History

Wednesday

Alex Massie

This Social Union, This Commonwealth

On reflection, perhaps I’ve been a little too quick to discount the historical significance of the Queen’s visit to Ireland this week. Like so much else, it’s a question of perspective. If you’re 80 years old and a citizen of the Irish Republic, perhaps the sight of the Irish President greeting and welcoming the British monarch on equal terms would seem quietly moving and even a cause of some pride. I might think that this was what it was all about and I might see the visit as another confirmation that the Irish state has taken its rightful place in the community of nations. That’s been true for many years,

Tuesday

Nicholas Mackey

When Dublin trembled

On 17 May 1974 — 37 years ago today — I was a 19-year-old student at Trinity College Dublin, celebrating the end of term in the Pavilion Bar near the sports fields. The summer exams were still to come, but we were carefree; the main subject of conversation was whether we could organise a disco party later on. Then, a little after 5.30 p.m., everything changed. First, all about us seemed to shiver, as if there were an earth tremor. Then, just as it occurred to me that Dublin did not generally suffer tectonic stress, there was a deafening bang that seemed to go on for an age. Somebody shouted:

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Eight Hundred Years of Oppression and Now This?

Pete is right to say there’s a definite “resonance” to these pictures. Nevertheless, I suspect that British people’s view of the “historic” significance of Her Majesty the Queen’s visit to the Republic of Ireland is inversely proportionate to one’s experience of Ireland. That is, the more time you have spent in Ireland and the better you know the country the less you are likely to swoon at the sight of a British monarch setting foot in southern Ireland.  Perhaps I’m extrapolating too much from my own experience and perhaps the over-40s think differently. But my impression strengthened, to be sure, by some of the breathless, hyperbolic BBC coverage is that

Peter Hoskin

An historic moment

There is something incredibly resonant about the images of the Queen arriving in the Republic of Ireland this afternoon. You have probably heard the facts by now — that she is the first British monarch to do so for 100 years, and the first since Irish independence — but they are no less striking. Against a backdrop of terror threats and of Britain’s participation in the country’s bailout, Queen Elizabeth II is making some kind of history today. It is also, as Ed West says in a thoughtful post over at the Telegraph, a time for remembrance. He suggests that we remember the 300,000 Irishmen who fought in the Great

Saturday

Carey Schofield

Imperfect working order

The publication of Pakistan: A Hard Country could not be more timely. International attention has been focused on Pakistan since the Americans killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad. Being in the spotlight generally means trouble for this country that has been bedevilled by war and political drama for over three decades. Foreigners announce goodwill and arrive with generous aid, but Pakistanis are frequently left feeling bruised, as the outsiders become ever more bewildered by the workings of this beguiling and maddening place. Anatol Lieven originally planned to call his book ‘How Pakistan Works’. It would have been a good title, since this is exactly what he tries to explain. The

Friday

David Blackburn

Bin Laden strikes from beyond the grave

And so it starts. The news that suicide bombers have attacked the military base at Shabqadar, northern Pakistan, sounds a chilling note. The Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attacks, committed in retaliation for the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Security experts and politicians warned that it would be so. It is, we are told, inevitable that similar atrocities will be attempted closer to home. There will also be concern that this may aggravate the already strained relations between the US and Pakistan, which would only strengthen the terrorists. Perhaps Bin Laden has become a more potent force since his death. The sight of a squalid man sitting in

Saturday

Jonathan Sumption

Setting the world to rights

Wicked Company is the collective biography of a group of men with little in common, apart from a generalised dissatisfaction with the state of the world around them. Perhaps that is true of most intellectual coteries. The kings of the Parisian Enlightenment of the 18th century were the mathematician Jean d’Alembert and the playwright and journalist Denis Diderot, joint editors of the great Encyclopédie. Their work brought them into contact with a remarkable group of men, who populate the pages of Philipp Blom’s quirky and original book: the economist and journalist Raynal, who never quite shook off his Jesuit origins; the mass of obscurer contributors to the Encyclopédie; the moody

John De-Falbe

Captain courageous

The sum of hard biographical facts about Captain Cook never increases, nor is it expected to. It is the same with Shakespeare. J. C. Beaglehole’s Life of Captain James Cook (1974), which Frank McLynn quotes often, contains most of what is known about Cook’s family life and origins. As the son of a Yorkshire farm labourer, he belonged to a class that was unlikely to leave any record of his childhood. He was clever, and went to live with a Quaker family in Whitby where he worked in the shop. He went to sea in the collier trade at the advanced age of 17, and transferred to the Royal Navy

Saturday

Lewis Jones

One hap after another

Nicola Shulman begins her rehabilitation of Thomas Wyatt by remarking that there is ‘an almost universal consensus that he can’t write’ — a consensus established within a generation of his death in 1542. Nicola Shulman begins her rehabilitation of Thomas Wyatt by remarking that there is ‘an almost universal consensus that he can’t write’ — a consensus established within a generation of his death in 1542. Even the Earl of Surrey, his friend and eulogist, acknowledged his verse to be ‘unparfited’, and by Shakespeare’s day he was a joke: Malvolio keeps a poem of Wyatt’s about him, proclaiming himself a nincompoop. Like Malvolio, Wyatt excels at such un- attractive emotions

James Grande

Lancelot of the lake

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia offers two contrasting views on a ‘Capability’ Brown landscape at the imagined Sidley Park. Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia offers two contrasting views on a ‘Capability’ Brown landscape at the imagined Sidley Park. Lady Croom, the 19th-century owner, praises its harmonious natural style, even down to ‘the right amount of sheep tastefully arranged’. Two hundred years later, a garden historian laments the destruction of the ‘sublime geometry’ of 17th-century formal gardens: ‘paradise in the age of reason’, before being ‘ploughed under by Capability Brown’. It is not even English, Hannah Jarvis complains: English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors … Capability Brown

Jane Ridley

Jennie, Clemmie and Goosie too

‘There never was a Churchill, from John of Marlborough down,’ wrote Gladstone, ‘that had either principles or morals.’ With the shining exception of Winston and his brother Jack, Churchill men have tended to be bad hats, but this makes them all the more interesting to read about. ‘There never was a Churchill, from John of Marlborough down,’ wrote Gladstone, ‘that had either principles or morals.’ With the shining exception of Winston and his brother Jack, Churchill men have tended to be bad hats, but this makes them all the more interesting to read about. Mary Lovell’s new book tells the story of the Churchills as a family over four generations,

Douglas Hurd

Go out and govern New South Wales

‘In the mists and damp of the Scottish Highlands, 61-year-old Sir Bartle Frere was writing a letter. ‘In the mists and damp of the Scottish Highlands, 61-year-old Sir Bartle Frere was writing a letter. Straight-backed, grey-haired, he had the bright eye and bristled moustache of an ageing fox-terrier.’ Reading this, at the beginning of a chapter, we cannot be sure whether what follows will be Lytton Strachey or John Buchan. The tale might go either way. The letter might be either an invitation to shoot grouse or in answer to a summons to cope with a crisis threatening the British empire. The second guess would be right. The letter was

Saturday

Nicola Shulman

King of spin

Draw two two-inch triangles, tip to tip, one on top of the other. A little way down the left flank of the upper triangle, take a perpendicular line out to an inch, then turn your pencil at a right angle and continue another inch. Repeat on the other side. Next, draw two short, splayed lines down from the base of the lower triangle. Finally, put an acute accent, an inch long, about two inches above the whole. What have you got? According to Dr David Starkey, who performs this trick at schools all over the country, Henry VIII in 13 lines. Apparently he is recognisable in this form as far

Friday

David Blackburn

From the archives – the Khmers Rouge’s debt to 1950s France

It is 13 years to the day since Pol Pot died in mysterious circumstances while in exile on Cambodia’s remote western border with Thailand. Where did Pot and his maniacal fellow travellers acquire their politics. There are a number of candidates from the megalomania of the 20th Century, but Michael Sheridan, the Sunday Times’ former Asia Editor, notes that France, or more exactly aspects of French culture at the end of the colonial era, played its part. He explained why to the Spectator. Pol Pot and Chardonnay, Michael Sheridan, 21 September 1996 Not long ago, the Americans found in their archives in Washington a long-forgotten film about Cambodia, made by

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Ferguson’s triumph

The last episode of Niall Ferguson’s documentary series, Civilization, has just been aired — and for those who missed it, it’s time to buy the DVD box set. Or, better still, read the book. Ferguson is, for my money, one of the most compelling, readable and original historians writing today. His books stand out for throwaway lines which can change the way you think about what’s happening now. Understanding of history shapes our politics, whether we admit it or not. And myths about history also fuel political myths. How often do we hear it said that the Great Depression came about because government didn’t borrow in the hard times? A

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Great among the nations

The King James Bible, while uniting the English-speaking world, gave birth to centuries of radicalism and Dissent. On its 400th anniversary, Philip Hensher examines the translation’s legacy Considered as a book, the Bible is far too long. Its characterisation is not all it should be: its hero, God, seems totally inconsistent, varying from a prankster with a bizarre sense of humour (Job) to a sensible dispenser of advice. You can’t help feeling that it is really rather patchy in quality: some of it is wonderfully entertaining, such as the Acts of the Apostles and the two Books of Kings, but some of it doesn’t seem to be interested in entertaining

Colin Amery

Rather in the lurch

Will it ever end? The romantic interest in the architecture, history and life lived in the country house is as alive today as it was in 1978, when Mark Girouard wrote his seminal Life in the English Country House. There are now some three million members of the National Trust — guardians of the flame of country-house life that still just flickers in its teashops. The path to an instant peerage is along the passages of the imaginary Downton Abbey, and feudal splendour is still the dream destination of hedge-fund millionaires. How much is the dream driven by aesthetics, how much by nostalgia and how much by a fascination with

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Poor Bloody Infantry Faces More Friendly Fire?

In opposition Liam Fox boasted he could cut the Ministry of Defence by 25% without there being any impact on “frontline” troops. The confirmation that there will be 17,000 fewer men and women in uniform by this parliament’s end mocks that promise. To govern is to choose, for sure, but the scale of these cuts leads one to wonder, again, what kind of capability will be left once they are completed. For now, the Gurkhas excepted, the infantry has been spared. But there are already indications that its luck, if you can call it that after all the reorganisations of recent years, will run out when the next “tranche” of

Saturday

Peter Parker

In the pink

In 1988 Katherine Swift took a lease on the Dower House at Morville Hall, a National Trust property in Shropshire, and created a one-and-a-half acre garden in what had been a field. In The Morville Hours (2008), she placed that garden in its landscape and wrote one of the finest books about the history, philosophy and the practice of gardening you are likely to read. She is currently working on a sequel, and The Morville Year is a very welcome interim volume, gathering the columns she wrote for The Times between 2001 and 2005. The book is arranged by month, starting not in January but in March: as Swift characteristically

Joanna Kavenna

The trail goes cold

For centuries, the history of the far North was a tapestry of controversies and mis- understandings, misspellings, dubious arrivals and equally dubious departures. Pytheas the Greek sailed north from Britain in the 4th century BC, found a place where the sea, land and sky seemed to merge, and was trounced by later scholars as a terrible charlatan. The Vikings mingled cartographical details with stories of trolls and hauntings. During the reign of Elizabeth I, Martin Frobisher went north and (mistakenly) thought he’d found gold. Undeterred, successive explorers and treasure hunters ventured into the Arctic wastes, many of them vanishing among the floes. Frederick Cook claimed to have reached the North