History

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 activity was almost non-existent.

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.

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 Select Committee and is a senior fellow at the think tank, Policy Exchange.

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 A Letter to a Noble Lord he writes of one detractor: The Duke of Bedford is the Leviathan among all the creatures of the Crown.

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?

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 was commissioned by the centre-left Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad to set off on an epic journey.

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.

Since the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, European history has been dominated by two themes: the centrality of Germany and the primacy of foreign policy. This is the argument of Brendan Simms’ new book, Europe: the struggle for supremacy 1453 to the present. Simms is a professor of the History of International Relations at Cambridge University and his decidedly European focus has allowed him to craft a detailed yet expansive account in the style of Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. One afternoon we sat down at Penguin’s offices on the Strand to discuss these issues, as well as their relevance to the current European Union debate.

The life of Oscar Wilde is so wearily familiar that we assume that there is nothing new to think or say about him. This book proves us wrong. Carlos Blacker - the central figure of  J. Robert Maguire's research for more than half a century - rates, at best, a bare mention in Wilde's many biographies. Yet, as Maguire conclusively demonstrates, he is no footnote. Blacker, a handsome man of Latin extraction, knew Wilde in the days of his London pomp, was a witness at the writer's wedding to the long-suffering Constance Lloyd, and often saw his friend on a daily basis.

Does monotropa hypopithys, or yellow bird’s nest, still grow in Mickleham, Surrey, in the woods once owned by Sir Lucas Pepys the celebrity physician who, in ministering to King George III, ‘found the stool more eloquent than the pulse?’ The question is prompted by the Bodleian’s recent acquisition of a ‘Catalogus Plantarum’ kept in the 1790s by an anonymous Botanist who roamed the south of England looking for specimens and noting them down with meticulous care in an exact italic.