History

Thursday

John Preston

Queen Victoria, by Matthew Dennison – review

When Prince Albert died in 1861, aged 42, Queen Victoria, after briefly losing the use of her legs, ordered that every room and corridor in Windsor Castle should be draped in black crepe. As a result, the country’s entire stock of black crepe was exhausted in a single week. One of the key factors of Victoria’s reign for Michael Dennison is that it was — not always consciously — a ‘performance monarchy’, in which the Queen sat in carefully fashioned stage-sets at Windsor, Balmoral or Osborne being discreetly ogled by the populace. This public posturing helped gloss over Victoria’s ‘dizzying’ contradictions, and the purpose of this short biography is to

Jane Ridley

What caused the first world war?

The centenary of August 1914 is still almost a year away, but the tsunami of first-world-war books has already begun. The government tells us that 1914 must be commemorated, not celebrated, and ministers worry about British triumphalism upsetting the Germans. But the debate about Germany’s responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914 won’t go away. Historians are divided into those who blame Germany — John Rohl, Max Hastings — and those who point the finger at someone else, such as Serbia (Christopher Clarke) or Russia (Sean McMeekin) or even Britain (Niall Ferguson). The blame game is of course conceptually flawed. The international system in 1914 was seriously dysfunctional. The

Thursday

Victoria Glendinning

Anorexia, addiction, child-swapping — the Lake Poets would have alarmed social services

The last time the general reader was inveigled into the domestic intensities of the Wordsworth circle was by Frances Wilson in The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth. She engaged delicately with Dorothy’s inordinate love for her younger brother William, and seemed to think her passionate attachment was romantic and sentimental rather than sexual — though there are 50 shades of grey between the one and the other, and honestly, it doesn’t matter. Katie Waldegrave, in her riveting family saga The Poets’ Daughters, is not much concerned with that anyway. Her focus is on what happened to Wordsworth’s daughter Dora, the second of his five children, and Coleridge’s youngest, Sara. There were

Guido Fawkes

Guido Fawkes to Damian McBride: Who’s spinning now?

When Gordon Brown eventually became aware that his Downing Street was about to be engulfed in the Smeargate scandal, he called Damian McBride to try to get to the bottom of the story. The latter recounts the conversation verbatim in Power Trip, his tell-all book dedicated ‘to Gordon, the greatest man I ever met’. Brown says: ‘OK, Damian, I need your word that you will tell me the truth. If the years we’ve worked together mean anything, I need your absolute word.’ ‘Yep, of course,’ McBride replies solemnly, ‘I give you my word, I promise I’ll tell the truth.’ ‘Right,’ says Brown, ‘firstly, is there anyone else in No. 10

Peter J. Conradi

Meeting the Enemy, by Richard Van Emden; 1914, by Allan Mallinson – review

The Great War was an obscene and futile conflict laying waste a generation and toppling emperors. Yet here are two books that situate the horrors of trench warfare within a much larger perspective. One argues that the war had a forgotten ‘human face’. The other that it might all have had a very different outcome. Henry James described  the 1914 plunge of civilisation into blood and darkness as ‘too tragic for any words’ — and about tragedy there is always some air of inevitability, of sailing Titanic-like towards a foredoomed catastrophe. This air of unstoppable fatality has solidified over the intervening century. During the famous 1914 Christmas truce the Tommies

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ is still upsetting the complacent

It is twenty years since Samuel Huntington’s essay ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ was first published in Foreign Affairs. On Monday night I took part in a discussion on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves about the article (and the resulting book) which turned oddly nasty. I have always been a qualified admirer of Huntington’s most famous work (‘qualified’ because like most people who have read the book I admire its range and grasp while disagreeing with certain of its conclusions). But broadly admire it or not, it appears to be a difficult work to discuss. This is largely because it suffers the double-bind of being misunderstood by people who have not read it. Nine

Saturday

Bobby Friedman

A history of spinners, from Robert Walpole to Damian McBride and Andy Coulson

A full colour Andy Coulson looms ominously behind a black and white David Cameron on the front cover of Andrew Blick and George Jones’s book on aides to the Prime Minister. In a week when another former prime ministerial adviser, Damian McBride, has been spilling the beans on life behind the scenes of Gordon Brown’s government, the story of the apparatchiks who work in the shadows of the people in power seems ripe for revelation. However, if this makes you think that the text is going to be filled with juicy disclosures about today’s politics then, after a compelling first chapter detailing the workings of Cameron’s Downing Street, you will

Friday

Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week | 27 September 2013

When you hear the words ‘English art’, there are very few people who would immediately think of embroidery. As Dan Jones said when he was asked if he would like to present a programme about ‘the golden age’ of English embroidery, ‘Embroidery? What, like sewing?’ But accept the offer he did, and found that there’s a lot more to embroidery, as an art form, than ‘just’ sewing. In this week’s magazine he writes about everything he learnt about ‘one of English history’s most underappreciated art forms’. Here’s a clip from one of the previous ‘Fabric of Britain’ programmes – this one on knitting. Downton Abbey has returned to our screens

Thursday

Dan Jones

English embroidery: the forgotten wonder of the medieval world

Think of an art at which the English have excelled and I doubt you would come up with the word ‘embroidery’. As I muttered when my agent asked whether I should like to make a film for BBC4 about the golden age of this forgotten but brilliant native art form: ‘Embroidery? What, like sewing?’ But no, not like sewing. Or, actually, only a little bit. During the ‘high’ Middle Ages, English embroidery was one of the most desired and costly art forms in Europe. It was known as opus anglicanum or ‘the work of the English’ — a generic name that instantly conjured notions of craftsmanship, beauty, luxury and expense

Richard Davenporthines

Colette’s France, by Jane Gilmour – review

Monstrous innocence’ was the ruling quality that Colette claimed in both her life and books. Protesting her artless authenticity, she was sly in devising her newspaper celebrity and ruthless in imposing her personal myths. She posed as provincial ingénue, wide-eyed young wife of the Paris belle époque, scandalous lesbian, risqué music-hall performer, novelist of prodigious output, theatre reviewer, beautician, seducer, the most feline of cat-lovers and, ultimately, garlanded literary lioness. Yet her phoniness should not deter people from reading her books. Although most of her work resembled an imaginary autobiography, it was never self-obsessed or constricting. On the contrary, she used her fictionalised self as the centrepiece of a worldly

Thursday

Peter Parker

Pine by Laura Mason; Lily, by Marcia Reiss – review

After the success of their animal series of monographs, Reaktion Books have had the clever idea of doing something similar for plants. Writers are commissioned to investigate the botanical, historical, social and cultural aspects of individual plants, with volumes on oak and geranium already published, and yew, bamboo, willow, palm and orchid forthcoming. The structure and content of the books appears to be left up to the writers, but all the volumes combine scholarship with lively anecdote and are beautifully and generously illustrated. While lilies seem an obviously attractive choice for such a series, who would have thought conifers could be so interesting? Laura Mason’s Pine starts with a solid

Miranda Seymour

Hanns and Rudolf, by Thomas Harding – review

Confronted by this lavishly endorsed book — ‘compelling’ (David Lodge), ‘gripping’(John le Carré),‘thrilling’ (Jonathan Freedland) — I felt depressed. Two weeks ago, the New York Times’s savvy London correspondent accused the British of being obsessed with the Nazis. This might appear a case of pots and kettles: not for nothing did America’s widely watched History Channel become known as the Hitler Channel. Nevertheless, Sarah Lyall had made a valid point. A stupefying 830 books on the Third Reich were published in the UK in 2010 and — although no figures are yet available for 2013 — a reduction any time soon seems unlikely. Germany’s history of genocide is unforgivable. Still,

Selina Hastings

Stage Blood, by Michael Blakemore – review

Stage Blood, as its title suggests, is as full of vitriol, back-stabbing and conspiracy as any Jacobean tragedy. In this sequel to Arguments with England, his superb first volume of memoirs, Michael Blakemore presents us with an enthralling account of his five embattled years as an associate director of the National Theatre. When in 1970 Blakemore was offered the position by Laurence Olivier, he had a distinguished career as an actor behind him and was already well-established as a successful director.  It was an exciting time: the National was still in formation, several years away from moving into its permanent home on the South Bank; and Olivier was not only

Brian Sewell

Bizarre Cars, by Keith Ray – review

My various Oxford dictionaries define bizarre as eccentric, whimsical, odd, grotesque, fantastic, mixed in style and half-barbaric. By so many tokens, and with the casuistry of both Calvinist and Jesuit, it has been possible for the author of this pretty little Christmas-stocking book to include as bizarre any vehicle he chooses, including motorcycles and the micro-cars that made motoring possible after the defeat of Germany in 1945. Without these categories, a bus-cum-truck-cum-tractor,variations on the Hummer and the stretched limousine, and too many excursions into the bizarrerie of car names that in other languages have meanings genital and scatalogical, this book would be very thin. Yet even the vehicles that are

Petronella Wyatt

Royal Marriage Secrets, by John Ashdown-Hill – review

My brother Pericles Wyatt, as my father liked to say, is by blood the rightful king of England, the nephew of Richard III in the 18th generation, and as such the senior surviving Plantagenet. Richard was crowned king of England on 6 July 1483. It was described at the time as a joyous occasion. Little did anyone present imagine that it would become an event of rancorous controversy, for never has it been so true, sadly for my own family, that history is written by the winners. Just two years later, an exiled adventurer called Henry Tudor took Richard’s life and crown at Bosworth Field and unleashed an assault of

Ferdinand Mount

Isaac & Isaiah, by David Caute – review

The scene is the common room of All Souls College, Oxford, in the first week of March 1963. It is the idle half-hour after lunch when fellows slump into armchairs and gaze out of the window at the sparrows in the Fellows’ Garden. David Caute, a young first-class mind in his mid-twenties, is buttonholed by the revered figure of Sir Isaiah Berlin. What did Caute think of Isaac Deustcher? Did he admire him, as so many young scholars on the left did? Well, Caute replied cautiously, he knew Deutscher’s book on Stalin and his trilogy on Trotsky.  ‘Quite sufficient.’ And Berlin bounded off into one of his rapid-fire bombardments: there

Paul Johnson

The Story of the Jews, by Simon Schama – review

The recorder of early Jewish history has two sources of evidence. One is the Bible. Its centrality was brought home to me by David Ben-Gurion when I went to see him in Jerusalem in 1957. He had a big Bible on his desk, and banged it repeatedly with his fist: There, it’s all there, the past, present and future of the Jewish people. God? Who knows God? Can you believe in someone you don’t know? But I believe in the Bible. [Bang, bang.] The Bible is a fact. [Bang.] A record and a prophecy. [Bang.] It’s all there, Mr Johnson. Read your Bible, understand your Bible, and you won’t go

Thursday

Andro Linklater

Uncle Bill, by Russell Miller – review

Given the outcome of recent military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is pertinent to look for one particular quality in our senior commander: honesty. In other words, after blaming vainglorious politicians for precipitating us into war without adequate preparation or resources, it is reasonable to ask, how capable are our generals of admitting their own mistakes? Their persistence in two failed strategies — the application of Northern Ireland peace-keeping tactics to Basra and the dispersal of troops among forward posts in Helmand — does not suggest any culture of mea culpa, and ruthless self-examination has not been a distinguishing feature of the annual lectures delivered by the Chiefs of

Jasper Becker

The Tragedy of Liberation, by Frank Dikötter – review

The historian of China Frank Dikötter has taken a sledgehammer to demolish perhaps the last remaining shibboleth of modern Chinese history. This is the notion, propagated in countless books and documentaries, that Mao’s regime started off well, deservedly coming to power on a wave of popular support and successfully tackling the evils left behind by the corrupt and incompetent Nationalists. Then, at the end of the 1950s, it all started to go wrong. There were terrible natural disasters, followed by famine; and, seemingly unaccountably, the brotherhood of brave revolutionaries fell out, creating the bloodbath of the Cultural Revolution. This is the version still served up to A-level students in Britain.

Owen Bennett-Jones

Narcoland, by Anabel Hernandez – review

It is by now surely beyond doubt that those governments committed to fighting the war on drugs — and on paper that’s all of them — face a total rout. To understand the scale of the defeat, all you need to know is that Barack Obama and David Cameron have both been unable to deny that they were once users. The US spends more than a billion dollars a year on international narcotics control and as a result, as a US official in Colombia once told me, has forced up the price of a gram of cocaine in New York by just a few dollars. That must have put drugs