Culture

When Prince Harry stirred up a fuss by wearing Nazi uniform to a fancy-dress party he found a gallant defender in Paul Johnson who wrote that ‘in treating Nazi insignia as a party joke’ the young prince ‘reflects the instincts of his generation’. ‘The Nazis,’ he added, ‘do have an undoubted fascination for many young people’, because of their style, not their ideology. ‘Hitler still exerts some of the dread appeal he exercised in his lifetime ... A lot of his appeal, I suspect, is visual. Hitler was a kind of artist’ who ‘put his  artistic and inventive instincts to work’. This is surely undeniable, and Johnson is by no means the first to remark it. Thomas Mann was there before him.

ZABIBA AND THE KING (2000) by Saddam Hussein The first of several novels by the world’s bestselling war criminal, Zabiba and the King is a clunking allegory in which the king represents Saddam, Zabiba (a beautiful maiden) represents the Iraqi people, and Zabiba’s abusive husband represents the USA. Most of the book is presented in the form of a dialogue on statecraft between Zabiba and the king, who loves her madly (as Saddam loves his people), though he never has relations with her (that might be going a little too far). One of Zabiba’s musings, which may refer to Russia (the bear), reads as follows: ‘Even an animal respects a man’s desire, if it wants to copulate with him.

Europe thinks ‘that to achieve peace no price is too high: not appeasement, not massacres on its own soil, not even surrender to terrorists... Europe is impotent. A foul wind is blowing through [it]... the idea that we can afford to be lenient even with people who threaten us... This same wind blew through Munich in 1938... It could turn out to be the death rattle of a continent that no longer understands what principles to believe.’ This is not Michael Gove but Marcello Pera, President of the Italian Senate. But in fact the views of the three authors fit remarkably well. Celsius 7/7 is centrally about the political response to Islamist terrorism. Pera discusses the relativism that undergirds so much of the thinking that responds to terrorist Islam.

Even though Rudyard Kipling died 70 years ago, listeners to Plain Tales from the Hills are sure to gain the beloved storyteller some new followers. I’m certainly joining the fan club. Never engrossed by ‘Gunga Din’, ‘If’ or ‘the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River’, I was astounded how quickly I became hooked on these stories — I’ve listened to the majority more than once. This is early Kipling — he was only 23 when commissioned to write them for the Civil and Military Gazette, a local English-language newspaper for the British in northern India.

‘Do you pronounce it Sowthy or Suthy?’ asked a friend when I mentioned I was reviewing this book. Today, that small controversy probably marks the limit of public curiosity as to this remarkably prolific but not otherwise exceptional poet, novelist, historian, critic and political commentator, who flourished as a radical alongside his friend Coleridge in the early stages of the French Revolution, and later retreated to the Lake District where he became a diehard Tory and Poet Laureate, earning himself the contempt of Shelley, Byron and Hazlitt. This new biography follows relatively recent volumes by Geoffrey Carnall and Mark Storey; it adds little of significance to them.

Glorious, bloodless, last, perhaps all of those things, but the revolution of 1688 was hardly a revolution at all. It was the neat solution to a succession crisis: how to keep the throne of England secure against a Roman Catholic successor to the Roman Catholic James II. The essential ingredients were the resolve of James’s Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange, to bring Great Britain into permanent alliance with the Netherlands against France and, in the face of that resolve, James’s timidity and eventual flight.

Ah Oxford! Welcome to the City of Dreadful Spite, otherwise known as Malice Springs, the permanent Number One on the Bitch List. Not since the vituperative pamphleteers of the English Civil War has there been a community so dedicated to character assassination as the dons of Oxford. Living on the same staircase, dining side by side, night after night, term after term, dries up the milk of human kindness. Here is Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern History for 23 years, describing C.S.