Jonathan Sumption

Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom, by Tom Holland Millennia, like centuries, are artificial quantities, mathematical nothings. Medieval men may not have shared our obsession with marking the years in round numbers. But they had much the same desire to bring form and structure to a history that might otherwise be a mere jumble of events. Chronicles traditionally began at the Creation. All history was a divinely ordained cycle concluding with the last trump. Men lived under the perpetual threat of extinction. Apocalyptic writers of the age were remarkably precise about how it would happen. There would be natural calamities, human catastrophes, plague and mass-murder. Antichrist would come to reign on earth. Then all would be extinguished by the Second Coming.

Sir Thomas More was the most dedicated of Henry VIII’s Chancellors before becoming the most famous of his victims. Sir Thomas More was the most dedicated of Henry VIII’s Chancellors before becoming the most famous of his victims. Nearly 30 years ago, John Guy wrote what is still the best biography of this fascinating and contradictory man. Now he has turned his hand to More’s first and favourite daughter, Margaret Roper. More stood out in many ways in his day. One of them was that he believed in educating his daughters. He attended personally to their studies. He hired competent scholars to teach them. Margaret was brought up on the same diet of Greek and Latin literature, philosophy and theology as her two sisters and her brother John.

Gideon may or may not have overcome the Midianites by superior intelligence. The Book of Judges is a little obscure about that. But there is still something in the old adage that espionage is the second oldest profession. The rules of the game were set out more than six centuries ago in the advice given by one of his councillors to a king of France. Pay your spies well. Never let one of them know about the others. And don’t believe everything that they tell you. It is a good starting point, even today. Yet the profession is dying, progressively bypassed by electronic eavesdropping and satellite photography, and super- seded by computerised analysis. The trend is very ancient.

This book is about large-scale organised crime. The Sicilian mafia was the prototype which gave its name to a whole class of criminal activity. Hence Misha Glenny’s title. But he is not much concerned with these declining mastodons of the international crime scene. The focus of the book, and its main strength, is its coverage of the rising international gangs of eastern Europe and the former USSR, regions where Glenny was based for a number of years as a correspondent of the Guardian and the BBC. There are sections on Latin America, the Far East and other regions as well. But they are a good deal less substantial. The rise of international crime since the 1980s is an extremely complicated phenomenon.

Decolonisation has not been a happy experience for Africa. But nowhere in the continent has it been as disastrous as in Algeria. The country had once been the most successful of France’s colonies. Before the war, it was rich in resources and heavily subsidised by France. The educational system worked moderately well. It had produced a large class of native Algerians who spoke French, felt at home in France and successfully integrated themselves into the structures of the state. Politically, Algeria was a départment of France. There was a large European settlement, kept on top by a gerrymandered voting system. What would have happened if it had remained French into the age when such arrangements were no longer defensible? A different France perhaps.

The problem about contemporary history is that we know both too little about it and too much. The archives of the state are closed to the public for 30 years, leaving us dependent on those famous sources of myth and misinformation, political diarists, memoir writers and journalists. At the bottom end, a history of our own age can so easily turn out to be nothing more than a million newspaper cuttings placed end to end. But would we be better off if we knew everything? I doubt it. It is difficult for an author to think dispassionately about times which he has lived through, and no easier for his readers. Selection is everything, and virtually bound to be tendentious. Contemporary history dates badly. Andrew Marr’s history of Britain since the second world war is the book of the film.

Has there ever been a better time to be alive than the 18th century, provided that one were rich, healthy, literate and European? One would not necessarily have to be a Duke of Newcastle or a Prince-Bishop of Würzburg, although either would be nice. Many of the things which make life agreeable for humbler mortals originate in their modern form in this fascinating period: passable roads, fire insurance, tea, novels, newspapers, street lighting and innoculation to suggest only some random examples. At a more elevated level, an age which began with Bach, Newton and Racine and ended with Mozart, Hume and Beaumarchais plainly has much to be said for it. But there is of course another 18th century.

France discovered the Arab world with Napoleon’s ill-fated expedition to Egypt in 1798. If David Pryce-Jones is to be believed, this event marked the beginning of two centuries of pernicious Arabophilia and anti-Semitism, leading successive French governments to support unpleasant Middle Eastern despots and turn a blind eye to Islamic terrorism. Like most large generalisations, this one requires a fair amount of tendentious selection to support it. Pryce-Jones draws his examples from a wide field. The Dreyfus affair, the exclusion of Jews from the higher reaches of the pre-war diplomatic service, the racial policies of Vichy France, the granting of asylum to the Mufti of Jerusalem and later to Khomeini and Arafat, are all pressed into service.

On the opening page of The Waning of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga remarked that ‘we, at the present day, can hardly understand the keenness with which a fur coat, a good fire on the hearth, a soft bed, a glass of wine were formerly enjoyed’. Well, C. M. Woolgar can. Not that he is more learned or imaginative than his great predecessor, although he is a fine scholar and a good writer. It is just that the experience of life in the Middle Ages is less distant and arcane than Huizinga thought. Writing in the 1920s in the tradition of romantic pessimism which has dominated so much writing about the Middle Ages, he saw an unbridgeable gulf between medieval perceptions and our own.

Bob Woodward is famous for persuading people to be indiscreet. This book comprises the collected indiscretions of a large number of people who have been at the heart of American policy-making about Iraq over the past five years. We can guess who some of them are. But we do not know, because most of them have been careful to speak off the record. ‘The information in this chapter comes primarily from background interviews with six knowledgeable sources,’ reads a typical sentence from the author’s endnotes. ‘Some supplied documents,’ adds another. The book is packed with quotations from documents bearing various classifications of secrecy, or portentously marked NODIS (not to be distributed) or NOFORN (not to be shown to foreigners).

In the great prize-giving of history, there are only two truly ‘bad’ kings of England: King John and James II. Or three if you count Ethelred the Unready. There is more argument about the ‘good’ ones, but King John’s brother Richard ranks high in most people’s pantheon, right up there with King Arthur and Queen Elizabeth. Plainly, Ladybird Books, Robin Hood on TV and touring exhibitions of Magna Carta, have a lot to answer for.

We are still living with the images and legends of the crusades. Were they, as the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote, ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’? Were they, as muscular Christians and imperialists suggested in the 19th century, a matchless epic of human heroism, in which the defeat of the ‘right’ side had been happily reversed in their own age? Were they an immoral act of unprovoked aggression for which western Christians should apologise to the Muslim world, as the last Pope has rather absurdly purported to do on their behalf? Moral judgments, it is said, are not the historian’s province, but in this field they are hard to avoid.

Should the state take action against people who have done nothing wrong, if there are plausible grounds for thinking that they are about to? Suppose, says Alan Dershowitz, that reliable intelligence shows that a large-scale terrorist attack is about to happen. Should the law allow the police to round up whole categories of potential perpetrators in advance, in the hope of stopping the conspiracy in its tracks? Should it authorise the use of torture to obtain information that will prevent the attack? What if the suspected mastermind is identified in a foreign country where the authorities are too weak, wicked or incompetent to arrest him? Might one assassinate him instead? Or invade the foreign country? Or bomb it from a great height?

Karen Armstrong likes to take on large subjects, and they don’t come much larger than this. Her latest book is nothing less than an attempt to describe the historical origins of all the great world religions. The nearest analogy is The Key to All Mythologies, the grandiloquently named tome which George Eliot’s Mr Casaubon never got round to finishing. But it would be unkind to press the analogy too far. Armstrong is not a pedant, and whatever else may be said about this book she has certainly finished it. Its focus is what she calls the ‘Axial Age’. The phrase was coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers to describe the sixth century BC, the period in which he wrongly believed that Buddha, Lao-tzu, Confucius and Zoroaster had lived.

We know very little about the ‘good’ kings of medieval England. Weakness makes better copy. Gossip and laughter leave more traces than dumb admiration. Contemporaries, fascinated and appalled by their complex and unstable personalities, have left us vivid accounts of Edward II and Richard II, whose reigns both ended in deposition and murder. By comparison, Edward III is an icon. He lived his life in the manner that medieval men expected of a king. He looked the part. He won his battles. He made the right sort of people rich. In the chronicles of his time, his character is completely concealed behind a mask of conventional praise. Picking up a book titled The Perfect King, one might expect to find the same sort of treatment. Ian Mortimer does not disappoint.

Henry VIII is one of the most difficult and controversial figures in English history. The Victorian scholars who were the first to apply themselves seriously to his reign, regarded him as a lecherous despot. The king’s role in the foundation of the Church of England was either the providential by-product of his lust for Anne Boleyn, or the ultimate argument against its legitimacy, depending on one’s point of view. Another generation, inured to despotism and comfortable with lechery, has taken a more indulgent view. In popular imagination Henry has even emerged as the archetypal figure of a mythical Merrie England. The modern view of the period is due mainly to that fearsome, Germanic scholar, Sir Geoffrey Elton, who died in 1994 but still dominates the subject from his urn.

Dwelling Place is the story of a planter family in 19th-century Georgia, and of the slave community which served it. As an insight into the moral dilemmas of a slave-owning society and the local patriotism which sustained the Confederate side in the American civil war, it is one of the more remarkable recent books on the ante-bellum South. It is also refreshingly free from romantic delusions at one extreme or politically correct cant at the other. The central figure is Charles Colcock Jones, landowner, patriarch and Presbyt- erian minister, who inherited as a young man three cotton plantations and more than 100 slaves in Liberty County, on the Atlantic coast south of Savannah.