History

Henry Addington, first Viscount Sidmouth, was briefly and, on the whole, ingloriously Prime Minister at the beginning of the nineteenth century and then spent nearly ten years as Home Secretary at a time when Britain seemed as close as it had ever been to violent revolution. In both capacities he displayed an unwavering conservatism which seemed inexcusable to his political opponents and sometimes even caused disquiet among his supporters. He was a relic of the eighteenth century who signally failed to adjust to the realities of the nineteenth: when the Great Reform Bill was passed in 1832 it seemed to him bound to lead within a few years to the collapse of civilised society. 'I hope,' he told Lord Grey, 'God will forgive you on account of this Bill. I don't think I can.

George Packer is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq, a book that received several prizes. Packer’s other non-fiction books include, The Village of Waiting and Blood of the Liberals, the latter winning the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is also the author of two novels, The Half Man and Central Square.  Packer’s latest book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, is a work of non-fiction that attempts to document the massive political and economic changes that have taken place in the last three decades in the United States.

Francis Quarles, An emblem on books 'The world’s a book, writ by the eternal art Of the great Maker, printed in man’s heart; ‘Tis falsely printed, though divinely penned, And all the erratas will appear at the end.' I like this witty little poem. The idea is simple – just as books have their printing errors listed on the last page, we’ll have all our sins listed to us at the Last Judgement. As a joke, it says a lot about the way seventeenth-century people thought about human nature. Today, I think, the whole Last Judgement thing is a bit off-putting to most people. No-one likes to be told they’re sinful. Except that four hundred year ago it seems they did. Couldn’t get enough of it, in fact.

So here we go again into a heart of darkness:  the humbug and horror which is the history of Spanish South America ever since Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola. Now modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the island’s population had within a few decades of Columbus’ arrival, through genocide and disease, been reduced to barely 200. And that was just the beginning. No Christian nation has ever trailed such a shameful colonial past, which is why the colonists must feel the need to assemble what they see as its glories. This, the 2,684th book about Simon Bolívar, is subtitled ‘The Epic Life of the Man Who Liberated South America’. But liberated it for whom?

Silly season is here. A minor row has broken out over which long-dead figures should appear on the reverse side of Bank of England notes. I can’t be bothered to relate the details because you’ve all got better things to do like water the garden, fix lunch or watch Loose Women. Basically, Sir Mervyn King’s got it in the neck from the Continuity Bien Pensants by seeming to back Winston Churchill and Jane Austen for this dubious accolade. So far, so ludicrous. But there’s one more point worth making. The criteria for this banknote business are that the subject must be enduringly famous and recognisable. This does rather limit the field, particularly where ‘politically correct’ candidates are concerned.

Recent convulsions in China’s banks will not, I suspect, have surprised Timothy Beardson, a sinophile, veteran Hong Kong financier and author of Stumbling Giant: The Threats to China’s Future. He argues that China’s extraordinary growth over the last 30 years has come in spite of its banking system. A dinner party might speculate where China would be if not for Mao; but a more immediate question is: where would China be if its banking system supported the private sector? “If the economy has grown by 10 per cent for 30 years, as is reported (and I think that the data in China is very frail – it probably hasn’t grown at 10 per cent a year – but it’s clearly grown at a very high rate and that’s all that matters).

There I was, slowly and not ungrumpily coming to terms with the fact that there weren’t going to be any more decent books about the Apollo missions. Only 12 men ever walked on the Moon, and the ones that were interested in writing autobiographies had already done so. There’d been the brilliant one-volume history of the whole project (Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon), and the personal memoir of what it meant to an ordinary kid growing up at the time (Andrew Smith’s Moondust). There were the big glossy coffee-table jobs showing every crater, and Norman Mailer’s over-written but still revealing account of being at Houston and Cape Kennedy, A Fire on the Moon. What was there possibly left to write?

I spent the weekend in Dublin; consequently, I am suffering from what Apthorpe would have called ‘Bechuana tummy’. For the uninitiated, Apthorpe is the premier fool in Men at Arms, the first book in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. I was reading it in bed last night and was wryly amused by this joke, which hangs over two chapters: ‘The two lame men climbed into the car and returned to Kut-al-Amara in alcoholic gloom.  Chapter 7 Next day Apthorpe had a touch of Bechuana tummy, but he rose none the less.’ I return to Men at Arms often, but never without reason. I did so this time because Father’s Day fell yesterday. My father is of a generation and I am of a temperament: we don’t do Father’s Day.