History

Saturday

James Hamilton

A catastrophe waiting to happen

Gillian Darley’s book has the pace, colour and deliberation of a Vesuvian eruption, which is fitting; for we must get used to the fact that sooner or later the volcano will erupt again with a devastating power. Gillian Darley’s book has the pace, colour and deliberation of a Vesuvian eruption, which is fitting; for we must get used to the fact that sooner or later the volcano will erupt again with a devastating power. The subtitle of the book is quite accurate. Vesuvius probably is the most famous volcano in the world, because unlike all others it has attracted for some 2,000 years multifarious extraordinary people to study it. Darley enumerates these in their legions, showing that Pliny the Younger, writing after the 79 AD eruption, was not the first.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

The Lucifer Effect

Today’s papers are full of comment on the brilliant Panorama exposé of care home abuse. But none have mentioned what jumped out at me: the parallels between this and the Stanford Prison Experiment. The way that the tattooed Wayne treated his mentally ill patients is sickening — but, to me, this is not just a story about human evil. It’s a story about how institutionalisation brings out the evil in people, and that this evil is far closer to the surface than we like to admit. Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford, randomly divided 25 volunteers to play the roles of prisoners and guards in a poorly-regulated, mock prison.

Saturday

Peter Parker

Goodbye to Berlin

Peter Parker is beguiled by a novel approach to the lives of Europe’s intellectual elite in flight from Nazi Germany In his time, Heinrich Mann was considered one of Germany’s leading writers and intellectuals. Unlike his rivalrous younger brother Thomas, who always put his literary career before any other consideration, Heinrich was an early and outspoken critic of the Nazis, and so forced to leave Germany in February 1933. He was based for several years in the south of France, while travelling around the world to denounce the regime he had left behind, and he eventually emigrated to America in 1940, settling in Los Angeles. Unlike many European emigrants who thrived in the Californian sun, Mann did not adapt well to transplantation.

Anne Chisholm

What did you do in the war, Mummy?

By tradition, ‘What did you do in the war?’ is a question children address to Daddy, not to Mummy. By tradition, ‘What did you do in the war?’ is a question children address to Daddy, not to Mummy. In this ambitious, humane and absorbing book Virginia Nicholson moves Mummy firmly to the centre of the stage as she chronicles, largely in their own words, the lives of British women during the second world war. It is dedicated to one of them, her own mother, Anne Popham, later Anne Olivier Bell, who as a young woman suffered agonising wartime loss but went on to marry and become one of the great editors of her time through her work on the diaries of her husband’s aunt (and Nicholson’s great-aunt) Virginia Woolf. Nicholson sees her as typical.

Monday

Ed Howker

Alan Greenspan doesn’t exist

Five years have passed since Alan Greenspan stepped down from the most influential banking job in the world. (Now that’s how to leave at the right time.) Described in books, interviews and profiles too numerous to mention as ‘the most powerful regulator/person on earth’, he served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve for 19 years. For reasons of sheer longevity, perhaps Greenspan deserves to be called the architect of the modern global economy more than any of his elected contemporaries.

Saturday

Hester Vaizey

A conflict of loyalty

What was life like in Hitler’s Germany? This question has long fascinated authors and readers alike, as books like Alone in Berlin, The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas and The Book Thief bear witness. What was life like in Hitler’s Germany? This question has long fascinated authors and readers alike, as books like Alone in Berlin, The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas and The Book Thief bear witness. Nazi Germany, it has often been argued, was a totalitarian dictatorship. Through force, indoctrination and even common consent, such an interpretation contends, Hitler wielded total power and had complete control of the German population. But were the tentacles of the Nazi state as strong as this understanding suggests?

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The Queen’s Speech

At the state dinner at Dublin Castle this evening is rather good. As you would expect from HMQ it says all the right things and does so modestly and without fanfare. Especially this bit: Of course, the relationship has not always been straightforward; nor has the record over the centuries been entirely benign. It is a sad and regrettable reality that through history our islands have experienced more than their fair share of heartache, turbulence and loss. These events have touched us all, many of us personally, and are a painful legacy. We can never forget those who have died or been injured, and their families. To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy.

Alex Massie

This Scotland Subordinate? Only to a Crying Fool.

Much of Alex Salmond's speech on the occasion of his re-election as First Minister was entirely unobjectionable and some of it was even eloquent. A shame, then, that his peroration threw all that away: A change is coming, and the people are ready. They put ambition ahead of hesitation. The process is not about endings. It is about beginnings. Whatever changes take place in our constitution, we will remain close to our neighbours. We will continue to share a landmass, a language and a wealth of experience and history with the other peoples of these islands My dearest wish is to see the countries of Scotland and England stand together as equals There is a difference between partnership and subordination. The first encourages mutual respect. The second breeds resentment.

Alex Massie

This Social Union, This Commonwealth

On reflection, perhaps I've been a little too quick to discount the historical significance of the Queen's visit to Ireland this week. Like so much else, it's a question of perspective. If you're 80 years old and a citizen of the Irish Republic, perhaps the sight of the Irish President greeting and welcoming the British monarch on equal terms would seem quietly moving and even a cause of some pride. I might think that this was what it was all about and I might see the visit as another confirmation that the Irish state has taken its rightful place in the community of nations. That's been true for many years, but this is still some hefty symbol.

Tuesday

Nicholas Mackey

When Dublin trembled

On 17 May 1974 — 37 years ago today — I was a 19-year-old student at Trinity College Dublin, celebrating the end of term in the Pavilion Bar near the sports fields. The summer exams were still to come, but we were carefree; the main subject of conversation was whether we could organise a disco party later on. Then, a little after 5.30 p.m., everything changed. First, all about us seemed to shiver, as if there were an earth tremor. Then, just as it occurred to me that Dublin did not generally suffer tectonic stress, there was a deafening bang that seemed to go on for an age. Somebody shouted: ‘It’s a fucking bomb!

Alex Massie

Eight Hundred Years of Oppression and Now This?

Pete is right to say there's a definite "resonance" to these pictures. Nevertheless, I suspect that British people's view of the "historic" significance of Her Majesty the Queen's visit to the Republic of Ireland is inversely proportionate to one's experience of Ireland. That is, the more time you have spent in Ireland and the better you know the country the less you are likely to swoon at the sight of a British monarch setting foot in southern Ireland.  Perhaps I'm extrapolating too much from my own experience and perhaps the over-40s think differently. But my impression strengthened, to be sure, by some of the breathless, hyperbolic BBC coverage is that many British people over-estimate how "controversial" this visit is.

Peter Hoskin

An historic moment

There is something incredibly resonant about the images of the Queen arriving in the Republic of Ireland this afternoon. You have probably heard the facts by now — that she is the first British monarch to do so for 100 years, and the first since Irish independence — but they are no less striking. Against a backdrop of terror threats and of Britain's participation in the country's bailout, Queen Elizabeth II is making some kind of history today. It is also, as Ed West says in a thoughtful post over at the Telegraph, a time for remembrance. He suggests that we remember the 300,000 Irishmen who fought in the Great War — and rightly so.

Saturday

Carey Schofield

Imperfect working order

The publication of Pakistan: A Hard Country could not be more timely. International attention has been focused on Pakistan since the Americans killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad. Being in the spotlight generally means trouble for this country that has been bedevilled by war and political drama for over three decades. Foreigners announce goodwill and arrive with generous aid, but Pakistanis are frequently left feeling bruised, as the outsiders become ever more bewildered by the workings of this beguiling and maddening place. Anatol Lieven originally planned to call his book ‘How Pakistan Works’. It would have been a good title, since this is exactly what he tries to explain.

Friday

David Blackburn

Bin Laden strikes from beyond the grave

And so it starts. The news that suicide bombers have attacked the military base at Shabqadar, northern Pakistan, sounds a chilling note. The Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attacks, committed in retaliation for the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Security experts and politicians warned that it would be so. It is, we are told, inevitable that similar atrocities will be attempted closer to home. There will also be concern that this may aggravate the already strained relations between the US and Pakistan, which would only strengthen the terrorists. Perhaps Bin Laden has become a more potent force since his death. The sight of a squalid man sitting in exile watching videos of his bygone glories was almost pitiful.

Saturday

Jonathan Sumption

Setting the world to rights

Wicked Company is the collective biography of a group of men with little in common, apart from a generalised dissatisfaction with the state of the world around them. Perhaps that is true of most intellectual coteries. The kings of the Parisian Enlightenment of the 18th century were the mathematician Jean d’Alembert and the playwright and journalist Denis Diderot, joint editors of the great Encyclopédie.

John De-Falbe

Captain courageous

The sum of hard biographical facts about Captain Cook never increases, nor is it expected to. It is the same with Shakespeare. J. C. Beaglehole’s Life of Captain James Cook (1974), which Frank McLynn quotes often, contains most of what is known about Cook’s family life and origins. As the son of a Yorkshire farm labourer, he belonged to a class that was unlikely to leave any record of his childhood. He was clever, and went to live with a Quaker family in Whitby where he worked in the shop. He went to sea in the collier trade at the advanced age of 17, and transferred to the Royal Navy when he was 30. He married seven years later, in 1762, after the Admiralty’s attention was drawn by his successful charting of the Newfoundland coast.

Saturday

Lewis Jones

One hap after another

Nicola Shulman begins her rehabilitation of Thomas Wyatt by remarking that there is ‘an almost universal consensus that he can’t write’ — a consensus established within a generation of his death in 1542. Nicola Shulman begins her rehabilitation of Thomas Wyatt by remarking that there is ‘an almost universal consensus that he can’t write’ — a consensus established within a generation of his death in 1542. Even the Earl of Surrey, his friend and eulogist, acknowledged his verse to be ‘unparfited’, and by Shakespeare’s day he was a joke: Malvolio keeps a poem of Wyatt’s about him, proclaiming himself a nincompoop.

James Grande

Lancelot of the lake

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia offers two contrasting views on a ‘Capability’ Brown landscape at the imagined Sidley Park. Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia offers two contrasting views on a ‘Capability’ Brown landscape at the imagined Sidley Park. Lady Croom, the 19th-century owner, praises its harmonious natural style, even down to ‘the right amount of sheep tastefully arranged’. Two hundred years later, a garden historian laments the destruction of the ‘sublime geometry’ of 17th-century formal gardens: ‘paradise in the age of reason’, before being ‘ploughed under by Capability Brown’.

Jane Ridley

Jennie, Clemmie and Goosie too

‘There never was a Churchill, from John of Marlborough down,’ wrote Gladstone, ‘that had either principles or morals.’ With the shining exception of Winston and his brother Jack, Churchill men have tended to be bad hats, but this makes them all the more interesting to read about. ‘There never was a Churchill, from John of Marlborough down,’ wrote Gladstone, ‘that had either principles or morals.’ With the shining exception of Winston and his brother Jack, Churchill men have tended to be bad hats, but this makes them all the more interesting to read about. Mary Lovell’s new book tells the story of the Churchills as a family over four generations, and it never ceases to amaze and entertain.

Douglas Hurd

Go out and govern New South Wales

‘In the mists and damp of the Scottish Highlands, 61-year-old Sir Bartle Frere was writing a letter. ‘In the mists and damp of the Scottish Highlands, 61-year-old Sir Bartle Frere was writing a letter. Straight-backed, grey-haired, he had the bright eye and bristled moustache of an ageing fox-terrier.’ Reading this, at the beginning of a chapter, we cannot be sure whether what follows will be Lytton Strachey or John Buchan. The tale might go either way. The letter might be either an invitation to shoot grouse or in answer to a summons to cope with a crisis threatening the British empire. The second guess would be right.