History

Thursday

Mark Greaves

Recycled graves – coming soon to a cemetery near you

Two marble graves are side by side. One is grey and encrusted, with moss growing over the top. The other is smooth and shiny white. It looks new but, in fact, like the grave next to it, it’s more than 100 years old. It’s not just been cleaned — its top layer has been shaved off completely. On its front are potted plants, hydrangeas and a can of Guinness. These are tributes to its new resident. Its old resident, Robert John, died in 1894. His inscription is still there, on the back of the headstone. His remains are there, too, if they haven’t disappeared into the soil. John’s grave is

Julie Kavanagh

Nijinsky, by Lucy Moore – review

The first biography of Vaslav Nijinsky, which appeared in 1934, was written by his wife Romola with the help of two ghosts — the young Lincoln Kirstein and Little Blue Bird, an obliging spirit called up by a psychic medium to provide information from beyond the grave. Needless to say, the book wasn’t entirely accurate; and nor, two years later, was her edition of Nijinsky’s confessional diaries, a stream-of-consciousness record of his descent into madness, which she censored, restructured and cut by over a third. It took Richard Buckle’s now classic life of the dancer (published in l971 and amended after Romola’s death) to sort fact from fiction and recreate

Nicky Haslam

Flappers, by Judith Mackrell – review

I’m never quite sure what the term ‘flappers’ means. How did these creatures flap, and why? Where did they flap? Did they flap all day, or only at night? Were theyin a flap, or being flapped, sad-flaps or flap-happy? Did they open flaps, or close them? Did they flap Jacks, or flip Jills, or both? Reference books don’t help much. The OED says the word means a fly-killer, and you really don’t want to know the Dictionary of Slang’s definitions. So what was, in the accepted vo-deyo-do-ing, headache-band-browed, fancy-dress costume and Baz Luhrmanesque image, a ‘flapper’? One might assume that in this substantial, erudite and detailed, but oddly humour-free book,

Sam Leith

The birth of modern Britain

‘Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce?’ asked Julian Barnes in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. ‘No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.’ Reading David Kynaston’s densely detailed new book — in a ‘projected sequence of books about Britain between 1945 and 1979’ with the slightly magniloquent general title of Tales of a New Jerusalem — there isn’t half a whiff of onions. We have an Old Etonian prime minister with a chancellor ideologically hellbent on belt-tightening; we have a poisonous and sometimes violent debate

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Taste Ranald Macdonald’s wines, and you can forgive his ancestors for allying with the Vikings

The Macdonalds of Clanranald are one of the oldest families in the world. Their lineage comfortably predates the Scotland of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Descended from the Macdonald Lords of the Isles and sea kings of Dalriada, the Clanranalds emerge from the mists, myths and archaeology of the Dark Ages. But they were guilty of a misjudgment. Just as Robert the Bruce started life as an Anglo-Norman noble, the Macdonalds had to navigate the violent uncertainties of pre- and early medieval Scotland. They also had to reckon with the Vikings. (A Viking longship arrives at a beach, and the bosun divides the crew into three squads. ‘You lot, burning and slaughtering. You,

Molly Guinness

Hairstyles Ancient and Present, by Charlotte Fiell – review

The key thing in 18th-century France was to get the hair extremely high. Perching on a small ladder behind his client, a Parisian hairdresser could pull off all sorts of engineering feats. Once the hair was three foot in the air, the coiffeur could add props — ribbons, shepherdesses, feathers, mythical allegories. After a French naval victory in 1778, some of the more patriotic women took to sporting a ship riding on the waves of their hair. Extravagance was frowned upon after the Revolution, but innovation continued; some ladies of fashion took to wearing their hair very short like the hair of those condemned to the guillotine. The style was

James Mcconnachie

Alexandria, by Peter Stothard – review

This subtle, mournful book is many things. It is a diary of three weeks spent, during the tense winter before the outburst of the Arab Spring, in off-season Alexandria, where nothing comes ‘except birds to the lake, most of them when they have lost their way’. It is also a series of fragments rescued from Peter Stothard’s rich life as Essex schoolboy, Oxford student, Times editor and lifelong classicist. Another part, but only a small one, is a history of Cleopatra — and the story of Stothard’s seven previous, failed attempts to write about her. Classical scholars, however, will recognise this book for what it really is. The poets of

Owen Bennett-Jones

To Move the World, by Jeffrey Sachs – review

Jeffrey Sachs is the world’s best-connected development economist. An academic with highly developed communication skills, he has always managed to secure access to policy makers and to offer them advice. His record is controversial. Back in the 1990s he worked on Russia’s transition from a command to a capitalist economy. He advocated the approach that Yeltsin adopted — shock therapy. The result was pensioners on the streets selling off furniture, jewellery and even their clothes to raise cash for food. Whilst there were many other factors at play, it now seems obvious that China’s transition to capitalism was better handled. China didn’t take Sachs’s advice. More recently Sachs has argued

Philip Hensher

How do you define a ‘northerner’?

Obviously, now that every high street in England looks identical, and everyone under 30 uses exactly the same Australian rising inflection in speech, books of this sort are based on a false and wishful premise. But let us enter into Paul Morley’s game and ask the question he has asked again. What is ‘the north’ — or ‘the North’ — anyway? Obviously, as a geographical entity, we know (roughly) what we are talking about; we can argue about Derbyshire, but between Yorkshire and Scotland no one is going to dispute what the north is. Culturally, we may think we know what we are talking about, but all attempts to pin

Thursday

Christopher Booker

Global Crisis, by Geoffrey Parker – review

Just before I was sent this huge tour de force of a book to review, I happened to be reading those 17th-century diary accounts by Pepys and John Evelyn which record a remarkable number of what would today be called ‘extreme weather events’. Repeatedly we see them referring to prolonged droughts, horrendous floods, summers and winters so abnormally hot or cold that their like was ‘never known in the world before’. These were the days of those London Frost Fairs, when the Thames froze so thickly that it could bear horses, coaches and streets of shops. This was the time of the Maunder Minimum, when for decades after 1645 sunspot

Tuesday

Christopher Fletcher

Jane Austen’s pinny

This is the third entry in an occasional series by Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library. You can read the other instalments here. It’s almost two years since the Bodleian celebrated its hard-fought acquisition (nail biting auction) of Jane Austen’s manuscript draft of her abandoned novel, The Watsons. Thank you again National Heritage Memorial Fund, Friends of the Bodleian, Friends of the National Libraries, Jane Austen Memorial Trust and all supporting Janeites everywhere. Once a manuscript has been fetched into the bosom of the Bodleian, repaired, shelf-marked, and safely housed, it needs to be studied. So it was that at a seminar with Professor Kathryn Sutherland,

Friday

J P O'Malley

Jesse Norman interview: Edmund Burke, our chief of men

When he arrived in London, Burke had a very brief career in law. He soon dedicated his time to critical thinking, writing and politics. Burke published a number of ground breaking books, including: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and Reflections on the Revolution in France. In his new book, Edmund Burke, Jesse Norman dissects Burke’s outstanding intellect, and his career. He then asks how these ideas might be applied to modern politics. Jesse Norman is Conservative MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire. In 2012 he was named as the Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year. He is a member of the Treasury

Thursday

Jonathan Ruffer

When cautious-looking investments are the riskiest option

When can a famine taste pretty good? The answer is when you are eating the cattle which have just died of thirst. And that’s where we are today in the investment market. The famine is a lack of income — cash held in a completely safe bank, or in short-term government securities, earns almost nothing. Where’s the feast? The answer is in yield-bearing investments, into which savings are pouring — they produce a modicum of yield, to be sure — but that is dwarfed by the capital gains which have accompanied them. Those who have already made this switch are understandably rather pleased, and often rather pleased with themselves. Both

Thursday

Douglas Murray

“The right hero” – Douglas Murray reviews Jesse Norman’s Burke biography.

Edmund Burke is one of the most difficult thinkers to write about. His philosophy defies easy summary. His career, while noble, was not glittering. Many details that he exhausted himself over — such as the impeachment of Warren Hastings — were arcana before he was dead. And hardest of all is that Burke’s prose style is among the best in the language. Writing about Burke’s prose is like singing about Maria Callas’s voice. On each re-acquaintance with it you wonder why you don’t read Burke all the time. There was hardly a subject he tackled which he did not master, and not a register that he did not perfect. In

Monday

Austen Saunders

The Glorious Revolution and small ‘c’ conservatism

From a dialogue  between a non-juring clergyman and his wife by Edward ‘Ned’ Ward Wife: Why will you prove so obstinate, my dear, And rather choose to starve, than yield to swear? Why give up all the comforts of your life, Expose to want your children and your wife; Hug your own ruin through a holy pride, Which interest calls you now to lay aside; And common safety, that prevailing plea, Justifies those who wisely do agree? Consider, therefore, and in time comply, You may, perhaps, on some mistakes rely; And then, how fatal ‘twould hereafter be, That error should beget our misery? Secure the living first you’ve long possessed, And

Friday

Walter Ellis

Dreams and Nightmares: Europe in the twentieth century

So much abuse has been heaped on the European Union in recent years that it is easy to forget that Europe and the EU are not the same thing. Geert Mak reminds us of this fact. He is one of the most celebrated journalists and commentators in the Netherlands. Mak – widely read, multi-lingual and endlessly curious – considers the whole of Europe to be his home. He has won awards for his books in Germany, as well as in his native Holland, and been inducted into the Legion d’Honneur in France. He is also, on the side, a bit of an anglophile. In 1999, with millennial fever rising, Mak

Thursday

David Crane

The Young Titan, by Michael Shelden; Churchill’s First War, by Con Coughlin – review

One evening in 1906, shortly after the election that brought Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberals into power, an understandably nervous Eddie Marsh, a middle-ranking civil servant in the Colonial Office, paid a social call on the Dowager Countess of Lytton.  The previous day Marsh had gone through a tricky first meeting with the new number two in the department, and it had been a surprise to him on going into the office that morning to hear that he was wanted as his private secretary.  ‘Desperate, Marsh begged the dowager countess for guidance,’ writes Michael Shelden in his Young Titan: She had known Winston and Jennie for many years… She had also been acquainted

Jane Ridley

Perilous Question, by Antonia Fraser— review

There are times when a major drama in the House of Commons really does change the course of British history. The period 1974–79, dramatised in the play This House, was one such. The crisis over the Great Reform Bill was another. Not so long ago, every schoolboy knew that the 1832 Reform Act gave the vote to the middle classes. Nowadays, thanks to the collapse of history teaching, very few schoolboys or girls know anything about it at all. Antonia Fraser has written a compelling and timely book on this almost forgotten political battle. The story begins with the election of 1830, which was called because of the accession of

Wednesday

Nick Cohen

More Niallism: Keynes opposed Versailles because he was a screaming queen

When I heard that Niall Ferguson had said that JM Keynes advocated reckless economic policies because he was gay and childless, and hence had no concern for the future, I wrote: ‘If true, this represents Ferguson’s degeneration from historian to shock jock’. The reports were true, but I was wrong. There has been no degeneration. Ferguson has always been this crass and crassly inaccurate. Donald Markwell, Warden of Rhodes House until last year, pointed me to his John Maynard Keynes and International Relations for the gruesome details. Markwell had to devote time and space to the ugly task of dissecting an attack on Keynes by Ferguson in a 1995 edition

Friday

J P O'Malley

Interview: David Graeber, leading figure of Occupy

The anarchist movement in the United States has had the support of leading libertarian intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky; but it has lacked a figure who could transform its guiding principles into something resembling a political movement. In the autumn of 2011, David Graeber seemed to be the man who could drag anarchism into mainstream politics. Graeber, along with other leading figures in the Occupy movement, coined the term ‘we are the 99 percent’. The catchphrase caught on, and within weeks — with the assistance of social media — Occupy transformed a small group of idealists with little support into a radical network occupying 800 cities around the world. Graeber’s