History

Thursday

Caroline Moore

Too much of everything

Arundhati Roy has published only one previous novel, but that one, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize. That was 20 years ago. Early success did not, however, block Roy into neurotic silence: instead, it offered her a platform for verbally intemperate political activism. She is an impassioned campaigner against globalisation, industrialisation and all forms of the arch-enemy capitalism, and a critic of US foreign policy, Israel and the government of Sri Lanka. Her Booker prize money was donated to the campaign against the Narmada Dam project. To Indian critics who condemn her hyperbole as ‘hysterical’ she retorted: ‘I am hysterical, I’m screaming from the bloody roof tops.

Thursday

Jonathan Keates

The fount of all knowledge

Somewhere around the middle of the 17th century our modern concept of the museum began to take shape. Until then the cabinet of curiosities formed by a prince or a dilettante was on show solely to his friends or to scholars deemed worthy of having it unlocked. Nothing in the way of a systematic catalogue existed to help them navigate the gallimaufry of odd objects filling its shelves and cupboards. A Japanese netsuke button, an Arawak headdress and a handkerchief soaked in the blood of Charles I could be found nestling beside a stuffed alligator or a bezoar stone, calculus from an animal’s stomach held to possess magical curative powers.

Thursday

Victor Sebestyen

A brave new world – at gunpoint

Of the many books published this year to mark the centenary of the Russian revolution, this is perhaps the most curious. China Miéville is best known as an imaginative and entertaining writer of ‘weird’ (his word) science fiction and magic realism. October is a narrative history of the two 1917 revolutions in Russia, written from an ultra-left perspective — with a novelist’s eye for a good story and colourful characters. So it’s an examination of why the communist experiment failed miserably — at the cost of much blood — that is also wonderfully well written: smart, witty and full of fresh insight. But it can also read like an A-level essay, regurgitated from textbooks. Weird indeed.

Thursday

Boyd Tonkin

On the trail of a lost masterpiece

On 27 May 1939, the German liner St Louis docked in Havana with 937 passengers on board: all but a handful of them were Jews in flight from the Third Reich. After a dismal farrago of diplomatic obstruction, bare-faced corruption among local officials and the incitement by Nazi propaganda of anti-Semitic prejudice ‘even’ (as Leonardo Padura sorrowfully puts it) ‘among the open and happy Cubans’, only a score of refugees could disembark. The US refused entry to the rest. Their ship of despair sailed back to Europe.

Monday

Carola Binney

In defence of cultural history

Why study history? It's a question which often gets asked, and the historian R. G. Collingwood's answer - that history should enable us to ‘see more clearly into the situation in which we are compelled to act’- is one of the best responses. The idea that the study of the past should be applicable to the present has directed the career of Niall Ferguson, who was recently bemoaning the degradation of the subject. Discussing the current focus on race, class and gender in history faculties in a recent speech, Ferguson argued that undergraduates are being robbed of the chance to study events of real significance.

Thursday

Peter Jones

Thucydides on McGuinness

When Gerry Adams rose to announce at his funeral that Martin McGuinness was no terrorist but a ‘freedom fighter’, the historian Thucydides probably allowed himself a grim smile. He knew all about these sort of people. In 427 BC, Corcyra (ancient Greek Kerkura, now Corfu) was in the grip of a ferocious civil war between oligarchic and democratic factions for control of the state. The feature that stood out for Thucydides was the reversal of all normal, civilised values on both sides of the divide. Most striking of all, ‘men reversed the usual evaluative force of words to suit their own assessment of the situation’.

John Hemming

Lost city of fantasy

The new film The Lost City of Z is being advertised as based on the true story of one of Britain’s greatest explorers. It is about Lt-Col Percy Fawcett. Greatest explorer? Fawcett? He was a surveyor who never discovered anything, a nutter, a racist, and so incompetent that the only expedition he organised was a five-week disaster. Calling him one of our greatest explorers is like calling Eddie the Eagle one of our greatest sportsmen. It is an insult to the huge roster of true explorers. Had the advertisement been about a soap powder, it would fall foul of the Trade Descriptions Act. Percy Fawcett joined the army immediately after school, with a commission in the artillery in 1886. The next 20 years involved garrison duty in Ceylon and postings in Malta and England.

Thursday

Peter Jones

Theresa May at the Rubicon

Last week many commentators drew on the Ides (15th) of March, the anniversary of Julius Caesar’s death in 44 BC, to reflect on the signing of Article 50 and Julius Caesar’s famous cry ‘The die is cast’ (iacta alea est) in 49 BC, when he crossed the River Rubicon into Italy and started the civil war against Pompey. But they got it wrong: it does not mean ‘no turning back’. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Caesar-Pompey power struggle, Caesar knew the consequences of this moment. Our sources describe the build-up. Caesar is camped with his troops in Ravenna. Messages are flying back and forth between him and Pompey in Rome.

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Machiavelli’s lifelong quest for freedom

In this week’s Books Podcast I talk to Erica Benner about her new Life of Machiavelli, Be Like The Fox. Professor Benner, a Yale expert in political science, offers a new and intriguing reading of the great theorist of statecraft — arguing that in the violent and unstable Florence of his time, he learned to conceal his real meanings in layers of irony and satire. We ask, in essence, just how Machiavellian Machiavelli really was…. You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, please subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

The Spectator

Up the revolution!

From ‘The Russian revolution’, 24 March 1917: Even now, though the Revolution is young, the Russians have proved that they are fit and worthy to exercise the full benefits of self-government. In the highest spheres of government they had hitherto been always thwarted, but no one who has watched the progress and expanding influence of the Zemstvos and the Municipalities can deny that Russians have long displayed the capacity for local self-government. Such a Revolution as has just occurred was inevitably born in violence, but the violence was much less than might have been expected.

Bruce Anderson

The fall of Paris

Paris used to be the most self-confident city in the world. Brash, assertive, boastful: Manhattan claimed to be the best. Cool, elegant, sophisticated, supercilious: Paris knew that it was the best. This is no longer true. Paris has lost its élan, and that has created a love-hate relationship with the UK. Everyone seems to know someone who is working in London. The ones left in Paris cannot decide whether to punish us or join us: to hope that Brexit fails — or to fear that Brexit might fail, and keep able young Frenchmen from job opportunities in London. Flics everywhere, tattiness, tension: one is reluctant to acknowledge the successes of evil, but terrorism is at the core of Paris’s problems.

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 16 March 2017

Mary Queen of Golf? The vote by the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers to admit women as members has reawakened speculation as to who was the first woman to play golf. —According to legend, Mary Queen of Scots played the game at St Andrews and coined the phrase ‘caddy’ when referring to the cadet who was carrying her clubs. Yet the evidence seems to relate to a charge made by her opponents that she played golf within days of the death of her husband, Lord Darnley. — A more realistic candidate appeared in the Caledonian Mercury, an Edinburgh newspaper, in 1738, which reported two women playing a game at Bruntsfield Links; a ‘charming Sally’ won.

Robert Peal

Our island story is for everyone

Iam a teacher in a state secondary school in west London where the ethnic diversity of the pupils is remarkable. My current Year 9 class, for example, includes pupils with parents from Trinidad, Ireland, Turkey, French Guina, Algeria, Yemen, Italy, France, Bosnia, Albania, India, Germany, Iceland, Portugal, Zanzibar, Lebanon, America, and Spain. Over the past few decades, this ethnic diversity has been used as an argument against the teaching of national history. ‘What relevance do Boudicca and Benjamin Disraeli have to multi-ethnic pupils in modern Britain?’ it is asked. Well, quite a lot, I answer.

The Spectator

Disaster in the Dardanelles

From ‘The Dardanelles report’, 17 March 1917: The plan of the government in the case of the Dardanelles Expedition had the worst fault which any naval or military plan, or naval and military plan combined, can have. It had no real objective… or rather, to put it in another way, it only had a vague and general objective, not one which was clear and specific and could be carried through by a series of definite acts… To say vaguely that Constantinople was its objective was nonsense. A tourist, a mere sightseer, might have Constantinople as his objective, but not a fleet or an army, or even a commercial traveller.

Mary Wakefield

Redemption for the Ripper

In the autumn of 1888 London was in a state of terrified excitement over Jack the Ripper. There had never been a killer like this in England before, wrote Meredith Townsend and Richard Holt Hutton, the joint editors of The Spectator. They congratulated the British public on not succumbing to the continental habit of lynching (‘In Naples the doctors would have perished, in Berlin the Jews’) but warned that ‘this devil’ might never be caught. By January 1889, Townsend and Hutton were calling for an end to all the ‘morbid interest’ in the Ripper’s crimes.

Justin Marozzi

Lawrence of Arabia

The centenary of General Allenby’s capture of Jerusalem falls later this year. On 11 December 1917, the commander-in-chief of Britain’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force entered the city on foot in recognition of the unique sensitivities surrounding the world’s holiest city. War and farce are never too far removed and, as is so often the case on these extraordinarily important moments, the surrender of Jerusalem almost went hilariously wrong. Mounted on horseback and waving a white flag, the city’s mayor offered to hand over the keys to Private Murch, a British cook who had been sent out to find some eggs for his commanding officer. ‘I don’t want yer city,’ the stalwart Murch told the immaculately-turned-out mayor.

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 9 March 2017

Naming the weather Former BBC weatherman Bill Giles has said he’s fed up with storms being named. — The practice of naming storms in the UK began with storm Abigail in October 2015, although some earlier storms, like Bertha in 2014, were the remnants of hurricanes already named in the US. The St Jude’s Day storm of 2013 took its name from the saint’s day on which it fell. — The US National Hurricane Centre first named storms in 1950, when it started calling them by a phonetic alphabet: Able, Baker, Charlie etc. Three years later it switched to women’s names, starting with Alice, a damp squib with winds not exceeding 60mph. Its first male storm was Bob in 1979, a 65mph weakling.

Thursday

The Spectator

A model village

From ‘Sir Thomas Acland’s example’, The Spectator, 3 March 1917: In 1912 we discussed the idea — a favourite dream of ours — that some characteristic English village, perfect of its kind but likely to lose its quality in the hugger-mugger expansions of modern enterprise, might be acquired by the National Trust to be kept forever as a specimen, in a changing world, of what used to be… Men freely give pictures and collections of china and plate and furniture to the nation. Why not the grouped architectural works of man? Why, too, should not open pieces of country be given as often as pictures and bronzes and statues?

Thursday

Christopher De Bellaigue

Islam’s lost Enlightenment

I am quite used to people smirking into their sleeves when they hear that I’ve just written a book called The Islamic Enlightenment. The really helpful wags say they expect something along the lines of The Wit and Wisdom of Spiro Agnew, which was billed as a collection of all the memorable aphorisms of the former US vice-president, and contained only blank pages. So, the Islamic Enlightenment — good for a laugh. But we’re all familiar with the serious argument that lies behind the jests; that Islam has not been through an Enlightenment, a Reformation, or any of the other rites of passage that have formed our modernity, and that, ergo, Muslims and modernity are strangers.

The Spectator

The Americans are coming

From ‘What will the United States do?’, The Spectator, 24 February 1917: It may be that the congestion of American shipping may force Mr Wilson’s hand, for a partial paralysis in the docks is temporary evidence that Germany can intimidate the greatest of neutrals. But, on the whole, we expect that some more sudden and violent demonstration of German violence will cause Mr Wilson to summon the American nation to action. When that happens we shall be able to say that Germany, among her other diplomatic achievements, has reunited the Anglo-Saxon world.