History

The story of Kim Philby is, of course, like so many English stories, really one of social class. He was one of the most scandalous traitors in history, and from within the security services sent specific information to the Soviets during the early years of the Cold War that resulted directly in the deaths of thousands of men and women. Among them were the Albanian guerrillas, hoping to liberate their country, who found Soviet-sponsored troops waiting at their landing places to shoot them. A list of non-communist opposers to the Nazis in Germany was passed on to the Russians who, advancing into Germany in the last years of the war, summarily executed 5,000 named people.

The pattern of foreign travel by wealthy young Englishmen that became known as the Grand Tour began in the Renaissance and matured in the 17th century. In its origins it was a training for statesmanship. The state’s takeover of the church, which had done so much of the state’s official business, enlarged the employment opportunities of the nobility and gentry. So did the expansion of the government’s administrative resources and ambitions. But with the opportunities came challenges. Monarchs needed their advisers and officials and diplomats to be skilled and knowledgeable. So noblemen and gentlemen urged their sons to look beyond the accustomed pleasures of the hunting field and get down to educational business.

John Steinbeck (1902–1968), an ardent propagandist for the exploited underdogs of the Great Depression, had barely enough money for subsistence during the years he spent preparing and writing The Grapes of Wrath, the protest novel regarded as his masterpiece. It made him a Nobel laureate and a very rich man. The Nobel committee praised his ‘realistic and imaginative writing, combining . . . sympathetic humour and keen social perception’. Seventy-four years after first publication, the book still sells more than 100,000 copies a year. In his Nobel acceptance speech in 1962, Steinbeck said that ‘a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature’.

During Japan’s lost decade in the 1990s I found myself handing out rice balls to Tokyo’s homeless on the banks of the Sumida river. The former salary men — it was always men — slept in cardboard boxes the size of coffins. I peered into one. Its owner had neatly arranged his last few possessions. Crockery, two wash rags and a blanket were all emblazoned with the designer logos I associated with Japan’s boom years when I had lived in Tokyo. They had washed up like artefacts from another age in this unlikely setting. They signalled more than anything else to me that Japan’s economic miracle was well and truly in the past. Financial Times Asia editor David Pilling lived in Japan for seven years.

So, what are you doing with your Christmas decorations? Still up? Did the tree get put out on 2 January? Maybe you’re holding out until the Twelfth Day, on the basis that it’s bad luck to have the decorations up after that? Or are you going out on a limb and keeping your holly, bay and ivy up until 2 February, Candlemas? This last is in fact the correct answer for traditionalists; prior to Victorian times, people kept the Christmas season going, along with the greenery, right up until Candlemas. Mind you, given that Christmas trees only caught on with Prince Albert, pre-Victorians didn’t have the problem of pine needles dripping all over the carpet.

‘You have no idea,’ wrote the publisher Ralph Hodder-Williams in 1929 to one of his authors, what terrible offence Journey’s End has given — and terrible pain too, which is a great deal more important. I think you will agree that the chronic alcoholic was extraordinarily rare. He was referring to R.C. Sherriff’s controversial tragedy of the trenches, which was then, 11 years after the war, enjoying an unexpected box-office success in the West End, where it played for nearly 600 performances. Its success came as a surprise, not only because Sherriff (1896–1975) was an unknown writer, and exclusively male war plays were not particularly popular, but also because audiences were expected to sympathise with an unusual war hero.