History

Friday

Steerpike

French baiting from the PM?

The French media might prostrate themselves before their own leaders; but they are a little more adventurous with ours. Le Figaro reports that the original plan for today’s Anglo-French Summit at RAF Brize Norton, followed by a pub lunch, was to have been a far grander affair. Hollande was to be invited to Cameron’s constituency and then on to nearby Blenheim Palace. But French officials reportedly pointed out that the Duke of Marlborough’s home was so named in honour of his ancestor’s crushing defeat of the Franco-Bavarian army at Blenheim in 1704. The French suffered 30,000 casualties and the battle was a turning point in the War of the Spanish

Thursday

Blair Worden

What Englishmen learnt from Europe

The pattern of foreign travel by wealthy young Englishmen that became known as the Grand Tour began in the Renaissance and matured in the 17th century. In its origins it was a training for statesmanship. The state’s takeover of the church, which had done so much of the state’s official business, enlarged the employment opportunities of the nobility and gentry. So did the expansion of the government’s administrative resources and ambitions. But with the opportunities came challenges. Monarchs needed their advisers and officials and diplomats to be skilled and knowledgeable. So noblemen and gentlemen urged their sons to look beyond the accustomed pleasures of the hunting field and get down

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Aid, Arabs and how to spot a gentleman

The battle over aid Sir: Why Nations Fail, the book rightly lauded in The Spectator (‘Why aid fails’, 25 January), is one of the inspirations for many of the changes this government has made in international development policy. Those changes can best be described as driving value for money through the system, tackling conflict and instability, and building prosperity. Bringing together defence, diplomacy and development — not least through the mechanism of the National Security Council — has made a significant difference to the success of British development policy. Buried in the article is the sentence: ‘We do not argue for its [the aid budget’s] reduction.’ Our development policy is

Thursday

Patrick Skene-Catling

The two people who brought us The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck (1902–1968), an ardent propagandist for the exploited underdogs of the Great Depression, had barely enough money for subsistence during the years he spent preparing and writing The Grapes of Wrath, the protest novel regarded as his masterpiece. It made him a Nobel laureate and a very rich man. The Nobel committee praised his ‘realistic and imaginative writing, combining . . . sympathetic humour and keen social perception’. Seventy-four years after first publication, the book still sells more than 100,000 copies a year. In his Nobel acceptance speech in 1962, Steinbeck said that ‘a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor

Florence King

America’s war on sleep

 Fredericksburg, Virginia Ask an American to name the author of the line ‘Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care’, and he will promptly reply ‘Shakespeare’. It’s pure guesswork but we always credit the Bard with anything that sounds like a literary quotation, so he inadvertently gets it right. But if you recite the rest of the passage and ask what it means you will draw a blank. The American mind will not spark until it hears ‘Macbeth hath murdered sleep’, which sets off a cascading display of audience-identification fireworks, and visions of a new American production in which Macbeth is renamed Big Thane and cast as the hero

Thursday

Harriet Sergeant

Is there a way to live without economic growth? 

During Japan’s lost decade in the 1990s I found myself handing out rice balls to Tokyo’s homeless on the banks of the Sumida river. The former salary men — it was always men — slept in cardboard boxes the size of coffins. I peered into one. Its owner had neatly arranged his last few possessions. Crockery, two wash rags and a blanket were all emblazoned with the designer logos I associated with Japan’s boom years when I had lived in Tokyo. They had washed up like artefacts from another age in this unlikely setting. They signalled more than anything else to me that Japan’s economic miracle was well and truly

Vernon Bogdanor

The Spectator book review that brought down Macmillan’s government

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_January_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Vernon Bogdanor discuss Iain Macleod’s ‘What Happened’ article” startat=1460] Listen [/audioplayer]Fifty years ago this week, a cover story in The Spectator helped to bring down a Conservative government. It was called ‘The Tory Leadership’ and was written by the editor, Iain Macleod, who had been a senior minister in Harold Macmillan’s government. Purporting to be the review of a book by Randolph Churchill on how Lord Home had ‘emerged’ in October 1963 as Macmillan’s successor, it claimed that Macmillan had fixed the succession so as to scupper the chances of the natural candidate, R.A. Butler, who had been deputy prime minister in all but name. In those days,

Stephen Robinson

Harry Shearer on bringing out Richard Nixon’s feminine side

Hollywood tends to treat Richard Nixon as an oafish B-movie villain, so it is ambitious and original of Harry Shearer to try to convince a British audience of the very feminine side of the 37th American president. As a veteran comedy actor and the ‘voice’ of several of the Simpsons cartoon characters — including Mr Burns, Smithers, and Ned Flanders — Shearer has the vocal range to get almost anyone right if he puts his mind to it. But voice work was not the main challenge in the forthcoming Sky Arts drama. Shearer is more intrigued by the physical aspects of the central role in Nixon’s the One, which he

Thursday

William Astor

William Astor: My father, his swimming pool and the Profumo scandal

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_9_January_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Richard Davenport-Hines discusses the Profumo affair’s enduring appeal”] Listen [/audioplayer]Christine Keeler and Jack Profumo might never have met in the swimming pool at Cliveden if it had not been for a filly called Ambiguity. As children, growing up at Cliveden, we all swam in the Thames. In the summer, the river was cold, dark and full of sludge, but my grandmother Nancy Astor, a devout Christian Scientist, thought it good for us. Then Ambiguity, my father’s filly, won the Oaks and with the prize money a heated swimming pool was built — and the rest, as they say, is history. Or Andrew Lloyd Webber’s theatrical version of history,

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

How we lost the seasons

So, what are you doing with your Christmas decorations? Still up? Did the tree get put out on 2 January? Maybe you’re holding out until the Twelfth Day, on the basis that it’s bad luck to have the decorations up after that? Or are you going out on a limb and keeping your holly, bay and ivy up until 2 February, Candlemas? This last is in fact the correct answer for traditionalists; prior to Victorian times, people kept the Christmas season going, along with the greenery, right up until Candlemas. Mind you, given that Christmas trees only caught on with Prince Albert, pre-Victorians didn’t have the problem of pine needles

Ed West Ed West

Economists – the scourge of mankind

Are there any disciplines on earth as hyped-up and overrated as economics? Every subject depends to some extent on others; you can’t, for example, understand history without a bit of geography or human biology, and you can’t master either of those without a bit of chemistry, for different reasons. The same goes for all disciplines – except, for some reason, economics, where the opinion of the experts seems to count for a great deal in discussions where their field is only one aspect. The great example of this was the euro, which was promoted by the great and the good of the dismal science as a brilliant idea because, of

Thursday

Hugh Cecil

To see how good Journey’s End is, just look at who it’s offended

‘You have no idea,’ wrote the publisher Ralph Hodder-Williams in 1929 to one of his authors, what terrible offence Journey’s End has given — and terrible pain too, which is a great deal more important. I think you will agree that the chronic alcoholic was extraordinarily rare. He was referring to R.C. Sherriff’s controversial tragedy of the trenches, which was then, 11 years after the war, enjoying an unexpected box-office success in the West End, where it played for nearly 600 performances. Its success came as a surprise, not only because Sherriff (1896–1975) was an unknown writer, and exclusively male war plays were not particularly popular, but also because audiences

Tobias Grey

What took Francis Mitterrand to the top?

Of a dashing political rival, François Mitterrand once remarked: He was more intelligent than I was, he thought faster than I did, he was more seductive to women. In some ways, he gave me a complex. But he lacked perseverance. The man of whom Mitterrand spoke was a certain Félix Gaillard, whose claim to fame during the Fourth Republic was to become France’s youngest ever prime minister at the age of 38. He lasted barely five months in the job (1957–58) and was never heard of again. As Philip Short — who has previously written works on Mao and Pol Pot — makes mordantly clear in his well-rounded, albeit meandering

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

A book that’s inspired by a movie (for a change)

Books become films every day of the week; more rarely does someone feel inspired to write a book after seeing a film. Peter Conradi’s Hot Dogs And Cocktails tells the story of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth’s visit to North America in the summer of 1939 and specifically the couple of days they spent at President Roosevelt’s country retreat at Hyde Park on Hudson. In the film of that name, Bill Murray played FDR with a characteristic twinkle in his eye, and the story was fleshed out with a did-they-or-didn’t-they illicit romance with his distant cousin, played by Laura Linney. For reasons of professional integrity Conradi can’t play quite

Hugh Rathcavan

The Last Knight, by Robert O’Byrne – review

I have to declare an interest: for many years the Knight and I were the closest of friends until a sequence of his unpredictable and volcanic rages drove us apart. Robert O’Byrne explains how the Knight suffered for most of his life from the illness and strong medication of manic depression. It is a tribute to him that I never knew of this medical diagnosis until much later and that, despite it, he achieved so much in his life, drawing international acclaim to Irish pictures, architecture and furniture and producing so many learned books on their quality and beauty. In fact there is a photograph in this book of the

Thursday

Christopher Booker

Old England died in 1963

There is no better measure of the pivotal importance of 1963 than to recall what Britain was like in the early 1950s, as we slowly emerged from the shadows of the second world war. The great Labour experiment of 1945 had petered out in a grim slog through years of austerity and rationing. With Winston Churchill back in No. 10, life had begun to crawl back to ‘normality’. Conservative values ruled: respect for tradition, discipline and authority. The old class structure still stood. No extramarital sex or homosexuality. In the cinema we were entertained by cosy Ealing comedies and films portraying the ‘stiff upper lip’ spirit which had won the

Christopher Booker

Profumo. Chatterley. The Beatles. 1963 was the year old England died

Shortly before his death, David Frost rang to ask me to take part in a radio series he was making to mark the 50th anniversary of ‘the year, Chris, that I know is closest to your heart, 1963’. This was not because 1963 was the year when he and I worked together on the BBC satire show That Was The Week That Was (TW3), which overnight made Frost a television superstar. It was because he remembered the importance I had given to the events of that year in The Neophiliacs, a book I wrote long ago analysing the tidal wave of change which swept through British life in the 1950s

Harry Mount

The men who demolished Victorian Britain

Anyone with a passing interest in old British buildings must get angry at the horrors inflicted on our town centres over the last half-century or so. Gavin Stamp is wonderfully, amusingly, movingly angry. And he has been ever since the early 1960s when, as a boy at Dulwich College, he saw workmen hack off the stiff-leaf column capitals in the school cloisters. He reserves particular rage for that ‘cynical, philistine Whig’ Harold Macmillan for murdering the Euston Arch. Not that Stamp’s a ranting fogey, reserving his anger only for the demolition of Victorian buildings. A former chairman of the Twentieth Century Society, he is deeply upset by the demolition of

Ian Shircore

The wounded Kennedy – and the people who gave him strength

Ten years ago, a determined historian transformed our picture of John F. Kennedy. Robert Dallek had finally got his hands on the president’s medical records and discovered just how big a part JFK’s constant health problems played in his life. Instead of a young, fit, athletic leader, Dallek revealed a man racked with pain, suffering from Addison’s disease and excruciating spinal damage and swallowing a daily pharmacy of drugs and potions. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, when his finger hovered over the nuclear button, he was pumped full of steroids and antibiotics, amphetamines and testosterone, ritalin and sleeping pills. He had been given the last rites on three

Tuesday

Alex Massie

John F Kennedy was one of the nastiest presidents in American history

The fiftieth anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination is, of course, an occasion for a fresh outbreak of the virulent hagiography that has corrupted the memory of his actual record. The New York Times, a paper that should know better by now, published an article this week that repeated the old lie that somehow right-wing hysterics in Texas were the people really responsible for Kennedy’s murder. A theory inconvenienced only by the fact Lee Harvey Oswald was a pro-Castro leftist. But never mind that. Better to reframe the assassination as a part of America’s culture wars. And we know who the guilty men are in those, don’t we? American history is a