History

In Germany in 1923 money was losing its value so fast that the state printing works could not keep up. The work had to be contracted out to 130 different printing firms, all churning out marks with the lifespan of mayflies. Only ten years earlier, the mark had been as good as gold. Then Germany had set out to fight a short war and send the bill to the losers. This had worked well the last time round: after the 1870 war, France had handed over 5 million gold francs, not to mention two provinces. But the 1914 war turned out to be longer and far more expensive, and Germany

Our unrelenting appetite for historical drama is fed by a ceaseless stream of novels and dramatisations – usually, these days, something to do with those naughty Tudors. Perhaps it is how my generation, dosed on pick n’ mix modules and special options (Industrial Revolution or Origins of WW1 anyone?), recovers lost ground. But it is unmediated history taken straight from the page that gives the real jolt. I recently acquired for the Bodleian a journal kept from 1813-1818 by the engraver and antiquary James Basire (1769-1822). His father was the more famous artist, closely associated with William Blake.  Nevertheless, the journal seemed worth having for all the right academic reasons.

It may be that only geological erosion, expected to occur sometime over the next ten million years, will finally remove Gibraltar as a source of friction between Britain and Spain. In the meantime, with a poll showing that nearly two thirds of Spaniards support their government’s current tough line on the territory, David Cameron has again reassured the Rock’s chief minister Fabian Picardo that Britain will always stand up for Gibraltar and safeguard the interests of its people. But while the tension is real and enduring, there is no suggestion on either side that the situation might be resolved by force. Seventy-three years ago, in the autumn of 1940, the

It’s one of the most famous – indeed infamous – episodes in English literary history. In the summer of 1816 Lord Byron took a villa on the banks of Lake Geneva. He was attended by his doctor, John William Polidori, and another nearby house was rented by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, with whom the married Shelley had eloped two years previously, and Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister and Byron’s mistress. The weather was terrible that year – so bad they called it ‘the ‘year without a summer’ – and the party spent most of their time indoors, gathered about the fireplace in Lord Byron’s drawing-room. And it was there,

From Shakespeare’s Richard II, lines spoken by John of Gaunt. This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house Against the envy of less happier lands; This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, this nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Feared be their breed and famous by their birth,

The title of Alwyn W. Turner’s book could deter readers. Even the Hollywood film The Secret Lives of Dentists promised more excitement. John Major sought the creation of a classless society in the 1990s. He confused this with equality of opportunity and social mobility. Efforts to engineer classlessness always end in tears. George Orwell was right: some animals are more equal than others — even in death. Orwell shares an Oxfordshire churchyard with Herbert Asquith. It was an insipid decade when managerialism triumphed over leadership. Ideas and intellectual rigour were kept in check, and institutions were repeatedly assaulted. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this inertia may have been

For the first time in years, I thought of Tony Hancock. In the ‘Blood Donor’ episode of Hancock’s Half Hour, Hancock exits a doctors’ surgery singing the words ‘coughs and sneezes spread diseases, catch the germs in your handkerchief’ to the tune of Deutschland, Deutschland Ueber Alles. I have only seen this clip once or twice, but evidently it made a lasting impression because there it was, in my mind’s ear, on being confronted by a 1940s anti-flu poster at the British Library’s propaganda exhibition. Propaganda: Power and Persuasion features more persuasion than power. Goebbels and Uncle Sam are represented, but do not dominate. Indeed, the curators challenge the notion that propaganda

Amartya Sen is Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. Sen’s previous books include: Development as Freedom; Rationality and Freedom; The Argumentative Indian; Identity and Violence, and The Idea of Justice. In 1998 Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Much of the work done by the Indian economist has focused on poverty, specifically looking at developing new methods to predict and fight famines. His research also discusses ways to measure poverty, so that more effective social programs can be designed to prevent it. Sen has recently co-written a book with fellow economist, Jean Drèze, called An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions.

The forecast is bad. Football is back. Gloom strikes. Cure the malaise by reading the book reviews in this week’s Spectator. Here’s a selection: Richard Davenport-Hines introduces the celebrated American novelist and businesswoman Willa Cather to a British audience: ‘Cather was a pioneering career woman who in the late 1890s supported herself as a magazine editor and then as newseditor at the Pittsburgh Leader — an unprecedented post for a woman. She was later a successful managing director ofMcClure’s Magazine. With her gumption and vitality, she was a stalwart among women facing the ‘rough-and-tumble’ of competitive work. It is regrettable that her book Office Wives — a collection of stories about women in business —

The Coronation Chair currently stands all spruced up, following last year’s conservation, under a crimson canopy, by the west entrance to Westminster Abbey. The sovereign has used this throne during the actual ceremony almost continuously since the coronation of Henry IV (1399). The oldest dated piece of English furniture (1297-1300) made by a known artist (Walter of Durham) to survive has been given the comprehensive study it deserves by Warwick Rodwell, with supplementary chapters on its most recent conservation by Marie Louise Sauerberg and its current display by Ptolemy Dean. Not only does the book cover the design, construction and decoration of the chair, but also the subsequent adaptations and

More books have been written about Winston Churchill than perhaps any other figure in British history. Do we really need another volume added to the existing library? In Churchill and Empire, the historian Lawrence James makes a strong case for justifying another book for Churchillian bibliophiles. The narrative begins by looking back at Churchill’s career as a young army officer in the late nineteenth century, where he served in conflicts in India, South Africa and Sudan. It ends with Churchill’s slightly deluded view of Britain’s place in global politics as the Second World War is ending: when the British Empire is disintegrating and America is the most dominant superpower on

The book reviews in this week’s issue of the Spectator is worth the cover price. Here is a selection of quotes from some of them. The historian Anne Somerset enjoys Leanda de Lisle’s ‘different perspective’ on the Tudor dynasty. She reminds us that these self-invented parvenus had ‘vile and barbarous’ origins. ‘When Henry VII’s surviving son inherited the throne as Henry VIII, he continued his father’s policy of judicially murdering anyone close enough to the throne to imperil the claims of his immediate family. Yet the dynasty’s future remained precarious, for Henry’s six marriages produced only a single male heir. Having disinherited his daughters Mary and Elizabeth, Henry only reinstated