History

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 the Daily Express, in whose room she ate sardines and crackers and listened to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

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 the account of a journey through five countries with the purpose of ‘investigating the effects of African belief on the progress of civilisation’.

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 to her art and her work as a teacher of Steiner’s doctrines.

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. Only now has Jehanne Wake researched and pieced together their story. The four Caton sisters were born into one of the grandest American families.

As a five-year-old in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem in the 1950s, Kai Bird overheard an elderly American heiress offering $1 million to anyone who could solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Tugging on his father’s sleeve, he said: ‘Daddy, we have to win this prize.’ Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, Bird’s memoir of growing up in the Middle East, is full of such generosity and innocence. In 1956, Kai’s father, Eugene Bird, moved his young family from Oregon to East Jerusalem, where he was to serve as American vice-consul in a city divided in two by the 1949 armistice line.

The study of history is a subversive calling. All countries make up a story that suits their idea of themselves. Authoritarians stamp out independent historical scholarship; extreme nationalists simply vilify those who try to tell the tale of what really happened. Charles de Gaulle stands at the heart of what France likes to think about itself; Winston Churchill plays a similar role on this side of the Channel. Even a Francophile like me concedes that there is a deal more fiction about the French story than the British. The distinguished historian Robert Gildea has helped to tear the covers of what he has called the ‘redeeming, unifying heroic story’ of France’s wartime years.

John Buchan’s Greenmantle remains a marvellous read, even if its plot is absurd. John Buchan’s Greenmantle remains a marvellous read, even if its plot is absurd. Who could credit a story about German attempts, headed by the unlovely Kaiser Wilhelm and the glamorous and suitably ruthless Hilda von Einem, to stir up a world-wide Muslim holy war against the Allies during the first world war and ultimately build a vast German empire stretching to India itself? Now Sean McMeekin shows that fiction, after all, was not so far from the truth, and he makes the most of what is a very good story. He starts in the late 19th century with the construction of the Berlin to Baghdad railway.