William Waldegrave

Wednesday

William Waldegrave

How to make Britain great again

From our UK edition

Here we are again. Fifty years ago the fashionable view was that Britain was ungovernable. Chancellors wrote their budgets kow-towing to the bond markets, and, if they did not make their obeisance low enough, had to beg from the International Monetary Fund. The unions had turned out one democratically elected government and were giving the next one a good kicking. People said we needed a 'strongman' who did not have to bother with elections, implausibly suggesting Lord Mountbatten. The public had noticed there was another candidate already rehearsing for the role, the Secretary General of the Transport and General Workers' Union, Mr Jones, whom they saw, said the opinion polls, as more powerful than the prime minister. We were the 'sick man of Europe'.

Wednesday

William Waldegrave

How troll stories blighted the life of Patrick O’Brian

From our UK edition

Patrick O’Brian, born Richard Patrick Russ, never wanted his life written, and this passionate wish presents the first hurdle to someone as fond of him as was Nikolai Tolstoy, the son of O’Brian’s second wife, Mary, by her first husband. Why pry further? Why deploy papers and diaries which O’Brian expressly instructed should be destroyed? To this objection, Tolstoy can offer two replies, and both are powerful. First, one biography already exists, not only unauthorised but deeply resented by O’Brian in his lifetime; and on the basis of that book, and of partial evidence from one faction within a fairly dysfunctional family, some unpleasant accusations have been made about O’Brian’s behaviour towards his first wife, Elizabeth Jones.

Thursday

William Waldegrave

Courting the Iron Lady

From our UK edition

This is a strange book. Peter Stothard, the editor of the TLS, is packing up his office. It is a year after Margaret Thatcher’s death, and Murdoch’s Wapping site is being destroyed to make way for new, expensive flats. As the national memory of Thatcher fades, and transmutes into myth and caricature, so the physical scene of one of the seminal battles of her time, where the old print unions and their rackets were destroyed, crumbles into dust. Into his room comes Miss R, a young and mysterious historian, to interview him for her thesis about Thatcher’s courtiers.

Saturday

William Waldegrave

Man with a trade mission

From our UK edition

About the second part of the title of Nigel Cliff’s excellent book there can be no argument. Vasco da Gama’s voyages do indeed remind one of those of Odysseus and Aeneas — in the range of adventures, mostly disastrous, which befell the tiny ships, and also in the iron will of their leader. His ruthless pursuit of his goal left a trail of destruction behind him, both for his own companions and for those whom they encountered along the way. It is the first part of the title, which claims that Portugese policy was the last fling of medieval crusading, about which there may be more doubt.

Saturday

William Waldegrave

Almost a great man

From our UK edition

Of those prime ministers whom the old grammar schools escalator propelled from the bottom to the top of British society since the second world war, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher were in many ways the most alike. Wilson, that classic greasy-pole climber, tactically brilliant, strategically trivial; Major, decent, straightforward, a good man lifted to power on the shoulders of his many friends as a healer who could unite: both these are types, the one less admirable than the other, but familiar to history. Heath and Thatcher are much odder, more dangerous and more remarkable. It is an extraordinary tribute to the modern Conservative Party that both chose it as the instrument through which to try to deliver their radical visions — as it is to the party that it chose them.

Wednesday

William Waldegrave

Beyond the call of duty

From our UK edition

David Crane’s latest book is much more interesting than its title would lead you to believe. If you buy it hoping for a collection of stories of derring-do and British pluck, you won’t be wholly disappointed: you will indeed learn how Frank Abney Hastings, having got himself sacked from the Royal Navy for behaving like a petulant teenager when given his first command, went on almost single-handed to invent naval steam-powered gunboats, and used the first one he built to sink a ridiculous number of Turkish ships in the Greek War of Independence.

Saturday

William Waldegrave

The tricky world of faction

From our UK edition

There is something odd about a roman à clef which has the key attached. Justin Cartwright’s latest novel tells the story of ‘legendary Oxford professor’ Elya Mendel of All Souls and his relationship with German Rhodes Scholar Axel von Gottberg, who is hanged in Plotzensee on 26 August 1944 after the failure of the July Plot. In case we miss the clues (Isaiah Berlin’s father was called Mendel; Adam von Trott was hanged on that day and in that prison) there is an afterword saying that the book is based ‘in part’ on the friendship between von Trott and Berlin, and on ‘the ‘repudiation’ of that friendship by Berlin. Others in the story, such as Stauffenberg himself, are given their real names.

Saturday

William Waldegrave

The Senior Service to the rescue

From our UK edition

There is something unedifying in politicians apologising, without cost to themselves, for the sins of their predecessors while deploying all the black arts of their trade to suppress criticism of their own performance. The same goes for society at large. It would be more admirable for 21st-century Britain to be trying to imagine what our successors will see as incomprehensible moral blindness on our part than to be taking easy shots at the morality of two centuries ago. What will look as foul to Britons of 2306 as slavery does to us now? We don’t really want to know, because the answers might well be inconvenient. Abortion? The eating of animals? It is the people who get it right at the time who deserve celebration.

Saturday

William Waldegrave

Before the mast was rigged

From our UK edition

There are three possible reasons for republishing forgotten books by writers who have achieved subsequent fame. The first and best is that they may have been unjustly forgotten. The second is that they are of interest to fans looking for hints of the future. The third is that early novels in particular often contain autobiography, more or less disguised; and in the case of a life as strange as Patrick O’Brian’s they may therefore be of interest to literary detectives. Only one of these novels really passes the first test; both pass the second and third. The Catalans is a well-crafted story of love and betrayal in the French Catalonia to which Patrick and Mary O’Brian had moved not long before.