History

Saturday

Frederic Raphael

Rome on the skids

The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower, by Adrian Goldsworthy The Ruin of the Roman Empire, by James O’Donnell These two fat, well-sourced books about the decline of ancient Rome run, until they limp, in relay. Adrian Goldsworthy begins his leg from the end of the second century AD, the term of the Antonines (under whom Edward Gibbon could imagine himself happy, so long as he was a patrician), through the nervous three centuries which ended with the incursions — here seen more as forceful immigrations — of the Huns and the Goths. After Alaric’s irruption in 410 into Italy, the rulers of the once-master Latin

John Adamson

Order out of chaos

What got into them? For two decades in the middle of the 17th century, English- men transformed their world, overthrowing and eventually executing their king, abolishing bishops and the House of Lords, and incidentally slaughtering each other — and from time to time their Scottish and Irish neighbours — on a scale that approached the carnage of the first world war. Explaining these ‘English civil wars’ — the term Blair Worden gives to the sequence of conflicts that afflicted the country between 1640 and the Restoration in 1660 — has always been tricky. How does one make sense of the multifarious possible causes, or the bewildering, Russian-novel-like profusion of characters;

Saturday

Jonathan Mirsky

A poisonous legacy

A Senseless, Squalid War: Voices from Palestine 1945-1948, by Norman Rose Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War Against Jewish Terrorism, 1945-1948, by David Cesarani The second epigraph in Norman Rose’s eloquent, comprehensive and even-handed book, A Senseless, Squalid War, says it all, from Palestine in the late 19th century to Gaza right now. In 1891, the Zionist philosopher and poet Asher Zvi Ginsberg, wrote: From abroad we are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all desert savages, like donkeys. But this is a big mistake. The Arabs, and especially those in the cities, understand our deeds and our desires in Eretz-Israel. If the time comes when the

Saturday

Patrick Marnham

Not for the faint-hearted

‘You might be wondering how I end- ed up in the lace business . . . ’, so the hero of The Kindly Ones, a doctor of law and former SS officer, introduces himself to readers of his fictional memoirs. Dr Max Aue, an ingenious Nazi of Franco-German descent, has survived the war and assumed a false identity in order to escape ‘the rope or Siberia’. As Berlin falls to the Red Army he slips out of the city and makes his way to Paris disguised as a returning French STO, an enlisted worker. But the war has reduced him to ‘an empty shell, left with nothing but bitterness and

Saturday

Anita Brookner

Pure, but never simple

Here at last is a novel informed by exceptional intelligence. The blurb states that the author, Simon Mawer, was born in England, but it seems likely that his ancestry was Czech, since he is acquainted with the language and the customs of pre-war Czechoslovakia and has learned of its travails during the German and Russian occupations. And it is clear from his narrative that the country was both sophisticated and cultivated in its manifestations, influenced perhaps by its position at the heart of Europe and subject to both the best and the worst of its fashions. This alone would mark it as unusual: the clarity with which it is written

Linda Kelly

From palace to cowshed

Madame de la Tour du Pin’s Journal d’une Femme de Cinquante Ans, with its vivid descriptions of her experiences during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, is one of the most enthralling memoirs of the age: a hard act, one would think, for a biographer to follow. Caroline Moorehead succeeds in doing so triumphantly in a rich and satisfying book which not only adds to our appreciation of her story but brings the whole tumultuous period and its characters to life. Born in 1770 into the highest reaches of the French nobility, Lucie-Henriette Dillon spent a lonely and unhappy childhood, brought up by a tyrannical grandmother after her mother’s

Rupert Christiansen

A monumental achievement

Like virtually everyone middle-aged and middle-class in this country, I am a beneficiary of the cult of Civilisation — Kenneth Clark’s ‘personal view’, stretching in 13 episodes from the Vikings to Van Gogh, which was broadcast on BBC2 in 1969 and on BBC1 two years later, as well as appearing as a sumptuously illustrated, best-selling book. Like virtually everyone middle-aged and middle-class in this country, I am a beneficiary of the cult of Civilisation — Kenneth Clark’s ‘personal view’, stretching in 13 episodes from the Vikings to Van Gogh, which was broadcast on BBC2 in 1969 and on BBC1 two years later, as well as appearing as a sumptuously illustrated,

Wednesday

Ferdinand Mount

How different from us?

The Ends of Life: Roads to Human Fulfilment in Early Modern England, by Keith Thomas The English past is not what it was, for professional historians anyway. The rest of us still talk about the Tudors and the Stuarts, about Renaissance and Reformation and the Augustan Age. But within the academy all these dynasties and eras are now bundled up into what is called the Early Modern period. The inhabitants of this huge stretch of time can only be made sense of, it seems, if we think of them as a rough, awkward prelude to Us. It is startling how rapidly Early Mod has flattened the competition, and flattened our

Jonathan Mirsky

Heartbreak hotel

Here surely is what Joseph Conrad meant when he wrote that above all he wanted his readers ‘to see.’ In The Post Office Girl Stefan Zweig explores the details of everyday life in language that pierces both brain and heart. Born in 1881 into a rich Austrian-Jewish family, Zweig was the embodiment of pre- and inter-war Viennese intellectual life. A biographer, essayist, memoirist, short-story writer and the author of one finished novel, Beware of Pity, he delivered the oration at Freud’s funeral. During the Thirties, Zweig wrote The Post Office Girl, originally Rausch der Verwandlung (The Intoxication of Transformation). The English title is better. In his informative afterword, William Deresiewicz

Ian Thomson

Surviving the Middle Passage

The Book of Negroes, an historical romance, creates an unforgettably vivid picture of the Atlantic slave trade and the philanthropists who sought to oppose it. The novel opens in Africa in the year 1745. Aminata Diallo, a midwife’s daughter, has been abducted from her village in present-day Mali and marched in chains to a slave ship, where she is sold to white traders. In the course of the two-month voyage to America, she witnesses a violent shipboard slave revolt, yet is miraculously able to survive the Middle Passage, before reaching Carolina. Plantation life in the American south, with its hierarchy of skin tones ranging from black to cinnamon to white,

Wednesday

Jonathan Sumption

A slow decline

The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000, by Chris Wickham This outstanding book covers what used to be called the ‘dark ages’. Publishers rarely speak of the dark ages now. It does not sell copies. But the title still encapsulates the conventional view of the period: a civilised empire destroyed by barbarians and replaced by a world of anarchy and superstition, a universal monarchy superseded by a mosaic of statelets ruled by men with unpronounceable names, long hair and uncouth habits, an age of grim ignorance with few literary or administrative sources and those reflecting the enclosed prejudices of monks and priests. Geoffrey of Monmouth

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

Ending the Vile Traffic

Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships that Stopped the Slave Trade, by Siân Rees The narratives of slavery have, it’s safe to say, replaced the narratives of imperial adventure in our reading lives, and our moral compasses are orientated by indignation at suffering and exploitation rather than by the contemplation of our ancestors’ achievements. The slave trade, considered ‘relevant’ as well as a gruesome spectacle of human suffering on a colossal scale, is taught in schools and familiar to millions to whom ‘Nelson’ suggests only Mandela. And yet the abolition of the slave trade, over long, difficult decades, was one of the bravest and most serious endeavours of the British

Charles Sprawson

The true Stoic

An early memory from the years we lived near Stowe was the sight of my father pushing our front door firmly shut in the face of one of its headmasters, who was attempting to force his way in and apologise for some misdemeanour. He had, I believe, tried to seduce my mother. Later on I shared a London flat with a Stoic, a dark, mysterious, gipsy figure who worked on Ready, Steady, Go but was principally a beautiful tennis player, mentioned here for having helped Stowe win the Public Schools Championship in successive years. Sometime after I left, he was found by the police dead in the bath. Nights there

Wednesday

Matt Ridley

The origin of the theory

Darwin’s Sacred Cause, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore Darwin: A Life in Poems, by Ruth Padel In 1858, on the brink of publishing his theory of evolution, which I discussed here three weeks ago, Charles Darwin took a hydropathic rest cure at Moor Park, near Farnham in Surrey. While walking on the sandy heath, he caught a glimpse of ‘the rare Slave-making Ant & saw the little black niggers in their Master’s nests’. A certain species of red ant kidnaps the young of a smaller black ant and rears them as unwitting slave workers in the service of the red queen. Darwin had heard about this phenomenon but had

Raymond Carr

Behind the fighting lines

M. R. D. Foot confesses that he has always endeavoured to follow Whistler’s counsel, ‘Not a day without a line’. His written output is impressive and his judgments severe on those who do not come up to his standards. Heinz Koeppler, his boss at a Foreign Office study centre, with his fawning on his superiors and bullying of his staff, turned out not to be a gentleman. Foot makes clear in his first chapter that he himself comes of gentleman stock and is proud of it. True, his father married a Gaiety Theatre chorus girl; but his grandfather had married an heiress, retired as a general from the army to

John De-Falbe

One-man triumph

The Companion to British History (Third Edition), by Charles Arnold Baker Readers familiar with the first edition of The Companion to British History (Loncross, 1997) will already know that its value as a reference work proceeds from an inclusive attitude towards its subject. Besides providing the rudiments — monarchs, battles etc — the CBH was particularly strong on the constitution, law, local history, the Empire, anecdote, circumstance, and much else. It was also a useful stand-in for The Dictionary of National Biography. This third edition comes again with the glorious yellow jacket (which Routledge’s second edition discarded), but it has many more entries. We can read, for example, a crisp

Philip Ziegler

Challenging Zeus

Senior civil servants are generally expected to be shadowy figures, influential rather than powerful, discreet rather than flamboyant, probably — in Gladwyn’s generation at any rate — educated at Winchester. To describe such a being as a Titan might seem an oxymoron. The Titans, it will be remembered, were a family of giants who had the temerity to challenge Zeus and duly got their comeuppance. In this well-researched and thoughtful book Sean Greenwood convinces one that in the case of Lord Gladwyn — not least in the ill-judged challenge to the superiority of Zeus — this far-fetched analogy is amply justified. Greenwood identifies three fields in which Gladwyn’s contribution was

Wednesday

Chris Skidmore

Pawns in the royal game

The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, by Leanda de Lisle Only recently a portrait minature by Lavina Teerlinc was identified as being of Lady Jane Grey. Her diminutive size, coiffed red hair and crimson lips had suggested that it might be her — except that the eyes are blue, while Jane’s were known to be brown; but Teerlinc was accustomed to giving all her subjects blue eyes. It is all we have; no other portrait of Jane is known to exist. The absence of a recognisable image reflects the problem facing any historian wishing to study her. The evidence is simply not there to form a credible description, let alone

Lee Langley

Troubled waters

Empires of the Indus, by Alice Albinia When Alice Albinia set off for the source of the Indus she was not embarking on a quest for the unknown: she knew where the river rises. She wanted to start her journey at its mouth, the delta on the Arabian Sea, to travel upstream to Tibet and tell the story of the river which gives India its name. Empires of the Indus covers a 2,000-mile journey and 5,000 years of history. Albinia’s prize-winning first book is a personal odyssey through landscape and time, fed by scholarship. Her pages resonate with great names: Timur, Genghis Khan, Alexander, Aurangzeb. But before that we have

Christopher Ondaatje

The life of the heart

Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, Letters and Diaries from the Love Affair of a Lifetime edited by Victoria Glendinning, with Judith Roberts It is probable that the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) was a virgin ten years after her marriage to Alan Cameron, the retired Secretary to the Central Council of School Broadcasting at the BBC. Victoria Glendinning tells us that ‘their alliance was always close — but companionable, not sexual.’ But then she began to have affairs: with the Irish writer Sean O’Faolain, and with Humphrey House, a young Oxford don; a lesbian relationship with May Santon, the Belgian-American poet; and a brief liaison with Goronwy