Jane Ridley

Early one morning in August 1826 two men stood facing each other 12 paces apart in a sodden field a few miles outside Kirkcaldy in Fife. One man was a linen merchant named David Landale, the other was George Morgan, his banker. At the words ‘Gentlemen are you ready? — Fire!’ two pistol shots went off instantaneously. As the smoke cleared it was plain that Morgan had fallen to the ground. He was shot through the chest and died at once. Landale escaped unharmed. This was the last duel ever fought in Scotland (the last duel to be fought in England was in 1845) and the wonder is that it happened at all. As James Landale shows in this enjoyable book, the quarrel between David Landale and George Morgan was not a matter of honour in the aristocratic sense of the word at all.

It is a remarkable but little known fact that in 1901 the entire Indian subcontinent with a population totalling 300 million was administered by a British ruling elite which consisted of no more than 1,000 men. Still more extraordinary, their rule rested neither on military force nor on terror or corruption. On the contrary, the rulers of the British Raj were renowned for being impartial, high-minded, conscientious and incorruptible. Yet this astonishing British success story has been largely ignored. Historians have got their knickers in such a twist over the whole embarrassing business of imperialism that they have been blind to its strengths.

In 1767, John Hunter, a 39-year-old surgeon, performed an experiment on venereal disease. In order to prove the hypothesis that gonorrhoea was the same disease as syphilis, he dipped a lancet into a festering venereal sore, and then injected it into a penis. He took careful notes, observing the classic symptoms of gonorrhoea, which then developed into the secondary stage of syphilis. Buboes, ulcers and copper-coloured blotches appeared, which he anointed with mercury. This seemingly proved that syphilis and gonorrhoea were one and the same. But his experiment was fatally flawed. Unwittingly, he had injected from a patient with syphilis, not gonorrhoea. His botched experiment set back the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases for many decades. Even worse, he had ruined his own health.

Christopher Hibbert is a publishing phenomenon. Now 80 or thereabouts, he has published at least 37 books, mainly on British history. You name it, Hibbert has written a book on it — from Charles I to the Marlboroughs, from Napoleon and his Women to Queen Victoria. Hibbert is rarely interviewed, but his books are always well-received and, to judge from the shelves of W. H. Smith, they certainly sell. How does he do it? Take this latest life of Disraeli. Hibbert has done none of the things that modern biographers are supposed to do. He has not spent time laboriously transcribing documents in the archives, nor has he slogged around the country retracing his hero’s footsteps. He doesn’t really attempt to explain Disraeli’s politics.

The Duke of Wellington once bumped into Nelson in a minister’s anteroom. Nelson had no idea who Wellington was (it was before he was famous), and at first Nelson talked entirely about himself, and in a style so vain and silly that Wellington was disgusted. Then Nelson briefly left the room, checked out Wellington’s identity, and returned to talk as one officer to another in a way that Wellington found altogether fascinating. There were two sides to Nelson. The most brilliant naval commander of all time was also a shameless self-publicist and the spoiled celebrity lover of Emma Hamilton. Perhaps these contradictions are what make him endlessly fascinating to biographers.

In 1799 Susan O’Brien underwent an operation for breast cancer. She was 56 and, her sister having died of the disease, she nerved herself for the knife. The doctors insisted on blindfolding her during the operation, but she took nothing to ease the pain and remained fully conscious throughout. She was convinced that the operation would kill her, so she saw it rather like a public execution, and determined to die with dignity. She didn’t scream or weep once. The operation was a complete success, and she lived on for another 28 years. This and many other plums are tightly packed into Joanna Martin’s book.

One February day in 1845 a well-dressed young man walked into Gallery Nine of the British Museum and hurled a lump of sculpture at a glass case. He smashed the case and shattered its contents — the Portland Vase, a famous piece of Roman glass. The vase was broken into 200 pieces. The vandal turned out to be a mentally unstable Irish student, and for this mindless crime he was committed to two months’ hard labour. The Portland Vase was glued together again, and returned to its glass case. It still stands in the Museum today — a small, dumpy, blue-glass vase carved with white cameo figures. It isn’t particularly beautiful, but for centuries it has been a Grade-A classical treasure, bought by the ultra-rich and coveted by scholars who have tried to explain it.

The old Oxford Histories of England were trusty bestsellers bound in pale blue wrappers. Hugely authoritative but often dull, they provided confident narratives of kings and governments, together with a chapter or so on culture and economics. The Clarendon Press has begun to update the series, and several volumes of a New Oxford History have so far been published. Geoffrey Searle has spent a lifetime working on Edwardian England, and he is well qualified to provide a new overview. This is no easy task. Searle’s massive book, over 900 pages long, is ambitious but uneven. For a start, there’s the problem whether a history which is really about Britain can still be described as a history of England.

Nineteenth-century British politics used to be the historian’s bread and butter, but it has gone sadly out of fashion. Instead of the Great Reform Act, what every schoolgirl knows today is Hitler and Stalin, studied over and over again. The story of reform is too narrowly political for today’s tastes. The historians spoiled it too. Doctoral students were taught to comb the archives for correspondence, the more obscure the better, and the dense and tedious monographs they wrote about ‘high politics’ added very little to the big picture. Edward Pearce’s new book shows what a mistake it is to ignore reform. It is quite simply a splendid story. The fact that Pearce is a political journalist not a professional historian is probably an advantage.

Atlases are things that one takes for granted, but they have an interesting history. This book tells the story of the world’s first atlas, which was published in Antwerp in 1570. It was the brainchild of a Dutchman named Ortelius. Of course, maps had existed for many centuries. Ptolemy put together a Geographia in Roman Alexandria in the 2nd century AD. But mediaeval men weren’t really interested in maps which were topographically accurate. For them maps were conceptual — a sign language about Christendom, centring on Jerusalem. This all changed during the Renaissance. Explorers such as Magellan logged their voyages, and the first recognisable world map appeared in 1507. Merchants needed maps too, and cartographers developed the maths to draw to scale.

Who was Hannah More? William Cobbett called her an old bishop in petticoats, and she was the subject of a hefty, pious Victorian biography, since when she has been pretty much forgotten. The Edwardian wit Augustine Birrell buried 19 volumes of her collected works in his garden for compost. She owes her disinterment to the fashion for writing the lives of women, the more obscure the better. Is she interesting enough to merit a book of nearly 400 pages? Almost certainly, the answer is yes. She was born near Bristol, the daughter of an impoverished charity school master, in 1745. Her older sisters ran a successful school for young ladies. Hannah, who was reassuringly plump, wrote poetry. Aged 28, she published a best-selling poem, and went to London.

In 1066 and All That there is a spoof exam question: 'How can you be so numb and vague about Arbella Stuart?' All the same, her name means little today. If she is known at all, it is as one of those fiendishly muddling and worryingly inbred claimants to the Tudor succession who all seem to be called Seymour or Stuart. Sarah Gristwood has rescued Arbella from the tangles of royal genealogy and reinvented her as a figure for our times. Her story is extraordinary. Anyone who doesn't know their Stuarts from their Seymours should read this book. Arbella, who was born in 1575, was the first cousin of King James I. She was the daughter of the Earl of Lennox, who was the brother of Darnley, the husband of Mary Queen of Scots.

'If Charles Darwin had spent the first half of his life in the world of Jane Austen, he now stepped forward into the pages of Anthony Trollope.' Thus Janet Browne begins what must at times have seemed an almost impossible task: how to write an interesting book about the second half of Darwin's life. When this book opens, Charles Darwin is 49. On his desk sits an unwieldy pile of papers, the unfinished manuscript of the interminable book on the origin of species which he has been working on for longer than he cares to admit. At Down House in Kent, Darwin lives comfortably on a private income, but this retiring gentleman scholar and paterfamilias is no slouch.

The publicity material likens this book to The Forsyte Saga, but in fact it's far more gripping than fiction: the true story of a larger-than-life political dynasty. The diaries of Margot Asquith form the core of the book. For too long Margot's voluminous diaries have been unavailable, and Colin Clifford is the first biographer to gain unrestricted access. He has put them to excellent use. Daughter of the fabulously rich Sir Charles Tennant ('the Bart'), Margot took London by storm with her energy and outrageous wit. Her diaries reveal a less attractive side. She emerges as self-obsessed, with an irritating habit of detailing pert exchanges with the great and the good in which she always comes out best.