Philip Mansel

The corniche at Izmir had a magic atmosphere. Lined with cafés and orchestras playing every kind of music — Western, Greek, Turkish, Armenian — it had the reputation for making the gloomiest laugh. Though ‘terribly chee-chee’ (i.e., they spoke with a sing-song accent), the women were famous for their allure. The trade in figs, raisins and opium made the city the richest in the Levant; it had the first cars, first cinemas and first girls’ schools. Nowhere else, it was said, did East and West mingle in so spectacular a manner. In 1919, as Giles Milton describes in this indictment of nationalism, Izmir Greeks welcomed a Greek army with flowers and an outbreak of looting and killing Turks. Turkish revenge was pitiless.

Philip Mansel reviews Lion of Jordan:  The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace by Avi Shlaim On 2 May 1953 two 18-year-old cousins were enthroned as kings, in Baghdad and Amman respectively. Faisal II of Iraq, the intelligent ruler of a wealthy country, seemed destined for a great future. Hussein of Jordan, king of a penniless backwater, described by his housemaster as ‘not a success at Harrow’, seemed bound to fail. It was the former, however, who was murdered with his family in 1958. The latter survived countless assassination attempts and died a revered world statesman in 1999. The secret, as Avi Shlaim shows in this complex, readable, important biography, was luck, character, the charm of ‘exceptionally gracious manners’ — and a good army.

Europe had a party during the Congress of Vienna in the last months of 1814. Monarchs, ministers, ambassadors and their wives and mistresses had learnt what Lord Castlereagh called ‘habits of confidential intercourse’ while engaged in defeating Napoleon. Between balls and banquets in the city’s many palaces, they seduced, betrayed and negotiated with each other. Letters copied for the Austrian police tell us who slipped up which staircase, or quarrelled between which polonaises. ‘You, always you, nothing but you,’ wrote Metternich to the Duchess of Sagan, while ‘all Europe’ waited in his antechamber. Their love affair seemed to concern him more than ‘the affairs of the world,’ complained his secretary Friedrich von Gentz.

Anyone interested in the history of Germany, of nationalism or of dynasties will be gripped by this book. Born at the start of the 20th century, heirs of an ancient German dynasty, Princes Philipp and Christopher of Hesse-Kassel were good-looking, modern young men. English was their second language, Queen Victoria’s liberal daughter the Empress Frederick their grandmother. No other German princes, however, rose so high in the Nazi party. Prince Philipp became a member of the Nazi party and the SA in 1930. Prince Christopher joined the SS in 1932. The timing of their adhesion, before Hitler came to power, proves its sincerity.

Parliament has so dominated the writing of English political history that the royal household has been sidelined. Moreover, the absence of a tradition of court literature as strong as the French, and prudent bonfires of such compromising documents as the letters to George III from Lord Bute, subject of this remarkable study — and to John Brown from Queen Victoria — have erected walls of silence around this elusive institution. In reality, well into the 19th century the court was the centre of power and pleasure in London. Someone as independent as Swift spent years haunting St James’s palace in search of a job.

A hundred and twenty years ago, the global hyper-power invaded a strategic Middle Eastern country. It talked of self-government but imposed its own rule. Other powers were excluded. Despite repeated promises to leave, its troops did not finally do so until 74 years later. Egypt under British occupation at the end of the 19th century has many parallels with Iraq under American occupation at the beginning of the 21st. The Bremer of the British occupation, the subject of this biography, was Evelyn Baring (from 1892 Lord Cromer). Younger son of a banking dynasty, he had spent his youth helping to administer Corfu, Malta and India, where he was known as the ‘vice-Viceroy’.

Courts can be a tool for understanding the present as well as the past. The behaviour patterns of courts and courtiers are often a better guide to the workings of modern regimes than constitutions or ideologies. In The Last Days of Hitler, Hugh Trevor-Roper analysed the government of the Third Reich as a ‘cannibal court’. In his spectacular new work Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore does the same for the Soviet Union under Stalin. He analyses the lives and ‘informal power and customs’ of the top 20 men in the Soviet leadership, as well as Stalin himself, in the years from the suicide of Stalin’s wife Nadya on 8 November 1932 to his death on 5 March 1953.

Revolutions no longer seem so inevitable, nor the overthrown governments so hopeless, since the failure of the greatest of all European revolutionary regimes, the Soviet Union. In The Fall of the French Monarchy Munro Price analyses, with skill and a light touch, the policies of two celebrated royal failures, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and of some of their ZmigrZ advisers, during the first years of the French revolution. The central figure is the Baron de Breteuil, an energetic former ambassador and minister, chosen by Louis XVI to co-ordinate resistance to the revolution, both from Versailles during his brief ministry of 12-15 July 1789 and, in the opinion of Munro Price, from exile in Brussels in 1790-2.