History

From Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid Arms and the man I sing who forced by fate And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate Expelled and exiled left the Trojan shore. Long labours both by sea and land he bore And in the doubtful war; before he won The Latian realm and built the destined town, His banished Gods restored to rites divine, And settled sure succession in his line: From whence the race of Alban Fathers come, And the long glories of majestic Rome.     O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate, What goddess was provoked, and whence her hate, For what offence the Queen of Heaven began To persecute so

Abraham Lincoln, in Walt Whitman’s celebrated phrase, contained multitudes. M.E. Synon showed yesterday quite how many there might have been. There is evidence of prejudice, callousness and corruption. Yet there is also the 13th amendment (1865): the basis, whatever the wider context of its adoption, of Lincoln’s right to be called the Great Emancipator. Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is a film of a book: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, a blockbuster that paints a little more of the good Lincoln than the bad, but which accepts Lincoln’s complexity freely by describing a determined politician at work. Daniel Day-Lewis’s often mesmerising, twinkling Lincoln is not wholly

This post by M.E. Synon is the first in a series about Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln. A counter-argument will be published tomorrow, followed by a comparison of screen and literary adaptations of the last months of Abraham Lincoln’s life. Last week in Dublin there was the European premiere of Spielberg’s film on Lincoln. Why Dublin? Because the star Daniel Day-Lewis lives in Ireland and he wanted the premiere as a fundraiser for an Irish charity. All of which meant I’ve been writing on Lincoln for the Irish press, trying – and I know it’s fruitless, but still I go on – trying again to explain to the Irish that Lincoln was a racist,

‘Pastime with good company’, attributed to Henry VIII Pastime with good company I love and shall until I die. Grudge who list, but none deny, So God be pleased, thus live will I. For my pastance, Hunt, sing and dance, My heart is set. All goodly sport For my comfort Who shall me let? Youth must have some dalliance, Of good or ill some pastance. Company me thinks the best All thoughts and fancies to digest. For idleness Is chief mistress Of vices all. Then who can say But mirth and play Is best of all? Company with honesty Is virtue, vices to flee; Company is good and ill, But

Poor Kate Middleton. In the royal tradition of artistic and literary representation, what defines her at this moment in time? The creepy feature on her wardrobe statistics in February’s Vogue? Or Paul Emsley’s even creepier official portrait revealed last week? Emsley’s Vaseline lens ‘Gaussian girl’ take on the future consort would have been appropriate had she the complexion of Doris Day, whose preference for the blurred lens was renowned. The fact we all know that Kate’s skin is like butter, her eyes sparkly, and demeanour jollier than her hockey stick makes her first official portrait instantly bewildering. Just imagine, though, if we didn’t know any of those things. Traditionally, we

Fancy a walk into London’s past? How about a stroll down Fleet Street in 1895? Or Oxford Street in 1899? It can be done. I can’t promise pictures, but I can offer more detail on the residents of each building than Google would risk publishing today. The secret: from the mid-1830s, a man named Frederic Kelly employed agents to call at every address in London and to record the people or businesses within. Kelly was a postal official, and his agents, at least to begin with, were postmen. There was some scandal about that. Because this wasn’t an official census, conducted every ten years and then locked away for a

The word ‘turboparalysis’, coined by Michael Lind (who has a brilliant piece on the subject in the Spectator Christmas double issue), is paradoxical, even illogical. And yet it is clear, perfect for our times. Lind defines his term as: ‘a prolonged condition of furious motion without movement in any particular direction, a situation in which the engine roars and the wheels spin but the vehicle refuses to move.’ Turboparalysis is a new word; but its sense is familiar. We are often warned that we ‘risk repeating the mistakes of the 1930s’. Comparison between eras is always awkward. Try to compare, for instance, unemployment in Britain during the Great Depression and the Great Recession

In December 1936, following the Abdication of Edward VIII, a rhyme circulated about the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang: ‘My Lord Archbishop, what a scold you are! And when your man is down, how bold you are! Of Christian charity how scant you are! And, auld Lang swine, how full of cant you are!’ Lang had made a particularly ill-judged broadcast three days after the Abdication, which caused considerable offence. The widespread view of Lang is that he impotently wrung his hands on the sidelines before the Abdication, after which he made his disastrous broadcast. A different view was taken by the Duke of Windsor in his memoirs: ‘Behind [the

350 years ago, Charles II ruled over a Britain whose destiny – as a world power or a defeated backwater – was intricately tied to its relations with Europe. The King’s chief minister was the Lord Chancellor Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Sober and high-principled, Clarendon favoured alliance with the Hapsburg powers of Spain and Austria simply because they were the most powerful rivals of France. But Charles II did not pursue such a policy consistently. Throughout his reign, Britain’s relations with France vacillated between open hostility and close friendship. Why? A close study of the original records reveals a triangle of very human relationships at work in the Stuart

‘Whig and Tory Scratch and Bite’, by Aaron Hill Whig and Tory scratch and bite, Just as hungry dogs we see: Toss a bone ‘twixt two, they fight, Throw a couple, they agree. Tribal party politics are three-hundred years old in Britain. So is the fashion for satire which aspires to rise above it all. The British people have been dealing with political parties since the 1670s. It was then that a faction led by the Earl of Shaftesbury tried to have Parliament pass a law to prevent Charles II’s brother James from succeeding to the throne. Charles had no legitimate children so James was next in line. He was

Just as the classical world was built around the Mediterranean, the modern world was built around the Atlantic. The Romans called the Med ‘Mare Nostrum’ – Our Sea. The Atlantic, on the other hand, was a place of contest for centuries. European nations fought for supremacy and plunder upon it, traded for wealth across it, and scrambled for territory around it. According to John K. Thornton, author of A Cultural History of the Atlantic World 1250-1820, the creation of an ‘Atlantic World’ was driven by the hunger of European states for hard cash. Money was needed to support the fantastically expensive armies which, from the late Middle Ages onwards, European

In his new book Classified: Secrecy and The State In Modern Britain, Dr Christopher Moran gives an account of the British state’s long obsession with secrecy, and the various methods it used to prevent information leaking into the public domain. Using a number of hitherto declassified documents, unpublished letters, as well as various interviews with key officials and journalists, Moran’s book explores the subtle approach used by the British government in their attempt to silence members of the civil service, and journalists, from speaking out about information that was deemed classified. Moran points out the inherent hypocrisy at work, when leading political figures of the 20th century, such as Lloyd

Some thirty-five years ago, in 1977 to be exact, I first published A Savage War of Peace, a definitive history of France’s war in Algeria. The war dragged on from 1954 to 1962, torpedoed six French governments, and the Fourth Republic itself, bringing de Gaulle to power. It also introduced a new meaning to the word ‘insurgence.’ Thanks to the indolence of my publishers, the book was allowed to go out of print. When the Iraq War began, to my fury I learned that it was changing hands on the free market in Washington at over $200 a copy, with quantities being bought by the Pentagon. Then, out of the

The bare statistics of the Great Irish Famine are chilling enough: in 1845-55 more than a million people died of starvation and disease and a further two million emigrated. Ireland’s population fell by more than a third. John Kelly does an excellent job of sketching the background in The Graves are Walking: massive population growth (the Irish population doubled in the second half of the eighteenth century and almost doubled again in the first four decades of the nineteenth), division of land into ever smaller plots and consequent dependence on the potato, exploitative landlords, resentment at rule by London. When blight struck the potato crop in 1845, it was not