History

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

Tuesday

Tom Chivers

The idiot diet – nonsense vs common sense in ‘Paleo’ nutrition

Looking for real power? Get a jump-start on the future of global fuel at The Spectator’s energy conference on 1 December. Tickets are still available here. There’s a great New Yorker cartoon – two cavemen, sitting in a cave, looking suitably homo habilis or something, all sloping foreheads and protruding jaw. The caption reads: ‘Something’s just not right – our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past thirty.’ I think of it whenever someone trots out a living-close-to-the-soil, modern-lives-are-killing-us mantra about how we should stop eating cooked food or only wear natural fibres or whatever. Humans

Friday

Molly Guinness

Liberate women…from the rotten dictatorial group-think of ‘feminism’

Good on David Cameron for refusing to wear that hideous T-shirt. Feminists these days spend an awful lot of time telling people what to think and what to wear. It’s easy to forget the heady days of feminism’s innocence, when it lobbied for freedom, the freedom for women to operate telegraphs, for example. The deft fingers of women were to set in action the wires of the telegraph with as much swift dexterity as they do those of the piano. They were to write messages about iron and steel and stocks and shares with the same easy celerity that they corresponded about the last new ribbon or baby’s first tooth.

Tuesday

Camilla Swift

Save Isis (the dog on Downton Abbey… not the terrorists in Iraq and Syria)

Downton Abbey fans are on high alert that something drastic might be about to happen to the loyal labrador of the house, ‘Isis’. On this week’s episode she was pointed out as looking ‘terribly listless’, with Lord Grantham subsequently agreeing to have the vet check her out. Surely this can’t have anything to do with her name? After all, it would be slightly unfair for poor old Isis to suffer simply because of a misfortune of nomenclature. What has she ever done to deserve an untimely death, save follow Lord Grantham devotedly around Downton? Isis’s predecessor was, after all, named Pharoah, so she continues the pyramidic scheme. If the Downton

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

What are 16-year-olds supposed to learn by making posters?

My niece, Lara, 15, has a mind like a surgical blade. On any subject, from calculus to The X Factor, she finds the heart of the issue and dissects it with alarming ease. Lara makes mincemeat of homework, trailing A grades, which is why it was so odd to find her stumped two weeks ago. The trouble was with her English language GCSE. As part of her coursework (controlled assessment) she had to comment on a pamphlet, produced by a charity, about volunteering. On the cover of the pamphlet was a slogan in a pink circle, and Lara’s dilemma was this. She said: I’ll get points if I write that

Peregrine Worsthorne

Bourbon from Bush, envy from Nixon… and running into Herbert Hoover: encounters with eight presidents

I feel a bit of a fraud writing about the ‘presidents I knew’, since journalists do not really get to know the great figures they interview or shake hands with. Indeed the relationship between journalist and great personage is about as false as any relationship can be, since each is trying to make use of the other. So in all likelihood my dreamed relationship with President Herbert Hoover — which began and ended in 1933 when I was aged 11 and only lasted for about a minute — came nearer to being a genuine human relationship than all the other journalistic ones later — which included Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower,

Saturday

Molly Guinness

Keep calm and address Ebola: a brief history of pandemics at The Spectator

Ebola clinics in many parts of West Africa are full, so more and more people are being told to stay at home and take Paracetamol and fluids if they become infected. It means if someone in your family gets Ebola, you all have to stay in the house, which is effectively a death sentence. At the moment, the disease is killing 70 per cent of the people it infects, but that’s likely to go up. People who need other medical treatment can’t get it, and in Sierra Leone 40 per cent of farmland has been abandoned. Western governments are building secure military encampments for health workers, fearing civil unrest and

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

All is fair in football, war and the former Yugoslavia – even Albanian mini-drones

The whole notion that sport is, like the EU, an alternative to war, took a bit of a battering at the Euro 2016 qualifier in Belgrade’s Partizan stadium last night. The match had to be called off after 40 minutes when a small drone, bearing the flag of greater Albania (with, presumably, the flag of Serbia as an Ottoman province in the corner) flew over everyone’s heads. One of the Serbian players, Stefan Mitrovic, made a grab at it, some Albanian players tried to rescue it and the most fabulous melee ensued. The brother of the Albanian prime minister, Olsi Rama, was initially arrested in the VIP box; I gather he

Saturday

Molly Guinness

Clacton to Ukip, Britain’s anti-politics were long in the making

Talking to people in Clacton-on-Sea this week, there was a sense that, as much as they thought there were too many people in Britain, they felt politicians had it too easy. Over and over again people told me that MPs in Westminster didn’t understand working people. Politics is becoming less about policy and more about empathy; voters just don’t want to be ruled by aliens. In a famous article in 1955, Henry Fairlie described the chasm between the aliens and normal people: I have several times suggested that what I call the ‘Establishment’ in this country is today more powerful than ever before. By the ‘Establishment’ I do not mean only the

Thursday

Harry Mount

Napoleon’s birthplace feels more Italian than French

Napoleon’s birthplace, Casa Buona-parte, in Ajaccio, Corsica’s capital, is pretty grand. It has high ceilings, generous, silk-lined rooms and a gallery that could double as a mini-ballroom. The house fits Napoleon’s upper-middle-class roots, as the son of a lawyer and Corsica’s representative to the court of Louis XVI. But the odd thing is, the home town of the world’s most famous Frenchman doesn’t feel very French. Corsica is only 14 miles from Sardinia — and 110 miles from the Côte d’Azur. It only became independent from Genoa in the late 18th century and the place names are still a mixture of Italian and the Corsican dialect. Near Bonifacio, road signs

Thursday

Tim Bouverie

What’s that I hear? Francis Fukuyama back-pedalling frantically

The problem with a futuristic thesis — particularly when summarised by a futuristic title — is that it is likely to be thrown back at you in the future. This is the problem that Francis Fukuyama has faced ever since he published his daring and now much derided book, The End of History and the Last Man, in 1992. In it, Fukuyama argued that history had been buried beneath the rubble of the former Berlin Wall and that the teleological process was now at an end: ‘What we may be witnessing… is the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form

Thursday

Blair Worden

Rebellion without a cause: Peter Ackroyd’s curious Civil War

How our perceptions of 17th-century England are dominated by the convulsions of the two decades at its centre! Peter Ackroyd’s book, the third of what have been announced as six volumes of his History of England, covers the period from the accession of James I in 1603 to the overthrow of his grandson James II in 1688. His priority is established by his title and by the facing portraits of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell on the front cover. He gives proportionately much more space to the conflicts of 1640–60 than to events on either side of them. When the reign of James I and the peaceful portion of Charles

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Matter of Scotland: Try, try and try again.

PG Wodehouse, who was only the twentieth century’s greatest English-language novelist, once remarked that there existed just two ways to write: “One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.” I feel something similar about theatre. I can – and do – enjoy a comedy or farce and, blimey, there’s always room for laughter in this – or any other – world. But, in general, I prefer my theatre punishing and draining and liable to leave you exhausted and feeling like the marrow’s been sucked from your bones. I don’t go to

Patrick Allitt

Is America headed for tyranny? It is when the other side’s in charge…

For the last 50 years Americans have been decrying the increase of presidential power whenever the party they oppose is in office.  Republicans hated to see Kennedy and Clinton throwing their weight around, while Democrats deplored the ‘imperial presidency’ of Nixon and Reagan. F.H. Buckley, a Canadian law professor now working in Virginia, explains why presidents have become so powerful. He adds that it’s not just an American problem. Prime ministers in Britain and Canada have also grown more powerful at the expense of their countries’ parliaments, but to a lesser, and less menacing, degree. He argues that American conditions today are very different from those foreseen by the founding

Thursday

Will Nicoll

Siberia beyond the Gulag Archipelago

Larger than Europe and the United States combined, Siberia is an enormous swathe of Russia, spanning seven time zones and occuping 77 per cent of the country’s land mass. Ryszard Kapuscinski describes the gulags which were placed there as being amongst the greatest nightmares of the 20th century — and that image of suffering has tarnished the region irrevocably. In her masterful study of Siberia’s people, Janet M. Hartley, professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that this has not only been a place of torture and starvation. While it has certainly endured miserable times, and is likely to suffer many more, it