History

The historiography of the Great War is stupendous, the effects of the conflict being so far-reaching that even today historians are finding angles hitherto unexplored that they can make books out of; or, at the lower end of the scale, they are content to retell the old story in a different way. What we have been short of in the English canon is a view of the war not just from the other side, but from all sides: it was, as Colonel Repington termed it, ‘the first world war’, and not simply four years of carnage between the British and the Germans. Jörn Leonhard’s epic and magnificent work — unquestionably, for me, the best single-volume history of the war I have ever read — tries, with some success, to embrace everything.

Are books becoming an adjunct to TV? Both of these are good reads, but both feel influenced by — and yearning for — television. Medieval Bodies could be the script for a landmark BBC Four series, while the author of How to Behave Badly in Renaissance Britain came to prominence as farthingale consultant on programmes such as Tudor Monastery Farm. She can tell you everything you never wanted to know about codpieces. Medieval Bodies skips between English, Welsh, Hebraic and Islamic medicine with ease, touching on caliphs and kings, Mamluks and djinns. One gem here is the inventor Ismail al-Jazari, the Heath Robinson of 13th-century Baghdad.

On 23 May 1618, Bohemian Protestants pushed two Catholic governors and their secretary through the windows of Prague Castle, in protest at the anti-Protestantism of Bohemia’s King Ferdinand, soon to be elected Emperor Ferdinand II. The defenestration was only injurious to dignity, and had farcical aspects, a rebel shouting: ‘We shall see if your Mary can help you!’, only to exclaim, ‘By God, his Mary has helped!’ when the men landed in a midden. This sparked what C. V. Wedgwood termed ‘the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict’ — the bloodiest campaign ever waged on German soil.

‘The Victoria Cross,’ gushed a mid-19th-century contributor to the Art Journal, ‘is thoroughly English in every particular. Given alike to the highest and the lowest in rank, but given always with a cautious and discriminating hand... the Victoria Cross is an epic poem’. Like all epic poems, the VC has its tragedies. For some that tragedy lay on the field of battle; for others, as Brian Izzard details in his often depressing new book, it lay in the life that followed. The original Royal Warrant by which Victoria instituted her eponymous medal stipulated that it was to be given only for service ‘in the presence of the enemy’ for some ‘signal act of valour, or devotion to country’.

Dr Felix Klos is an extremely personable, highly intelligent American-Dutch historian who has undertaken much archival research, worked extremely hard and is an excellent writer. In trying to persuade us that Churchill favoured Britain joining a federal Europe, however, he comes up against several immovable obstacles. The most serious of these is that in the four years that Churchill was prime minister, between 1951 and 1955, he personally, regularly and decisively blocked all movement towards Britain joining any of the European federal institutions that existed. However engaging Klos may be, and however well written his book, he is utterly wrong in his central thesis.

So the Phoenicians never existed. Herodotus, that unreliable old fibber, made it all up in the Histories. Is this really what Josephine Quinn is saying, or is it just a cunning ruse to stir up a fuss and infuriate the dwindling band of Herodoteans out there? Because Quinn, a professor of ancient history at Oxford University, declares that her mission is not so much to rescue the Phoenicians from their ‘undeserved obscurity’ so much as to argue that there were no such people. ‘It is modern nationalism that has created the Phoenicians,’ she writes, citing 19th-century French, English and German historians who spoke of the Phoenician ‘people’ and ‘nation’ in the age of the nation state.

Mrs Thatcher once explained that she adored cleaning the fridge because, in a complicated life, it was one of the few tasks she could begin and end to total satisfaction. In this way are refrigerators evidence of our struggles, our hopes and our fears. Moreover, if you accept that the selection and preparation of food is a defining part of our culture, then you must acknowledge the primacy of the refrigerator in human affairs. In 2012, The Royal Society declared refrigeration to be the single most significant innovation in food technology since Fred Flintstone invented the barbecue. Me? I wrote these notes while chewing chilled sapphire grapes from Brazil, via Waitrose, messengers from our refrigerated global food chain. Your domestic fridge is your autobiography.

I grew up knowing 1947 as the year of my father’s birth, in a black-and-white faraway time. I was told about rationing and petrol coupons, as yet another chapter in the long book of ‘how good you have it now’ — along with chilblains, measles, castor oil and walking ten miles to school neck deep in snow, uphill both ways. The Swedish author Elizabeth Åsbrink presents the year as the fulcrum of modern history, when ‘everything seemed possible, as it had already happened’. Month by month, she shows us the year through the eyes of a disparate cast of characters. Some of them are well known (George Orwell, Simone de Beauvoir, Chuck Yeager, Primo Levi), some are passers-by who happened to be in history’s path.