Tag Archives: History

Book review

This Boy, by Alan Johnson, 2013

It’s traditional for politicians to write their memoirs after the end of their Parliamentary career. Alan Johnson was a senior figure in the Blair administration, but nonetheless This Boy had to be something special to stand out from the host of other post-Blair/Brown government autobiographies, diaries and memoirs. And it is. What makes this narrative so exceptional is its unsentimental portrait of a childhood of quite profound poverty and deprivation. That fact that the scenes Johnson describe date from the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, not some Dickensian nightmare, make them all the more extraordinary.

How bad was it; just how poor was his family? He regularly went without meals; his social housing in North Kensington, now considered part of trendy Notting Hill, was condemned; he didn’t have an indoor toilet or bathroom until he was in his teens. He faced the daily humiliation of free school meals (when everyone knew who received the free meals and who didn’t) and having to ask shop owners for ‘tick’ (credit). Coal was bought one day at a time because it couldn’t be afforded any other way and the Johnson household was usually bitterly cold, especially during the harsh winters of the early 1960’s.

But despite all that, this is not a misery memoir. These facts are recorded honestly but Johnson doesn’t dwell on them unnecessarily, and rarely seems to feel sorry for himself. (I think his older self feels sad for his younger self, but recognises that at the time he was often happy, especially when his father wasn’t around). Growing up in the 60’s Johnson sees and feels a small part of the immense social change that swept the country as it emerged from a post-war period and the 1964-70 Labour Governments introduced a host of progressive legislation.

Racism disfigured society of the period and Johnson also witnessed more than his fair share of that, as North Kensington saw terrible scenes of abuse of the Windrush generation. It’s not hard to trace the roots of the Labour politician Johnson became in the childhood of this boy.

You often see debates in the media and online about the definition of poverty. Lots of families live in households where the family income is below 60% of the median national income, the most widely used statistical definition, without suffering anything like the deprivation Johnson faced. Some of these families, it is sometimes claimed, are relatively affluent – they don’t go without daily necessities, can afford holidays and things that the middle class might consider luxuries such as mobile phones, cigarettes and flat screen televisions. So what we mean by poverty changes over time, it is relative, and the situation Johnson faced as he grew up was perhaps not as dire as that of the previous generation. The threat of eviction never seems present, social housing however poorly constructed is almost always available (including on several occasions the offer of new housing in the suburbs, most often declined) and jobs seemed to be extremely easy to walk into. If Johnson’s father had contributed to the family finances then a reasonable standard of living was within reach – certainly Johnson describes other family members and friends living in relative comfort. The safety net of the welfare state may not have protected everyone, but it did a pretty good job compared to the absolute poverty of fifty years or so earlier. That aspect of the narrative – that Johnson’s story is one of exceptional hardship, rather than a typical West London boyhood – was often lost in many of the reviews of the book at the time it was originally published. Johnson has corrected this narrative to some extent with his subsequent memoirs covering his early years as a postman, when life was comfortable by comparison.

Johnson’s sister Linda and mother Lily emerge as the heroines of this memoir. Lily worked numerous part-time jobs to keep the family afloat both before and after her husband Steve left, despite her serious health issues which took her life in her early forties. Linda, just three years older than Alan, kept the family together after Lily’s death and showed a remarkable maturity in dealing with the challenges of being orphaned and looking after her younger brother.

This book is written with a refreshing honesty and simplicity. It is obvious from the first page that it is not ghost-written, and the clumsiness of the text is easy to excuse when set beside the rawness of the content. It’s a hard read at times, although knowing that things turn out well for Johnson and his sister helps at lot.

This Boy, by Alan Johnson, 2013

Aside
Book review

All books are themselves the product of earlier books, however original they may be. I’m not suggesting that all books are copies of earlier works, but they all have dna, texts which have influenced them and without which they couldn’t exist. Some reveal their origins more obviously than others. Unruly makes very little attempt to disguise its sources and influences, which are a fairly straightforward combination of Horrible Histories and the ladybird books that gave you one king per page, with an illustration summarising the one thing you needed to remember about him or her. Add in a little 1066 and All That and a lot of swearing (and I will come back to the swearing), and there you have it.

Which as always begs the inevitable question – why? What made David Mitchell think that writing a book about the queens of England from Anglo-Saxon days to the end of the Tudor period, a pretty long span of history in anyone’s books, was a good idea? Certainly there is a very well established tradition of celebrities writing books. And Mitchell studied history at Cambridge, albeit quite a while ago. My hunch is that this is a lockdown book, something the author filled his hours with when going out or recording game shows wasn’t an option.

There’s not much original research here – none in fact – and anyone with a reasonable grasp of English royal history won’t learn a great deal. A canter through six hundred years of royal history was always going to be somewhat superficial. Even if Mitchell’s reasons for writing the book can be surmised, that in itself doesn’t explain why anyone should read it. There are a few reasons, although whether these justify the whole exercise I am not so sure.

Firstly, there’s the swearing. For someone who has developed a whole comedic persona around being posh, here Mitchell swears freely and extensively. For example, writing about King Stephen and Queen Matilda, he says: “They were both twats. They may not have been able to help being twats – the mores and values of their times and of their class may have made them twats. But they were twats and terrible things happened as a result.” (This is a more family-friendly example). The comedy here derives from the repetition of the word twat rather than its shock value – just in case you hadn’t spotted that. Despite his best efforts not much comedy is wrung from the humour of King Cnut’s name sounding a little like a spelling mistake. But it lightens the tone and makes it clear that Mitchell isn’t taking the exercise all that seriously.

The main interest and where the text really comes alive is in Mitchell’s observations about the nature of monarchy. He argues compellingly that monarchs aren’t in any way special people:

“Ultimately the reverence shown to monarchs is a mockery, a joke. It’s pretending they’re something they are not. This is a bitter and clear reduction of kingship to its essentials: an office accepted only because an unjust hierarchy is preferable to anarchy. Out of the gangsterism of the lawless post-Roman land of Britannia, a few local bigshots emerged, their power gradually coalescing into kingship.” (396).

That’s the book’s thesis in a nutshell – once the Romans left Britain there was a period of lawlessness, local thugs took control of small areas, slowly killed one another and grew in power and influence until the concept of ‘king’ was invented. That power was then cemented with “ceremonial and religious elements giving kingship an aura of legitimacy and sanctity. But it was just made up. At some point someone with a sociopathic dislocation from the truth had to start asserting it, like the first conspiracy theorist who said that 5G masts spread Covid”. All of this is rather brilliantly summarised in the book’s final chapter, Bookends. This final chapter also contains a rather remarkable few paragraphs about Shakespeare. Mitchell writes with passion about Shakespeare’s brilliance, and concludes “He’s where this book has been heading, it turns out…Shakespeare is a good reason to stop writing about kings, because his brilliance makes them seem silly.” I wish he had come to that realisation a few hundred pages earlier and turned his intelligence and learning towards a subject that obviously interests him far more than kings and queens, and one on which has some valuable insights.

The book ends by making it clear that although the exercise could be repeated for the Stuarts, Hanoverians etc, it won’t be. The excuse offered is that kingship had by the end of Elizabeth’s reign become less important and therefore less interesting (tell that to Cromwell). I’m not buying it for an instant. I hope Mitchell’s next book is about a subject he obviously has a real passion for and which according to this book he shares with his wife – if she were to help him out with it all the better!

Unruly, a History of England’s Kings and Queens, by David Mitchell, 2023

Aside
Book review

Orwell, A Man of our Time, by Richard Bradford, 2020

I can’t remember ever having so passionately agreed with the central premise of a book before – yet also found myself profoundly disagreeing with many of the conclusions the author draws. I know that might sound like a slightly artificial opinion adopted to make a good opening line to a blog post, but I mean it. (I’d rather be honest than interesting, although ideally I’d like to be both of course!).

Bradford’s thesis is summed up in the book’s subtitle – Orwell is a Man of Our Time. In other words his work has an immediate relevance to the 2020’s – to the era of Trump, Brexit, social media and the ever intrusive state. And that’s utterly unarguable – of course he does. Orwell has in many ways shaped the way we see the world. That’s why the media manages to find a dozen things a day ‘Orwellian’, from facial recognition software to social media cancel culture. So here’s the first problem – this thesis has already been written. In 2002 Christopher Hitchens wrote Why Orwell Matters adopting the same format as Bradford, or rather anticipating it, demonstrating vividly Orwell’s continuing relevance. Although Bradford has written in more detail than Hitchens, and obviously included more recent material, fundamentally the point has already been made, far more convincingly. (If you prefer there is a short YouTube video of a speech Hitchens made that covers his key points. I disagree with much of what he says – he argues that Orwell died of poverty, which is simply nonsense, and he has nothing to say about Orwell’s defining characteristic, his Englishness, but he is entertaining and persuasive).

There’s a second equally obvious problem with the biographical structure that Bradford adopts. He goes through Orwell’s life in the manner of a traditional biography and gives equal space to his childhood and early novels compared to for example his final great works. If you are trying to trace the origins of (say) Animal Farm in Orwell’s time at the village store in Wallington, fair enough, but that immediately begins to stray from the declared intention of the book, to demonstrate Orwell’s continuing relevance. I would argue (as Orwell himself does, in Why I Write) that his work really only begins to be distinctively in his voice after the Spanish Civil War. Almost everything before that is of minor interest only (I would exclude the Down a Mine section of Wigan Pier). Putting it another way, if that sniper’s bullet that bisected his throat in 1937 had been centimetres to the left or right, we would never have heard the term “Orwellian”. The biographical structure of this book therefore means that we spend a long time waiting for the main event, the major two novels and the classic political essays of the 1940’s, and that some earlier parts of the text feel like ‘filler’.

(Just a quick aside on the term Orwellian. It seems to me it is used in three distinct ways nowadays. Increasingly the first application has come to predominate – to describe totalitarian behaviour by the state or the agents of the state, particularly through the use of technology. Facebook’s algorithms are Orwellian, automatic number plate recognition is Orwellian, etc. The second use is in the ironic commentary on official language, referencing the slogans of Oceania – appointing a Minister for Brexit Benefits was quintessentially Orwellian. Finally, and this is more rare nowadays, is the use of the term to describe writing in Orwell’s distinctive style – as he famously put it in the essay just referenced, “Good prose is like a windowpane”. )

Bradford often strays from his original concept. Instead of demonstrating Orwell’s relevance to contemporary events, (‘our time’) he instead finds parallels between incidents in Orwell’s life and things that happened later. Oswald Mosley is compared to Nigel Farage, for example, a perfectly fair comparison but nothing to do with Orwell. Conditions in mines in the 1930’s were hard, as recorded in The Road to Wigan Pier, but in the 1980’s miners in the UK went on strike to save their jobs – again hard to argue with, although the two things are barely connected with one another let alone Orwell. Where Bradford’s argument nears breaking point is in his apparently preposterous claim that Orwell’s ‘foresaw Brexit‘. That might seem ridiculous given that the EU didn’t exist before Orwell died in 1950, but surprisingly Bradford does a good job of defending this point. Orwell thought a lot about what the world would look like after the end of the second world war and in a world dominated by nuclear weapons. He lived just long enough to see the beginning of the end of Empire and new post-war political and military structures emerge, one of which was likely to be a form of united Europe. IN the event such a body was created, Britain’s role in it would be uncertain. It is not much of a leap to imagine Orwell’s understanding of colonialism, imperialism and nationalism all coming together to predict Brexit. In England Your England (1941) for example, Orwell wrote about “the famous ‘insularity’ and ‘xenophobia’ of the English, and in 1947 recorded anti-Polish sentiment very similar to the prejudices that drove Brexit. Orwell also foresaw that it would be in America’s commercial interests to weaken a centralised United States of Europe.

Unfortunately, for every worthwhile observation there are far too many misses, irrelevancies or demonstrations of the author’s own prejudices. The television cook Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall is bizarrely attacked for no apparent reason than he went to Eton. Anti-Semitism within the Labour Party is bafflingly compared to the two-minute hate in 1984. Jacques Derrida’s syntax is attacked as overly complex, and claimed to be an example of something Orwellian, I am not quite sure what given that Newspeak was defined by its lack of complexity. The book’s analysis ends with a scattergun critique of Boris Johnson, Trump, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, political correctness, wokeism, cancel culture in universities, deconstructionism, and last but not least Islam.

There are some errors in this text, or at least things that I found debateable, although I make no pretence of authority on the issue. First, Bradford says that Orwell spent a year at Wellington college before going on to Eton (page 17) – Taylor’s far more authoritative work says he was there for just nine weeks (page 60). In his discussion on homelessness as presented in Orwell’s work Bradford appears to believe that anyone using the ‘tuppenny hangovers’ (the cheapest place to sleep, resting over a rope) were at risk from arrest under the Vagrancy Act because they were outside, which is simply incorrect. He later describes Orwell’s voice as indicating “irredeemable boredom and monotony” without acknowledging that no recordings of Orwell’s voice can be found. To give one final example Bradford criticises China’s one-child policy, citing it as an unexplained example of the state attempting to control the private lives of the citizenry (and being therefore Orwellian) without giving a moment’s thought to the famine in China less than a decade earlier which lead to the deaths by starvation of millions of people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine).

This might be a bit clumsy, but I found this edition’s front cover strangely apposite. It is illustrated (see above) with a print of Orwell’s head and shoulders, cut into segments then partially reassembled, leaving his face crooked and askew. In a way that is what Bradford has done with Orwell’s life work – he has broken them down into different constituent parts and then poorly reassembled them.

Orwell, A Man of Our Time, by Richard Bradford, 2020

Aside
Book review

The Five – the untold lives of Jack the Ripper’s victims, by Hallie Rubenhold, 2019

The FiveThe central concept of this popular history book (by popular in this context I mean some of the claims are not as strictly evidenced as I would normally expect) is to tell the stories of the five “canonical” victims of the Ripper, the women generally accepted to be the victims of a single murderer operating in Whitechapel in 1888.

Inevitably the author cannot avoid drifting into speculation on how they came to their deaths, and it is here where the book has caused some controversy. Rubenhold disputes the widely held view that all of the victims were prostitutes. Her case seems strong here, although I haven’t read the counter-evidence which I am sure exists. She also argues powerfully that several of the women were killed while rough-sleeping; again this seems to make a lot of sense – they certainly were living a lifestyle where rough-sleeping would have been a necessity on occasion, even if the precise locations of their murders suggest unlikely places in which to bed down. 

But these issues are not the focus of the book. What the author aims to do is to tell these women’s stories – from their births to how they came to be on the street on those nights in 1888. What decisions and events led them there. If you knew nothing about these women and were to guess you would expect drink to play a part, and of course it does. Abusive relationships and personal tragedy are also involved. More widely the author is extremely strong on the social, political and economic context of the mid nineteenth century, including of course the housing and public health crises that were at the heart of these women’s tragic stories. Things were not all consistently bleak for these women – for example some of them were reasonably well educated for their class and generation. All had been in stable relationships (so far as we can tell) and had families from whom they had slowly been alienated. They were given support from employers, charities and housing associations. There was nothing inevitable about their deaths. 

In books of this kind one is always left wondering how much of the author’s reconstruction is speculation or educated guessing. A good example is the claim that Catherine Eddowes, the fourth victim, whilst selling pamphlets and so-called ‘gallows ballads’ was present at the execution of her cousin, Christopher Robinson, at Strafford in January 1866. The evidence that Catherine was present at the execution is flimsy to say the least, but here it is presented as unquestionable fact. (This is one issue were I took a quick look at some alternative sources). The other thing that is is hard to be clear on is how much of the text is the result of independent research, and how much is simply a reheating of existing knowledge about the victims. Because despite the widespread claim that this book is the first attempt to tell these women’s stories, there have been several previous such narratives, and there is arguably not much more to be found out.

Was this a genuine attempt to give a voice to these women, or yet another cynical exploitation of the frisson of excitement caused by the monstrous nature of the murders? I am happy to give the author the benefit of the doubt here. The narratives are all well-constructed, and the decision to end them at the point of the murders removes any hint of titillation. It was nice to see photographs of the victims others than on the mortuary slab. These photographs are remarkable, and if Rubenhold is the first historian to track them down (and I have no way of knowing if that is the case or not) then this in itself was a remarkable piece of historical detective work.

I think there was another way to give some value to these women’s lives, and that would have been to show how – if at all – their murders changed society. Did the way police investigate murders change? Did the way they treated vagrants and prostitutes change? Were the Whitechapel slums cleared? What, in other words, were the political and social impacts of the Ripper murders? But that’s obviously another book entirely.

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Book review

The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989

The Remains of the Day is a subtle, detailed portrait of a life of self-control, restraint and sacrifice. It is narrated by Mr Stevens, an ageing butler, who in 1956 takes a road trip to the West Country, to visit a former colleague, Mrs Dean, formerly Miss Kenton. In the course of his largely uneventful trip he reminisces freely about his long career of service. It has been a prestigious career at the height of his profession, or at least so he claims, but there has been a price to pay for this commitment to the demands of his role.

We are used to flawed narrators in modern literature, in which the detRemainsails of the story emerge in the gaps between what the narrator tells us, and what we can perceive is actually happening. Here Ishiguro pushes the flawed narrator concept even further – Stevens’s memories are carefully layered to reveal a portrait of a man profoundly reserved and out of touch with his feelings, who comes to fear that he has wasted his life, and worse still will waste what remains to him. Several memories are revisited more than once in the course of the novel, with Stevens’s revisions and corrections revealing each time further insights into his decisions and thought processes.

The ostensible purpose of his road trip emerges over the course of the novel. Initially we are told that Stevens is planning to ask Miss Kenton to return to Darlington Hall, the scene of his long years of service to Lord Darlington, and more recently to an American employer, Mr Farraday. Darlington Hall was once a large prestigious establishment, but is now sadly reduced with large areas of the hall closed up, and only a skeleton staff. Stevens has received a letter from Miss Kenton which he chooses to interpret as indicating that she wants to return to her post as housekeeper. At this time we know little about their relationship, and Stevens only gives us unreliable glimpses of the past, but he slowly builds a picture of a warm friendship which could easily have become something more. Later he confesses that he may have read too much into her letter, and that his visit has more a more personal agenda. He mentions several other former acquaintances that he has lost touch with over the course of the years, and it becomes apparent that this trip is, for Stevens, (although he would never admit it) a last attempt to rekindle an old flame and recapture some of the former glories of his past. Stevens is an expert at self deception, and his explanations for his conduct – for example when he pretends to the villagers he meets when his car breaks down that he is a gentleman, rather than a servant – are always plausible but ultimately unconvincing.

In parallel with this personal account of his life, Stevens reveals the story of his former employer, Lord Darlington. Lord Darlington, it slowly becomes apparent, was a Nazi-sympathiser and supporter of appeasement, and after the outbreak of the second world war was publicly disgraced. Stevens avoids admitting that he was butler to Lord Darlington in the post-war present, even though privately in the confines of his personal narrative he defends his former employer as having been well-intentioned if ultimately misled by those he trusted. In one scene he recounts the story of his being asked by Lord Darlington to fire two servants because they are Jewish. He does so despite the passionate protests of Miss Kenton, taking the approach that it is not his role to question his employer’s decision.

The pace of the novel and the lack of incident in the present have led to some reviewers expressing frustration with this novel. Stevens’s buttoned-up, restrained personality, and his habit of expressing himself with precise, non-committal language that never expresses his true feelings. When his father dies for example, we can only tell he is upset because someone notices he is crying, something he would never admit to doing himself.

Certainly there are no car-crashes, chases or fist-fights in ‘The Remains of the Day’. If you are looking for dramatic incident, look elsewhere. This is a novel of subtle details, precisely chosen words, and delicate portraits. The reader needs to invest in the narrative – if they do so the rewards are worth it.

Did you enjoy ‘Remains’? Did you prefer the film, which was undoubtedly brilliant, but arguably placed too much emphasis on the romantic aspects of the novel? Or was the lack of incident a problem for you? Would really like to know what you thought.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Book review

The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God’s Holy Warriors by Dan Jones, 2017

tamplarsIt would be hard to write a boring history of the Knight’s Templars. They were a Christian military order originally founded during the early years of the Crusades to protect pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem and other holy sites in the very dangerous lands of the Middle East. The Order’s story is inextricably linked with that of the Crusades, and you accidentally learn a lot about the latter just by reading this account of the former. It is hardly surprising then that the Templars have had a strong grip on popular imagination, from the Da Vinci Code to Indiana Jones. They also had a flair for iconography and symbolism, such as the big red cross they wore on their cloaks.

Dan Jones’s “Templars” a fairly conventional chronological narrative, and after a while the procession of battles, slaughter, castles and cities captured and lost, becomes a bit of a blur. Masters of the Order come and go, opponent warlords do the same, victories and losses take their turn. This is a very Western oriented history – the infidel hordes are differentiated only by their leaders, and there is no attempt to understand why they had such apparently inexhaustible resources (clue – because this was/is their homeland) or why they were able to repeatedly defeat supposedly superior Western European armies. Jones resists the temptation to draw parallels with modern conflicts in the Middle East,  although these suggest themselves at times irresistibly.

 Authors of histories need to address the “Why am I writing this book?” question in a way fiction writers do not. Normally answers range from “I have uncovered new material” – no such claim is made here – “I have a different interpretation from previous authors” – ditto – or “this topic has not been written about recently” – another ditto. So why was this book written? Jones may have hoped for a TV adaptation from this book – the settings are very photogenic – and this may be behind his tendency to leave chapters hanging on a cliff-hanger in phrases such as “William was not quite ready to act on the evidence he was compiling. But he could and he would”; “He would never see Cyprus again”; or “This was the moment when darkness began to fall on the Templars”.

I make no claims of expertise in this field, but I got the impression that Jones has based his work primarily on the chronicles of the Templars and their opponents. I would have thought an archaeological approach might have been worth considering – what do the ruins of the temples, castles, houses and farms of the Order  tell us about their histories that the chronicles gloss over?

During my read of this text I came up with a theory about this category of book – serious but non-academic history. There’s a limit to how much information the brain can retain. This is a complex narrative spanning around two hundred years. The bibliography, glossary and appendices run to almost 100 pages. This condensation of such a vast amount of information in a non-academic work of history (I don’t mean Jones’s approach is non-academic, simply that the book is aimed at the general albeit studious reader, rather than historians or student) inevitably leads to the overwhelming weight of facts passing the reader by. It’s just not possible to retain all that information, unless you read the book as if you were going to be examined on it afterwards. So in the end you probably learn little more than if you were to read a few thousand words about the Templars on Wikipedia. I am not sure that is a problem or not – you can enjoy the book but use the internet if time is more pressing or you want to cover more ground.

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History

The Greatest Day in History – Nicholas Best

The Greatest Day in History – the 11th Hour of the 11th day of the 11th Month – How the Great War Really Ended by Nicholas Best (Phoenix 2008)
I am probably being pedantic here, but I see a bit of a contradiction between this book’s title and its sub-title: either the book is about the 11th November 1918 – the day – or the 11th hour of that day, or about how the war really ended, which is infinitely more complex than just the analysis of one hour or day.
Pedantry aside, what the author has done here is actually very interesting – he has gathered together a series or memoirs and recollection of the end of the First World War, and woven them together. Sensibly he hasn’t been dogmatic about the time span, and where the narrative requires it he has gone outside the 24 hour constraints.
The book is a curious mixture of these memoirs with some genuine historical analysis, charting hour by hour how the Germans came to sign the Armistice. Armistice not of course surrender, a detail which matter significantly for the later course of European history. The Nazi version of events, whereby the undefeated German army was betrayed by the politicians, is comprehensively demolished through this detail. The last hours of the Kaiser before the abdication is also minutely described. Other scenes are more impressionistic – what various famous or to be famous people were doing at the time of the Armistice.
Many scenes from this book stayed with me, including the account of how, when the news that an armistice and ceasefire was imminent, some troops rushed to the front so they could claim they had “seen action”, not wanting to miss the last chance to have a go at the “Boche”. Some men died minutes before 11, and of course some fighting went on after 11.
I was a little surprised that this approach worked – that a deep dive into one day could tell so much about broader European historical themes such as the end of the second Reich and the Austro-Hungarian empire, instead of a traditional, broad narrative sweep across the years. The use of so much raw material, especially the diaries and letters, gives the account an immediacy and urgency – you can share the elation, the relief, and the bitterness as the war ends.
For anyone who wants to read about the Great War but doesn’t want to lose the personal stories of those involved, this is highly recommended.
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