History

The reason Peter Watson gives for writing this long intellectual history of Germany since 1750 is a convincing one: that British obsession with Nazism has blinded many British people to the achievements of German culture. Watson describes the complaints of German commentators about the emphasis on Nazism even in British schooling, which were borne out by the 2005 report of the Qualification and Curriculum Authority: ‘There has been a gradual narrowing and “Hitlerisation” of post-1914 history.’ Watson also discusses the importance of Nazism to America, and his most intriguing point is that interest in the Holocaust is a comparatively recent phenomenon. A study in the 1950s found that the effect

Lord Palmerston poses severe quantitative problems to biographers. His public life covered a huge span. Born in 1784, the year Dr Johnson died, he was nine years younger than Jane Austen and four years Byron’s senior. He died in 1865, the year Kipling, Yeats and Northcliffe were born. To put it another way, when he was a baby Reynolds was painting Mrs Siddons; when he died Manet was showing his ‘Olympia’, and Tolstoy had just published War and Peace. His long life was crowded with incessant political activity. He was on the Board of Admiralty in 1807, aged 23, even before he had a seat in parliament. He was an

Governments in early modern England, having no standing army nor a civil service to speak of, required the consent of the governed. Authority had to be ‘culturally constructed’. That is the starting-point for Kevin Sharpe’s monumental investigation into royal branding in the age of the Tudors and Stuarts. In the first volume of a projected trilogy, Selling the Tudor Monarchy, he argued that the Tudors made the person of the monarch more important than administrative procedures in establishing royal authority. Elizabeth, in particular, fixed in the national memory by her portraits, played down political divisions and ‘privileged her image over actions and events’, making the sovereign the sacred ‘unifying embodiment

Paul Johnson reviews Roy Hattersley’s life of David Lloyd George No politician’s life is so difficult to write as Lloyd George’s. All who have tried have failed, and wise heavyweight historians have steered clear. I applaud Roy Hattersley’s courage in tackling this rebarbative subject and congratulate him on his success in making sense of Lloyd George’s early life up to his emergence as a major figure in parliament. Thereafter, however, he tends to lose his way in the trackless jungle of endless political crises during Lloyd George’s 16 years in office, festooned as they are with the undergrowth of his financial fecundity and the florid canopy of his love affairs.

Virginia Cowles was a 27-year-old American journalist working for the Hearst newspapers when she went to Spain for the first time. It was March 1937; the battle of Guadalajara had just brought a victory to the Republicans and besieged Madrid was an exciting place to be. Up till then, Cowles had reported mainly on events of a ‘peaceful nature’. Spain would turn her into a war reporter. Arriving at the Hotel Florida with her suitcase and typewriter, an elegant, resourceful young woman with a high forehead and dark brown hair, she was soon part of the gang of foreigners cheering the Republicans on. There was the bulky Tom Delmer from

Africa is the setting for several of V. S. Naipaul’s finest fictional stories — In a Free State, A Bend in the River, Half a Life. Africa is the setting for several of V. S. Naipaul’s finest fictional stories — In a Free State, A Bend in the River, Half a Life. And there is a pattern to the themes in the African works: fear, post-colonial disintegration, isolation, approaching catastrophe, a sense of being trapped in a way of life that is hovering on the borders of savagery. It is an unforgettable vision, but it remains that of an outsider. In The Masque of Africa, Naipaul goes deeper; this is

These two memoirs by ladies born into the Russian elite in the 1880s have both had to wait many decades before publication in English. The Green Snake, however, has gone through eight editions in its original German, whereas The Russian Countess has never been published before. No one was in the least interested in a Russia that no longer existed. Margarita Woloschin was a painter and her husband was a well-known poet. She knew most of the key figures in the Russian Symbolist movement, and she became a disciple of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. From 1924 to her death in 1973 she lived in Stuttgart and devoted herself

Who was the first American to marry an English duke? Most students of the peerage would say it was Consuelo Yzagna who married the eldest son of the Duke of Manchester in 1876. But the banjo-strumming Cuban American Consuelo was not the first Yankee duchess. As early as 1828 the American Louisa Caton married the eldest son of the Duke of Leeds. This was half a century before the dollar princesses, trading titles for cash, played havoc with Burke’s Peerage. Louisa and her sisters were the pioneers of the American invasion of London society. Their conquest was so successful, and they became so assimilated, that they left barely a ripple.