History

Saturday

David Crane

Ugly old Europe

There are moments and places in history that one would have paid good money to avoid, and wartime Lisbon was one of them. For those rich enough to afford the Pan Am flying ‘Clipper’ to New York it at least offered a route of escape, but for those thousands of refugees from Nazi Europe left waiting for months or years before they could beg or borrow a passage to America or Palestine it was more likely to be just one last chance to savour old Europe at its unlovable, venal, extortionate and anti-Semitic best. Not that there was anything narrowly discriminatory in Lisbon’s attitude to its refugees — the Cidade

Jane Ridley

Crusader on the attack

Why have we forgotten John Bright? In his day he was a massive political celebrity. He could command audiences of 150,000, delivering thrilling impromptu speeches night after night. Perhaps, as Bill Cash suggests, Bright’s eclipse has to do with the decline of conviction politics and public alienation from parliament. Or perhaps, as the novelist Anthony Trollope remarked, the trouble with Bright was that he didn’t actually create anything — he spent a lifetime attacking evils: ‘It was his work to cut down forest trees, and he had nothing to do with the subsequent cultivation of the land’. Bright was a Quaker, the son of a self-made businessman who established a

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: The Christmas truce

Christmas is but a day away, and with it a chance to remember when British and German troops clambered out of the trenches to declare impromptu ceasefires in December 1914. CoffeeHousers are no doubt familiar with the specifics: how the Germans started by singing carols, and finished off (according to some letters from the time) by beating our soldiers 3-2 in a game of football. But I thought you still might care to see how The Spectator wrote it up a week later. So here is the brief report that appeared in the ‘News of the Week’ section of our 2 January issue, 1915: ‘The news from the western theatre

Saturday

Colin Amery

Soaring splendour

The glorious monuments built in India by the Mughal emperors, from Babur in the early 16th century to Bahadur Shah Zafar II in the mid-19th century, have long deserved a comprehensive illustrated survey in one volume. George Michell is the ideal author. He is both a great scholar and a fervent communicator on many aspect of India’s cultural history. He has worked as a hands-on archaeologist on major Indian sites and recently established a Deccan Foundation to protect the wonders of that little-known region. He has been extremely well served in this magnificent book by the photographs of Amit Pasricha, who describes himself as a ‘panoramic photographer’. His photographs are

Saturday

Philip Ziegler

Voyages of discovery

Roger Louis is an American professor from the University of Texas at Austin who knows more about the history of the British Empire than any other two academics put together. When the Oxford University Press embarked on its mammoth history of the Empire the general editor they chose —to the chagrin of certain professors from the Commonwealth — was Roger Louis. Among his other responsibilities is the British Studies seminar, which was founded at Austin 36 years ago. But Professor Louis is not the university’s only attraction. The Harry Ransom Center houses one of the most, if not the most, important collection of modern literary manuscripts in the English-speaking world.

Dan Jones

A beautiful bloody world

The half-millennium or so that followed the division of the Carolingian empire in 843 AD was a time of profound social and political change in Europe. Kingdoms were established, new forms of law and theories of power were developed and military technology and tactics were revolutionised. Relations between church and state were transformed. The emerging European states developed new cultural identities, while western Christendom as a whole also began to define and assert itself against the Islamic states in the Middle East and north Africa, and the ailing remnants of the Byzantine empire to the east. By the middle of the 15th century, the various kingdoms of Europe were strong,

Jonathan Keates

Wizard of the Baroque

Not content with being the greatest sculptor of his age and one of its most gifted architects, Gian Lorenzo Bernini had some talent as a painter and draftsman. Surviving self-portraits reveal him as the possessor of a positively overstated physique du role. In its most youthful incarnation the face has an air of presumption and entitlement which adulthood will darken with a combativeness that is almost wolfish. Even in the chalk drawing made around his 80th birthday (now in the Royal Collection at Windsor) the glance, under bushy white eyebrows, still smoulders and the slightly parted lips seem poised to challenge or command. Born in Naples in 1598, Bernini spent

Saturday

James Forsyth

The significance of the Iron Lady

Charles Moore’s essay on the Iron Lady in today’s Telegraph is required reading. Here’s how he starts: ‘The best way to understand why a feature film about Margaret Thatcher might work is to imagine trying to make one about other 20th-century British prime ministers. How about Safety First (Stanley Baldwin), A Period of Silence (Clement Attlee), Crisis? What Crisis? (James Callaghan) or In No Small Measure (John Major)? It doesn’t do, does it? Even Tony Blair, already the subject of several films, invites a satire treatment, not a life story. There is a case, perhaps, for David Lloyd George. There is the towering subject of Winston Churchill. And then there

Fiona Maddocks

At opposite ends of the scale

A book which opens in the bushes of a Venetian garden and ends, more or less, in the cafés of Parma with chocolate panettone and biscotti dipped in coffee knows how to command attention. Given that what unfolds between these sensory episodes is densely constructed and formidable in scope, this is just as well: Peter Conrad writes engagingly and lures his reader into a grand game of cultural chess. There is no winner or loser, but we need to be alert for fear of missing a wry connection or a devilishly clever move. The oddity of the title hints at the awkwardness of the subject matter. Verdi and/or Wagner reflects

Andrew McKie

S is for Speculative

Margaret Atwood has written 20 novels, of which three (The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood) are science fiction. Indeed, the first— and far the best of them — won the inaugural Arthur C. Clarke award, Britain’s chief prize for books in the genre. She has, however, long resisted any description of her work as science fiction, for which she was mildly upbraided by Ursula K. Le Guin a couple of years ago. Le Guin wrote that Atwood’s distinction between her own novels, which she maintains feature things which are possible, and may even have happened already, and SF, in which things happen that aren’t

Marcus Berkmann

Quirky Books: Treasure-troves of trivia

Connoisseurs of the Christmas gift book market — we are a select group, with little otherwise to occupy our time — will have noticed a couple of significant absences from this year’s line-up. There is no Blue Peter Annual, for the first time since 1964, when even Christopher Trace was still a young man. More tellingly, Schott’s Almanac appears to have ceased publication after six years of, one assumes, gradually declining sales. It was beautifully designed, lovingly compiled, funny and unpredictable, and I shall miss it. No doubt Ben Schott is now holed up in his gothic tower, surrounded by pieces of paper with bizarre facts written on them, wondering

Jane Ridley

The woman in black | 3 December 2011

The history of the royal family is punctuated by dramatic, premature deaths which plunge the monarchy into crisis. The most disastrous of these — historically more significant by far than the death of Princess Diana — was the death of Prince Albert in 1861. By the time he died, aged 42, this minor German prince, the second son of the obscure and dissipated Duke of Coburg, had taken over the entire public work of the monarchy. After 21 years of marriage, his wife Victoria had become deskilled and emotionally dependent upon him. His death left the monarchy in tatters and condemned Queen Victoria to a lifetime of black dresses. Helen

Richard Ryder

Trading places | 3 December 2011

Thirty years ago Sir Keith Joseph, portrayed by Sir Ian Gilmour, a fellow minister, as owning ‘a Rolls-Royce mind without a chauffeur’, sent a newly published book to every Cabinet colleague. Most groaned, some murmured oaths, and a lucky few skimmed it. The book was English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1850-1980) by Martin Weiner. The author, like Correlli Barnett before him, assailed Victorian and Edwardian entrepeneurs and inventors for ignoring family business. Scores and scores of tycoons yearned to be assimilated into the landed establishment by spurning their own mills and factories. They denied the infernos of noise and squalor the capital investment required for new

Thursday

Alex Massie

1707 And All That

In the midst of a futile* call for partisans on either side of Scotland’s great constitutional debate to avoid twisting history for their own ends, Professor Richard Finlay and Dr Alison Cathcart write: One feature of a mature democracy is the respect it accords to its past, which means accepting it in its entirety, warts and all. There are good points and bad points in all national histories and accepting both is vital to avoiding the pitfalls of narrow, triumphalist chauvinism or debilitating defeatism. Neither of which is healthy. One of the problems of using history to make the case for or against the Union is that it tends to

Saturday

Johnpaul Mccarthy

Jekyll and Hyde figure

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver believed that the ideal British prime minister was a creature wholly exempt from joy and grief who applies his words to everything except to the indication of his mind. Swift’s dilation on the virtues of political froideur is only one of many ghosts evoked by Paul Bew’s riveting portrait of the man who seemed certain to be the first Irish prime minister of the Victorian age. In a characteristic confection of intimate portraiture and high-political history, Bew assesses the astonishing career of a lacklustre Protestant landlord who brought a Catholic populace to the threshold of parliamentary self-government in 1886. And ‘astonishing’ scarcely does justice to the political

Saturday

Martin Jacomb

High-class fraud

You can always find a thief in financial markets. That is where the money is. Most frauds are quite dull affairs, and some are never uncovered. A few, however, are spectacular. The scale of loss, or the glamour of the perpetrator, or the failure of the ‘system’ to spot and prevent the crookery, may contribute to make a good story. One case, almost within living memory, which has all of these elements, was that of Gerard Lee Bevan. He was born in 1869 into a highly respected City banking family. The Bevans were among the founders of Barclays and continued to be involved in the management of the bank until

Molly Guinness

Chagrin d’amour

The horror of love: Nancy Mitford’s first fiancé was gay; her husband, Peter Rodd, was feckless, spendthrift and unsympathetic, and her great amour, Gaston Palewski, was endlessly unfaithful. She met him during the war in London and was in love with him for the rest of her life. Palewski was Charles de Gaulle’s right-hand man. He organised the French Resistance in London and commanded the Free French forces in East Africa. After the war, he was appointed De Gaulle’s chief of staff and he became known as the sinister éminence grise behind De Gaulle’s presidency. He and Nancy shared a love of France, beauty and jokes. He was never faithful

David Gilmour

A cult of virility and violence

Mussolini’s brutal sex-addiction makes for dispiriting reading, but provides material for a fine psychological study, says David Gilmour Bunga bunga may be a recent fashion, but adultery for Italian prime ministers has a long history. The first of such statesmen, Count Cavour, had affairs with married women because he was too nervous of being cuckolded to risk having a wife of his own.  One of his successors, Francesco Crispi, suffered such amatory turbulence that the police were often called to break up screeching rows between his wives and his mistresses; in old age he was accused by the press of trigamy because he had fathered children by two women in

Sunday

Daniel Korski

The spectre of populism

Across Europe, the bien pensant are worried. They fear that the Eurocrisis could lead to the rise of populism — whatever that means — and even extremism. The spectre of the 1930s stalks a lot of discussions, as the FT’s Gideon Rachman found out at a lunch with a hedge fund manager who thought the break-up of the Euro would lead to “the next Great Depression and a resurgence of Nazism”. But is there real cause for fear or is this a matter of people projecting a particular history onto the future? Economic dislocation has in the past led to populism but not uniformly, or at least not in numbers

Saturday

Andrew Gimson

The Conservatives: A History by Robin Harris

If David Cameron and his friends wish to know why they and their policies are so despised by some Conservatives of high intellect and principle, they should read Robin Harris. His book is a marvel of concision, lucidity and scholarship, with penetrating things to say about Peel, Disraeli, Salisbury, Baldwin, Churchill, Macmillan and the rest. But much of its savour derives from Harris’s disgust — the word is not too strong — with the various forms of bogusness, including intellectual cowardice veiled by complacent politeness, which recur so often in the history of the Conservative party. Harris recognises the ‘note of genius’ in Disraeli, but scorns the pious, posthumous ascription