Raymond Carr

Isaiah Berlin was a much-loved friend and a dominant influence on my thinking as an historian. His death in 1997 left a void that cannot be filled. I first met him in 1946 playing tiddlywinks on the floor of his room in New College. The letters in this book of some 700 pages, magnificently edited by Henry Hardy, cover his life before that date: at Oxford before the war, his time in wartime New York and Washington and his visit to Russia in 1945. What do the letters tell us of Berlin’s life up to 1946? First of all the central importance of his Jewish family. He was born in Riga in 1909, his father a prosperous timber merchant who had escaped with his family the horrors of the Bolshevik revolution to settle in England in 1921.

Richard Ford is now a forgotten figure and we must be grateful to Ian Robertson for bringing him to life in this scholarly biography. His Handbook for Travellers in Spain was published in 1845 by John Murray as one of his guides for the middle-class tourists who had replaced the aristocrats of the Grand Tour. It must count as the most learned, long and lively guidebook ever published: a monster of 1,064 pages. But his interests extended beyond his hispano- phile concerns and expertise on Spanish painting, making him a much respected figure in London literary and artistic circles in the early years of Queen Victoria. Ford early made picture-buying Grand Tours.

In September 1519 the Armada de Molucca of five ships and 250 sailors had set out from San L.

This is a fascinating book on a fascinating subject, written by a master of his craft as a military historian. Sir John Keegan’s declared purpose is to answer a simple question: ‘How useful is intelligence in war?’ The answer he gives is that, however useful intelligence is in disclosing the enemy’s intentions, strengths and weaknesses, wars are won not by knowledge but by brute force in battle. The modern fad to give primacy to knowledge he rejects as misleading. Addicts of spy fiction will be disappointed. Spies rarely supply relevant information in time for it to be of use. This book is not cloak and dagger stuff but a superbly researched series of case studies on the use of intelligence in war from the 18th century to the present war against terrorism.

During my first term at Oxford in 1938, when walking down the south side of the Christ Church quad, I passed a large man in a bowler hat and a smart London suit. The only persons in the college who wore bowlers were the porters and most dons followed David Cecil’s advice to dress in Oxford as if staying in a modest country house. The large man was clearly a man of importance but he seemed out of place. I was no wiser when told that he was Professor Lindemann, the owner of a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and a private bathroom in his college rooms, both unheard of luxuries for a don. Adrian Fort traces his rise to eminence in this scholarly book which provides fascinating, if sometimes disconcerting, glimpses of the world of science and government in the 1930s and 1940s.

In this book Russell Martin seeks to explain to the common reader how Picasso's largest canvas, measuring 11' 6” high and 25' 8” long, came to be called 'Guernica', after a small Basque market town of some 7,000 inhabitants and how it became the painter's best known work as an icon of the radical Left throughout the world. He achieves this by putting both the painting of the picture and its subsequent fate in their historical contexts. In 1937 Picasso had been living in France for 30 years. Yet he did not take out French nationality. Martin argues that in Paris he had become 'more Spanish than less so'.

Professor Linda Colley is a distinguished historian. In her Britons, published in 1992, she proved that good, imaginative professional history could attract a wide public. Captives is a more complex book that demands close reading, as she unravels the ambiguities that challenge customary certainties of imperial history. The empire celebrated at Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee was 'reimagined as inexorable and inevitable'. No one could have imagined this in the period she examines from 1600 to 1850. Time and time again, it was an empire challenged by its 'smallness', the incapacity of a small island to provide the manpower to run an empire. It was, as a perceptive analyst wrote in the early 1800s, an empire planted in a flowerpot.