Culture

One and a half million children were evacuated from London and housed in the country in two days. The evacuee child with its gas mask round its neck and the luggage label so particularly distressing to modern sensibilities, is a familiar image, but perhaps more credit is due to the organisation of Operation Pied Piper which went into action on 1 September 1939. In the light of recent events in New Orleans it begins to seem a miracle of planning and execution. According to Jessica Mann’s preface to this reissue of Barbara Noble’s 1946 novel about the emotional consequences of evacuation, an Evacuation Sub-Committee was established as early as 1931, in anticipation of chaos. Newsreels of bombing in Manchuria, Abyssinia and later Guernica, had prepared people for the worst.

E. H. Gombrich was born in Vienna in 1909. As a boy he had seen the Emperor Franz Joseph walking in his garden. As a young man, himself a Jew, he had watched Jewish students being beaten up in the streets by Nazi thugs. In January 1936, two years before Hitler’s troops marched into Vienna in triumph, he arrived as an exile in London, to work as a research fellow at the Warburg Institute of which he became director in 1959. When he died, loaded with honours in 2001, the huge sales of his book The Story of Art, published in 1950, had made him the best known and most acclaimed art historian in the world. But he had done more than write a bestselling blockbuster. Art history in Austria and Germany had developed on different lines from the professional connoisseurship of Berenson.

United Italy was reluctant to honour authentic heroes of its national struggle. Apart from Garibaldi, its squares and street-names — as well as its bronze statues and marble plaques — commemorate incompetent generals, duplicitous statesmen, serial conspirators, an oafish monarch (Victor Emmanuel) and a number of crazy young patriots who dashed off to Calabria (or wherever), shouted ‘Viva Italia!’ at a bemused populace, and were quickly shot. One neglected figure was Daniele Manin, the protagonist of Jonathan Keates’s skilful and absorbing account of the Venetian Revolution of 1848-9. Manin did not fit the mould of the Risorgimento romantic.

Do campus novels reflect the reality of university life? When I was a Fellow of Peterhouse, back in the Eighties, I was asked with tedious regularity whether the experience resembled Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe’s grotesquely overblown satire. But even as I (truthfully) denied it, a few vignettes would slide past my mind’s eye — such as my very first Governing Body meeting, when, sombrely robed, the Fellows debated, hotly and with manifest ill-will, whether the vomit by the chapel was beer- or claret-based. This was, of course, a matter of college politics.