that dizzying year of revolutions in 1989 when the Soviet empire fell to its knees. But another event a month later and 250 miles away in Prague was equally poignant. As the playwright/philosopher Václav Havel was sworn in as president of Czechoslovakia and declared in one of the most moving speeches I have heard, ‘Citizens, your government has returned to you’, it was clear that if history hadn’t exactly come to an end, the world had changed utterly. In his own country Havel’s reputation has nosedived since those giddy

Patrick Skene-Catling

Blue Note’s 75 years of hot jazz

This is a big book, a monumental text with 800 illustrations, 400 of them in colour, to be contemplated more easily on a lectern than in bed, celebrating the 75-year history of the greatest record company devoted solely to the variegated music called jazz. Blue Note Records, with headquarters in Manhattan, originated in the romantic imagination of a privileged adolescent, a Jewish architect’s son (the Jewishness was significant), who was born and brought up in Christopher Isherwood’s neighbourhood in Berlin, which regarded itself, with justification, as Europe’s capital of jazz in the hedonistic heyday of the Weimar republic. Alfred Lion precociously consorted with the city’s artists, musicians and all-round bohemian