History

Saturday

Ian Thomson

The world in arms

The long summer that led up to the last days of peace in Europe in 1939 — the vigil of Hitler’s assault on Poland and the subsequent Phoney War — gave little hint of the storm to come. As German troops engulfed Poland, however, Britain at last declared war on Hitler. Infamously, the Nazi science of massacre was put to the test in occupied Poland. Within two months of Hitler’s invasion, over 5,000 Jews were murdered behind the Polish lines. One year into the occupation a ghetto was established in Warsaw as a holding place for Jews prior to their deportation and death. A total of 265,000 of the city’s

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The dirty dozen

I have this fantasy in which I’m the Emperor Nero. I’m relaxing in my toga, and there are these slave girls dancing for me, and one of them has the most incredible … Like all the best fantasies, it’s a little unrealistic, let us say, but I didn’t know how unrealistic until I read this magnificent book by Matthew Dennison. For Nero’s life, as absolute ruler of the known world, was hell, haunted by twitching doubts and gibbering fears. He was bisexual, to begin with. That was OK in ancient Rome, but when it came to sleeping with men he received rather than gave, and that was definitely uncool. (During

Paul Bew

And thereby hangs a tale

The heart sinks when news breaks that an already distinguished novelist is trying his or her hand at the Irish revolution. The track record is uninspiring. Anthony Trollope lived many years in Ireland and knew senior nationalist leaders like Isaac Butt; even so, The Land Leaguers (1882) is very disappointing. Iris Murdoch had deep roots in the Northern Irish middle class; despite, or because, of this The Red and the Green (1965) is again a failure by the standards of middle-period Murdoch. Raymond Queneau’s sado-erotic satire on the Easter Rising, We Always Treat Women Too Well (1947), was perhaps unfairly excluded from the official Gallimard edition of Queneau’s oeuvre until

Anne Applebaum

Love conquers all

Anyone who has ever written a history book will feel a twinge of envy on reading the preface to Just Send Me Word: We opened up the largest of the trunks. I had never seen anything like it: several thousand letters tightly stacked in bundles tied with string and rubber bands, notebooks, diaries, documents and photographs… It was a unique family archive, the property of Svetlana and Lev Mishchenko, and it contained, among other things, packets of their love letters.   The two had met as university students in Moscow in the 1930s, but their relationship was cut short by the outbreak of war. Lev joined the Red Army in

Anne Somerset

What did he see in her?

When King George I came over from Hanover in 1714 to claim the crown he had inherited from his distant cousin Queen Anne, he was accompanied by his mistress of more than 20 years, Melusine von der Schulenberg. George’s wife Sophia Dorothea was left behind in Germany. She had made the mistake of taking a lover of her own not long after George had embarked on his affair with Melusine, forgetting that by the double standard that then prevailed in courts, it was acceptable for a man to have mistresses, ‘but shameful indeed to be a cuckold’. Sophia Dorothea had flaunted her infatuation with the glamorous adventurer, Count Konigsmark, and

Thursday

Alex Massie

Obama’s Polish Blunder

In Washington, as Andrew Sullivan reminds us, a gaffe is when a politician inadvertently blurts out what they actually believe. It is always occasion for equal measures of embarrassment and entertainment. So, no, Barack Obama’s reference to a “Polish death camp” was not a gaffe. Worse than that, it was a blunder. Not of malice but of carelessness or ignorance but not much better for that. To recap: Obama was awarding the Medal of Freedom (posthumously) to Jan Karski when he said this: “Jan served as a courier for the Polish resistance during the darkest days of World War II. Before one trip across enemy lines, resistance fighters told him

Saturday

Jonathan Mirsky

Back to the Dreyfus Affair

Not bad, this life. Now 95, Bernard Lewis, is recognised everywhere as a leading historian of the Middle East.He is the author of 32 books, translated into 29 languages, able in 15 languages, consulted by popes, kings, presidents and sheiks, on good or argumentative terms with many Western and Middle Eastern scholars and politicians, husband more than once, father, grandfather, and — true love at 80! — partner of the joint author of this book. He speaks with authority, although he is often disputed and occasionally sued, on so many different matters that his frequent name- and award-dropping somehow don’t exasperate. A non-observant English Jew, Lewis has visited most of

Andro Linklater

Some legends flourish …

Confronted by the dead Athenian heroes of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles gave voice in his funeral oration to an idea that explains better than any other why we are so obsessed by our military past. The freedom intrinsic to democracy, he said, made the unconstrained decision of its citizens to risk their lives in war more honourable than the choice forced on the soldiers of a militaristic system such as the Spartans’. ‘The man who can most truly be accounted brave,’ Pericles concluded, ‘is he who knows best the meaning of what is sweet in life and of what is terrible, and then goes out determined to meet what is

Peter Jay

… while others fade

For Watergate junkies, another raking of the old coals is irresistible. For those underage younger persons who never understood what all the fuss was about, here is the chance to get with it. Just to remind: in June 1972, a bunch of nasties, some of whose day job was with the CIA but currently working for Richard Nixon the President of the USA, broke into the offices of the rival Democratic party in the Watergate building and got caught red-handed. Nixon’s White House tried to cover up this illegal entry. A junior reporter at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward, unearthed a five-star source known on the Post and round the

Saturday

Sean Mcglynn

Forever waging wars

Death by buggery. Death by castration. Even death by being scared to death. Or so we are led to believe for the Plantagenets’ world. They had a lighter side, too: Henry II employed a professional flatulist with the trade-name of Roland the Farter. The longest reigning royal dynasty in English history (1154-1399), the Plantagenets offer the glaring contrast between their even balance of outstanding kings and outstandingly bad ones; this adds to the already exciting dynamics of a dramatic period, captured to great effect in Dan Jones’s big book on a big subject. The Plantagenets were established on the English throne by the ‘incessantly busy’ Henry II. He brought with

Friday

Sebastian Payne

Gove’s historical conundrum

Is it possible to set schools free while demanding a beefed up teaching of our nation’s history? Both are topics close to the heart of the Education Secretary but eventually, he’s going to have to choose one over the other. Top-down orders on the History curriculum will undermine attempts to give schools and teachers more control over what they do. Tristram Hunt threw this curveball in this weeks magazine, where he states it is a example of the classic Tory struggle between liberalism and conservatism: ‘The self-inflicted challenge comes with delivering this national narrative of Britishness. Because at the crux of Gove’s schools revolution is the dismantling of national provision.

Monday

Alex Massie

The Years of Robert Caro

For political types there’s little doubt about the publishing event of the year: the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s mammoth biography of Lyndon Johnson. The New York Times published a swell piece at the weekend which, as such pieces must, made it clear that Caro is the most unusual, and perhaps the best, biographer of our age. If it is madness to spend nearly 40 years writing about LBJ then it is a special and useful madness. The new volume, The Passage of Power, is only 700 or so pages long (compared to the 1,200 pages of its predecessor, Master of the Senate) but only covers six years: It begins

Saturday

Keith Baxter

An elusive father

In a large upstairs room of the YWCA building behind Tottenham Court Road, a group of actors were nervously waiting for the arrival of the director. There was the powerful whiff of a good cigar, the faint scent of expensive cologne and Orson Welles arrived. He had been in Paris cutting his film of Kafka’s The Trial and now here he was; a huge man, beautifully dressed in a dark suit and floppy tie, full of good humour, apologising for having missed a week of rehearsal. The room exploded with his laughter, an explosion so loud you feared for the windows, and everyone relaxed. He had prepared a version of

Saturday

Blair Worden

Death comes for the archbishop

Posterity has always embellished Thomas Becket. After his death in Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170 the Church idealised and canonised him; his tomb inspired miracles and became the most famous shrine in Christendom; the local monks grew rich and fat on the tourist trade that would attract Chaucer’s pilgrims. The 18th century invented Henry II’s hint, ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’ Playwrights spice the dish. Tennyson’s drama about Becket was staged by Irving; everyone remembers Eliot’s chorus, living and partly living; and Anouilh’s play, which turned the Norman immigrant into a Saxon, gave him, in the screened version, a wide and charismatic appeal. Not that theatricality or

Nicolas Barker

Figures in a landscape

As you cross the Trent, you are very much aware that you have moved from the south to the north country. The next great divide is the Tyne, with the dramatic straggle of Newcastle stretching east and west. Beyond lies mile upon mile of Northumberland, all the way to the Scottish border, arable land for grazing (punctuated with coal mines) by the coast, giving way to heathery moors and countless sheep. The centre of this often wild and always beautiful land is Alnwick, with roads stretching out, to north and south the Great North Road, east to the fishing port of Alnmouth, westward to the Roman Wall and the Cheviots.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

On the way to the forum

In 150 BC, Cato the Elder arrived in the Senate House in Rome with an eye-catching basket of figs. This redoubtable statesman — often referred to as ‘censorius’, an epithet I have coveted since my childhood — was famous, apart from his censoriousness, for his conviction that the most important thing for Rome at any given moment was the military destruction of its enemy, Carthage. Yet here he was, instead of making another swingeing speech on that topic, apparently about to eat his lunch. Cato picked out an especially juicy looking fig. He took a bite. And then he asked, in his most censorious of tones, ‘Do you know where

Andro Linklater

Not quite cricket

To the French, Albion’s expertise in perfidy will come as no surprise. But centuries of warfare have given them time to learn. With their experience only dating back to 1914, the Germans clearly found it difficult to grasp during the second world war that nowhere is the truth more expertly and instinctively spun than in the land of the gentleman. While a schoolchild soon masters the lie simple, and the lie financial merely requires a degree of brazenness easily developed by proximity to other people’s money, the lie belligerent demands an instinct for dis-simulation that must be bred in the bone of its practitioners to be carried off convincingly.Thus, alongside

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Prophetic times

The subject here is colossal, covering a substantial stretch of the later Roman empire, the last years of the Persian empire, the conversion of the Arabs, the spread of Christianity and what happened to Judaism. The time span runs, effectively, from the death of Jesus to the moment in the eighth century when the Abbasids acquired through violence the vast empire of the Umayyads, stretching from the Loire to the Hindu Kush, and founded Baghdad. The title of Tom Holland’s book is rather studiously general, but his central topic is unmistakable: the founding and establishment of Islam and its political and martial setting. If Holland didn’t want to make a

Robert Chandler

Searching for a saviour

The central themes of Russian history have remained constant for over a millennium.  Russia’s vast spaces and lack of any natural borders have always made her inhabitants terrified of invasion. And to protect the country against invaders, and to preserve its unity, Russia’s rulers seem always to have felt it necessary to assert their authority with great brutality. All this is at least hinted at in the very first introduction to Russian history. The Primary Chronicle, compiled in Kiev around 1113, tells us that there was no law among [the Slavs], but tribe rose against tribe…  Accordingly they …  said to the people of Rus [who were probably Scandinavians]: ‘Our

Graham Stewart

Special providence …

When Ed Smith became a full-time professional cricketer for Kent in 1999 the county side was preparing for the new millennium by shedding anything that smacked of old-fashioned amateurism. Professionalism was to be a state of mind. Players were henceforth required to sign up to a new code of conduct. This Core Covenant consisted mainly of a succession of abstract nouns, though it also proclaimed its faith in the transformative power of setting targets by requiring a ‘pledge’ from all players that they would take at least 50 extra catches during every practice session. What was more, it took personal responsibility to a higher level by abolishing bad luck as