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Showing posts with label biography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biography. Show all posts
As Edmund Crispin he wrote a far too short series of detective novels and short stories about Gervase Fen, Oxford Professor of English Language and Literature.
Anyone who reads his novels (and I can thoroughly recommend them for being clever, witty and often laugh-out-loud funny as well as highly literary) must realize that BM/EC was thoroughly conservative in his outlook. As it happens he was also a Conservative in his political support though not always in tune with the party. David Whittle points out that, unlike many of his friends, such as Kingsley Amis, Montgomery/Crispin never went through a left-wing phase.
Therefore, readers will not be surprised to hear that he was not particularly enamoured with Edward Heath, the bane of all conservative Conservatives. During the last couple of decades of his life he started a number of projects or, at least thought of them, but did not finish them. It was a very sad tale of decline but has to be off-set by the story of his earlier career, which was effervescently successful.
One of the projects (and how one wishes he had completed it) was a novel about two writers who live close to each other, cannot stand each other and are commissioned to write a detective novel together. Because some of the action takes place in a doctor's surgery, the title was going to be What Seems to be the Trouble? and it has the usual Montgomery/Crispin references to his friends
and there is also a savage attack on VAT and on Ted Heath, the Prime Minister for some of the time the book was being written (he is called a 'monomaniac mugwump').A monomaniac mugwump? Absolutely brilliant. I wonder what in particular the monomania was. Somehow I cannot imagine Montgomery/Crispin to be in favour of Britain's entry into the Common Market.
A number of Mr Miliband's supporters tried to pooh-pooh Disraeli's claims to being the first (and, so far, the only) Jewish Prime Minister of Britain by pointing out that he had been baptized at the age of 12 and was, in fact, a practising Anglican later in life. That is so but then Ed Miliband is a practising socialist atheist and it is highly unlikely that he has ever participated in Jewish religious ceremonies unless he thought he could get some kind of a political advantage from such participation. In that respect that would be no different from him participating in, as it were, Sikh religious ceremonies, or Hindu or Muslim.
So, it is down to race and ethnicity, according to which Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield was most definitely Jewish. Indeed, as he rose in the political sphere, he became the target of numerous attacks that now we would call anti-Semitic though the expression itself was first used after his death. Some of those attacks came from Liberal politicians, journalists and historians, including Mr Gladstone himself.
Did Disraeli perceive himself as a Jew? Was he at all interested in the Jewish question? Was his policies influenced by his race as many of the accusations proclaimed? David Cesarani asks these questions in the latest biography of Disraeli. (Alas, he died at the very early age of 58 and did not see the book's publication.)
The book is part of a series published by Yale University Press, Jewish Lives, and the author begins by asking "Does Benjamin Disraeli deserve a place in a series of books called Jewish Lives?" He comes to the conclusion that he does for various reasons not just because he was born a Jew and rose higher than any other in British politics. His analysis follows Disraeli's life and looks at his books, novels and his biography of Lord George Bentinck, his colleague in the destruction of Sir Robert Peel and, let us be honest, the Tory Party.
Cesarani looks at Disraeli's family, his early life, his cavalier attitude to other people's money and the distrust felt for him by many in British politics and society. The distrust, he concludes, had more to do with Disraeli's rackety life, his debts and his various affairs. He was seen as foreign and exotic but, thinks Professor Cesarani, his Jewishness was largely subsumed in that. The first attack on him as a Jew came from Daniel O'Connell during the Taunton by-election of 1835. The attack wounded but many commentators felt that O'Connell had overstepped the marks of decency.
It was not till later in Disraeli's career that the various slurs became stronger, culminating in the ferocious attacks during the whole of the crisis of 1876 - 78 from which he emerged as the man who had won a great victory for Britain without firing a single shot or endangering a single life. That he is emerged as such for most people and, certainly, for the Conservative Party but not for all. Gladstone continued to fulminate; other Liberal writers pronounced that Disraeli's policy was not in Britain's interest but in the interest of the vaguely describe international Jewish conspiracy who naturally sided with the Turk.
In fact, Disraeli's policy, be that the purchase of the Khedive's shares in the Suez canal (on a loan from the Rothschilds, which was seen as particularly sinister, but no one else would have been able to come up with the money and the interest they received was no higher than usual) or the tortuous effort to prevent Russia from acquiring too much influence in the Balkans, let alone get to the Straits and Constantinople, was motivated by his desire to protect and aggrandize the British Empire. He could not understand why other people, for instance Gladstone, could not see this. How could the Liberal leader not realize that Russia was not in the slightest interested in the welfare of the Christians in the Ottoman Balkans but wanted to use them to push forward to the Straits and Constantinople? (One cannot help recognizing certain themes in the debates about Russia that have continued to be argued over ferociously to the present day.)
When it came to Jewish affairs Disraeli tended to drag his feet. He rarely intervened for Jews in other countries and was little more than a lukewarm fighter for their political rights in this one. He did support, more or less, Lionel de Rothschild in his struggle to be allowed to take his oath in the House of Commons without using the words "as a Christian" but the Rothschilds considered him unreliable despite their eventual close friendship and their support after Mary-Anne's death.
When one looks at Disraeli's writings a somewhat puzzling picture emerges on the subject of his attitude to Jews and Judaism. He was, in some ways, fascinated by it all but without showing the slightest interest in the history or politics. The early novels do not even refer to Jews. Later Jewish characters appeared, usually elderly wise men who "understood" the reality of the world in a way nobody else did. Sometimes there were plot lines that involved ideas of a Jewish revival in the East but these never came to anything.
If one were to try to summarize Disraeli's rather convoluted and, let us be frank, mushy attitude to the Jewish Question, one would have to list these points. Jews ought to have the same rights as Christians because it is clear that, Christianity starting as a Jewish sect, the two were inseparable and it is wrong to try to do so. This rather conveniently by-passed the liberal argument for Jewish emancipation, as that was based on questions of equality and individual rights, concepts Disraeli loathed.
He came up with the wildest theories about Semitic, Germanic and Anglo races but was convinced and repeated this at every possible opportunity that the world is divided according to some racial theory and this gave the Jews and the Anglos a great advantage. This was a particularly unfortunate as many of those who attacked him used his own so-called theories against him. Indeed, both Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the creator of modern racial theory, and Hitler quoted Disraeli to support their own sayings. When one adds to that Disraeli's propensity to explain that there is a cabal behind all world events, run largely by Jews, one can see that his influence was oddly harmful to Jews in the twentieth century.
David Cesarani comes close to saying that it was largely Disraeli's fault that the modern lethal anti-Semitism was born and grew with such rapidity at the end of the nineteenth century. That is, surely, somewhat unfair. The likelihood is that it would have existed and battened on other historic events without Disraeli's melodramatic novels and peculiar biography of his friend. The tracing of Disraeli's attitude to Jews and other people's attitude to him as a Jew is, on the other hand, an important part of the story both Disraeli's and that of modern British politics.
Certainly Benjamin Disraeli deserves to be in this series of biographies as long as nobody thinks that this is all that matters about him. Cesarani's book ends on a rather tragic note with Disraeli losing his grip on politics and dying while under constant anti-Semitic attacks. But by this time he was seen as the creator of the modern Conservative Party and a statesman of world-wide fame. A year after his death he was honoured beyond any other Prime Minister through Primrose Day and, subsequently, the Primrose League. He remains the one against whom party leaders, mostly but not exclusively Conservative, measure themselves. He is also the one about whom biographies pour out every year. This is a fine contribution to the genre, fascinating, knowledgeable and lightly written, but there will be many more.
David Cesarani: Disraeli
The Novel Politician
2016 Yale University Press
This, as it happens, came out before the second volume of Charles Moore's magisterial (the only word one can use) biography and concentrates on just two years of Margaret Thatcher's premiership: the first two, before she established her control over the party and laid the foundation for her achievements (or otherwise, if you happen not to like what she managed to do).
I found Kwasi Kwarteng's Thatcher's Trial on the shelves for new books of London Library and took it down immediately.
This is how the author sums up the theme of the book:
Thatcher's Trial is a short account of the six months which defined Thatcher as a leader. These six months started with the budget delivered on 10 March 1981 and ended with the reshuffle of her government which took place on 14 September. during this period, Margaret Thatcher showed herself to be inflexible, tough minded and courageous.I am looking forward to reading Mr Kwarteng's description of all of that.
Her judgements were clear but often wayward; her self-belief sometimes faltered, although publicly she never let any hesitation blunt her message. She always conveyed an image of utter certainty, even when some of her closest allies openly expressed reservations.
In the first place, however, I was reminded of the fact that the famous September 1981 reshuffle got rid of a number of wets and, more to the point, a number of grandees who had assumed that the Conservative Party was theirs to run. Among these were Sir Ian Gilmour and Lord Soames whom Mr Kwarteng describes as having had "a political career of considerable distinction" but whose achievements (with the possible exception of his stint as Our Man in Paris) depended very largely on the fact that he was Sir Winston Churchill's son-in-law. Neither of them every forgave her.
Various versions of what happened when Thatcher had given Soames his marching orders have circulated the political world then and have done so ever since. Quoting from Thatcher's own The Downing Street Years, Mr Kwarteng says:
His sacking was a notable scalp for the daughter of a Lincolnshire grocer. To Margaret Thatcher, who was not so often as obviously class conscious, Soames gave 'the distinct impression' that he felt the natural order of things was being 'violated' and that he was, in effect, 'being dismissed by his housemaid'.Other versions were more colourful, notably Hugo Young's in One of Us, which is the basis of this:
Soames decided to give Thatcher a piece of his mind as is reported to have 'assailed her for twenty minutes for her various shortcomings'. His irritation was manifest and it was said that his 'thunderous' and booming voice 'could be heard out of the open window halfway across Horseguards Parade.Exactly as he would have spoken to a recalcitrant footman or under-gardener (housemaids being in his wife's domain). The lady must have given as good as she received because Soames was by the account many of us have heard, severely put out. Charles Moore describes his reaction in his first volume:
Christopher Soames reportedly complained to friends that he would have sacked his gamekeeper with more courtesy than Mrs Thatcher had shown him (though why one should expect gamekeepers to be shown less courtesy than Lord Soames in matters of employment was not clear).On the other hand, it is abundantly clear that Margaret Thatcher had summed up Christopher Soames and his attitude to her and to the Conservative Party fairly accurately.
When I first heard about it from the author, Michael Jago, I told him (by e-mail) that my attitude to Butler was ambivalent. In other words, I am not sure that he is the best Prime Minister we never had as I cannot help thinking that a man who allows the premiership to slip away from him three times had the necessary fire in the belly for the job. Without discussing all that, Mr Jago said that he, too, is ambivalent, despite or because of the biography he has just written. That is a fascinating attitude and I am greatly looking forward to reading the book.
Burke comes into that category of people about whom we all seem to know a little but few of us know much or with any accuracy. Most of the quotations attributed to him are bogus or misquotations. He did not exactly say that all it took for evil to triumph was for good men to do nothing or various words to that effect, which one can find on the internet. What he wrote in his seminal 1770 book Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents was:
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.That actually makes sense. To be fair, having silly but plausible quotes attributed is a problem Burke shares with, among others, Churchill and Lincoln. He also shares with them the fact that people tend to assign to them their own opinions and political affiliations. Thus, Churchill's checkered party political career is little known or ignored by many and Lincoln is routinely assumed to have been a Democrat though he was a Republican.
With Burke the situation is even more complicated as he lived, wrote and was politically active long before the modern British political parties were formed. No reader of this blog needs to be told that Edmund Burke was not a Conservative as that party did not exist in his day nor a Tory as he was a Whig. A Rockinghamite Whig, to be precise, and as Mr Norman shows in his book, the main creator of a group that could be seen as the prototype of later political parties. The Rockinghamites were more than just a faction or a following that many eighteenth century aristocrats who bothered with politics had: though in opposition for many years they kept together and developed a core body of opinions on a number of subjects such as the need to come to an agreement with the North American colonies that they kept throughout their existence.
To many Burke may seem to have been a somewhat changeable thinker and politician. Why, people ask, did he support the Americans in their fight against the British Crown but was so vehement in his denunciation of the French Revolution from a very early stage? Burke denounced the French Revolution, the destruction of the French Monarchy and what he saw a sinking into mob rule as early as 1790 before the full horrors had developed. His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791) were accurate predictions of what was to follow. He proved to be much more capable of understanding events than many of his allies and opponents such as Charles James Fox, Thomas Paine or Mary Wollstonecraft. (Online Library of Liberty has a fascinating section in which one can read all the most important works in The Debate about the French Revolution.)
In fact, Burke's thinking was mostly consistent and it is a rare historian who cannot see the basic difference between the ideas that motivated the American "rebels" and the French revolutionaries. Burke was simply ahead of most people. He could also see what the British government was doing wrong in Ireland and the problems with the East India Company - both being species of oppression and unaccountability. Many of these ideas have been discussed by previous biographers, particularly by Conor Cruise O'Brien in his magisterial work The Great Melody. (Curiously, Mr Norman does not mention an excellent short introduction to Burke, which has figured on this blog by Dennis O'Keeffe.
Jesse Norman divides his book into two, dealing with the great man's life in the first half and his ideas as well as their possible influence on present day political thinking in the second. The life is detailed enough but is not in the O'Brien category and rightly so. The chapters present a good account of his life and his writings, including a discussion of the relatively recently discovered early essay on political parties. (While I have no complaints about the text, I have very serious reservations about the scrappy notes and references as well as the less than adequate index.)
Mr Norman is clearly an admirer of Burke but is, nevertheless, ready to be critical when he thinks it is necessary, for example when he talks of the latter's behaviour during the Regency crisis. There is also a certain reticence over the impeachment of Warren Hastings, a controversial subject, though Burke's attitude to His Majesty's Indian subjects was clearly well ahead of his time and in keeping with his belief in freedom and dignity as the necessary portion of all.
The second part of the book is less happy in this reader's opinion. Burke's thoughts, writings and speeches had already been analyzed in the first half and there is little to add. Mr Norman concentrates on the question of how Burke's ideas are to be used today, a laudable enterprise, but he goes further and falls into the error that previous authors, notably Jim McCue had fallen into, by discussing how Burke might or might not have reacted to certain modern political ideas. This is futile. We cannot tell how an eighteenth century thinker, brilliant though he was, would have reacted to ideas of the late twentieth or early twenty-first century.
Jim McCue in his Edmund Burke and Our Present Discontents introduced a long (perhaps the longest) chapter which ranted at feminism and proved beyond any doubt in the author's mind that Burke would have hated feminism. Jesse Norman does not go that far but he does discuss a great many modern political, economic, social and anthropological ideas to prove that many things he does not like in our present state Burke would have disliked, too.
Mr Norman's particular bugbears are modern economists none of whom, according to him, can see beyond simple wealth creation or money making and liberal individualism, which denies the need for social networks and institutions. To say that this is a simplification of modern economics and of the theory of liberal individualism is to understate the case. One cannot help being a little worried about a politician who asserts over and over again that social and political structures are more important than individualism and individual liberty, particularly if he simplifies what the latter two mean. Is there not a suspicion that his idea of what a satisfactory social and political structures would be gives a primary position to politicians as creators and guardians of those structures?
Despite the long and sometimes only tangentially relevant discussions of modern sociology and social anthropology together with the often conflicting findings, the book is worth reading, not least because we must all rejoice in the existence of a literate politician who has some interest beyond vote getting tactics.
Beyond that, there is no doubt that Edmund Burke and his thoughts are of significance today just as they were in the past. He laid down many fundamental ideas about politics, gradual change, the need for a coherent social structure and the notion that there is a seamless whole between past, present and future generations and these are still relevant though many of the details have changed. At a time when the Conservative Party and the right in general are searching for definitions we could all do much worse than study those provided by Edmund Burke two hundred odd years ago.
Jesse Norman: Edmund Burke - Philosopher, Politician, Prophet
2013 London, William Collins
Tory Historian is reading Disraeli or The Two Lives, a cleverly titled book by Douglas Hurd and Edward Young. In chapter III, Doer or Dreamer there is a discussion about Disraeli's novels that have fallen completely out of favour. Hardly anybody who is not a specialist in Victorian literature or Disraeli himself reads them now though the later ones are not that bad. The early ones, on the other hand, are truly terrible.
The authors of Disraeli acknowledge the poor quality of the writing and plotting of the early novels and quote Anthony Trollope's contemptuous dismissal:
...the glory has been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been the wealth of tinsel. The wit has been the wit of hairdressers and the enterprise has been the enterprise of mountebanks.A comprehensive indictment. But there is another side to it, say Hurd and Young:
And yet Trollope's attack does not quite ring true. This is not simply because in Disraeli's later novels we find real jewels of cleverness. Rather, in all his novels, bad and good, mature and puerile, Disraeli was seeking something other than literary achievement.That may not tells us a great deal about the literary quality of the later novels, such as Coningsby or Sibyl but the comment does try to grapple with some of the contradictions in Disraeli's personality, which is one of the book's avowed aims.
A conflict had emerged in Disraeli's early years which never fully resolved itself. On the one hand, Disraeli became a passionately ambitious politician, intriguing and manoeuvring with growing skill, choosing whatever tactics and relationships might take him up the greasy pole. On the other hand, through his interest in literature he developed a set of ideas to which he was devoted and which throughout his life he spent much time refining.
He refused to give up either his career or his ideas; so how could they be reconciled? The answer was through his novels. For Disraeli, literary sparkle held the key to great leadership. Here was a man who had diagnosed the nation's ills and could supply the relevant imaginative remedies. Together with his Jewish stock and ancient ancestry, it gave him, as he later suggested, the feeling on waking each day that he could topple governments and shake dynasties.
A new double biography of those two nineteenth century giants, Gladstone and Disraeli. The Great Rivalry by Dick Leonard is published by I. B. Tauris and concentrates on the rivalry that shaped British politics for several decades. It is not, by any means, the first time the rivalry has been written about and the two men's differing personalities and backgrounds have been covered before. To be fair to the author, Dick Leonard, he says this in the Introduction; why the publisher needs to produce such inaccurate hype is unclear.
My first reaction was that Dick Leonard was an unlikely man to write about these two politicians, he being a Fabian, a former Labour MP and a man who is responsible for the unduly favourable light in which the European Union is viewed by some of this country's media. However, I note that he has written a number of books about British Premiers, most of whom were not and could not be socialists.
The intention is to write a long piece about the first volume of Charles Moore's authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher, Not for Turning, and I have started reading it. Unusually, the Preface is fascinating as it describes how the whole project came about and Lady Thatcher's own attitude and behaviour. Much of it Mr Moore told us at the launch, which was held, rather grandly in the Banqueting House in Whitehall, beneath the Rubens ceiling with the speakers standing by the window through which Charles I had stepped out to the scaffold. (But I digress.)
It is, however, fascinating to read how little interest Lady Thatcher had in self-analysis or in examination of her past life. In this she was the exact opposite of Sir Winston Churchill: for her the deed was the only thing that mattered, not its description (accurately or otherwise) afterwards.
Like all remarkable leaders, she had a great egotism. She always believed that she, and she alone, rescued Britain from its post-1945 years of semi-socialist decline. She believed that the "-ism" which derived from her married name would make a permanent different to the history of human freedom.But she was not at all touchy, or even anxious, about what history might say about her.A remarkable case of self-confidence. How many other leading politicians could show anything similar?
Dorothy L. Sayers crops up on this blog regularly so readers will not be surprised to learn that Tory Historian is reading another book about the great lady, detective story writer, theologian, literary critic, conservative thinker and all-round good thing (no, that is not a reference to her physical shape). This one is by David Coomes, media executive (not sure how else one can describe him) and erstwhile head of BBC Religious Department, entitled Dorothy L. Sayers - A Careless Rage for Life.
The book has more about Sayers as the writer of religious texts and plays but there is a chapter or two about the detective stories and more than that about the rest of her life. Mr Coomes seems to have been entranced by her personality while reading her huge correspondence, which is being published under Barbara Reynolds's editorship.
What appealed to TH, however, was a paragraph at the end of Chapter 1, a hilarious and terrifying account of the "battle of the scripts" that preceded the creation and broadcasting of Dorothy L. Sayers's famous and notorious sequence of plays The Man Born to be King, about which TH blogged some time ago. (TH remains of the opinion, pace some commenters, that there were better detective story writers than Miss Sayers but few as erudite on other subjects.)
Mr Coomes quotes Miss Sayers's opinion that "What we make is more important than what we are", then goes on:
It is the comment of someone who obsessively guarded her private life. Most people would say:: What we make is because of what we are ... because of we have experienced, endured, wept and laughed over, been defeated by, despaired of, embraced, rejected, come through.That may be true but TH is compelled to agree with Miss Sayers - whatever went into the creation of what one makes, that is what matters most. Furthermore, would it not be wonderful if writers, artists and actors would remember that dictum and talk less about themselves in endless interviews and self-analysis. What we make is more important than what we are. Let that be every writer's motto.
No, not Hitler's but Macmillan's whose fiftieth anniversary we remembered yesterday. A couple of days ago the Conservative History Group was addressed by the man who knows absolutely everything about that day, the historian D. R. Thorpe, author of a trilogy or prime ministerial biographies, Eden, Macmillan and Douglas-Home as well as that of Selwyn Lloyd, the Chancellor of the Exchequer who was, in some ways, the cause of it all.
As an amusing incidental point, it needs to be mentioned that Supermac won the Orwell Prize last year. What would George Orwell have made of that?
The roots of that night, he said, lay in the William Wallace case of 1931, the first in legal history when a conviction for murder was overturned on appeal. It was largely because of that case that Selwyn Lloyd, then a young lawyer, became a fervent abolitionist and, subsequently, joined Sidney Silverman's campaign against capital punishment. It also meant that under Macmillan he could take any job but that of Home Secretary, as he explained to the Prime Minister. So, when Macmillan decided, probably erroneously, in 1962 in the wake of disastrous by-election results, to get rid of his "sound money" Chancellor of the Exchequer, Selwyn Lloyd and put in an expansionist one, Reginald Maudling, he had a problem on his hands. Selwyn Lloyd had been Foreign Secretary under Eden and, briefly, under Macmillan so the Home Office would have been the obvious place to move him to but that could not be done. What to do?
Macmillan's answer was to offer the man a peerage (though not the Lord Chancellorship as he did not think Selwyn Lloyd was a notable enough lawyer, an ironic idea given subsequent developments) and the chairmanship of Martin's Bank. Whether the latter was in the Prime Minister's gift is unclear and it was never tested as both offers were refused and Selwyn Lloyd retired to the back benches, to the applause of all.
However, Macmillan found that he had to bring the reshuffle forward by some months because of RAB Butler's deliberate indiscretion to a friendly journalist and also he extended it in order not to make it seem like a simple sacking of the Chancellor. Seven Cabinet Ministers were sacked and thirty-nine posts were affected. All in all fifty-two people were moved around and a great deal of bitterness trailed the Prime Minister thereafter. And RAB Butler lost the slender chance he might have had of succeeding as leader of the party. But then, in my opinion, he did not have what it takes to be a Prime Minister.
One final thought: it is extraordinary how potent satire is. My own image of Selwyn Lloyd has always been the bumbling fool portrayed by John Wells. It was salutary to find out that he was a man of principle and strong convictions as well as one of the better Chancellors this country has ever had.
She was at the heart of English cultural, especially musical life of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, wrote several important books and hundreds of articles as well as translating books, songs and opera librettos from various languages, particularly Russian and many analytical programme notes for the Queen's Hall Prom concerts and a few others. She was friendly with Sir Henry Wood, Sir Edward Elgar and Sir Granville Bantock and many others, too numerous to list as they say.
It is hard to tell what Rosa Newmarch's greatest achievement was but TH would place high her promotion of Russian music and Russian culture in general, as well as the introduction (with Wood and Bantock) of the music of Sibelius and of Janáček. Enough there for several life-times.
What caught TH's attention among all these matters is a short paragraph on what might be called the vagaries of publishing.
Several of Mrs Newmarch's books had been published by Bodley Head (John Lane Ltd) but in 1912 its manager, Herbert Jenkins, decided to set up his own publishing firm and Rosa Newmarch, a friend as well as an author went with him. This is what Mr Stevens says (and his own style leaves something to be desired):
Herbert Jenkins was immediately successful with several popular works including his own witty and amusing series of Bindle novels, which sold well and established him financially, so that he could embark on more ambitious literary, if less remunerative, publications. Although Herbert Jenkins died in 1923, the firm thrived as a small publishing house until 1964 when it combined with another publisher [Barrie & Rockliffe], becoming Barrie and Jenkins. That was subsequently taken over by Hutchinson, which in turn merged with Century and later Random House.As it happens, Bodley Head was also eventually acquired by Random House. That paragraph sums up the history of British publishing in the second half of the twentieth century - a catastrophe many of us watched as it unfolded. Hardly any small or medium sized publisher retained its independence and the pretence that the various component parts of the conglomerates retained their own imprints was believed only by the very gullible.
What goes around comes around. Twenty-first century technology changed much of that. Indeed, even towards the end of the last century small publishers started springing up, using the ever more skilful desktop publishing methods; authors rejected by the big boys and girls decided to publish their own work and the words "vanity publishing" were used only by those big boys and girls. (After all, Herbert Jenkins published his own books, Hogarth Press published the Woolfs and their various friends and relations and so on. Nobody called that vanity publishing.)
Print on demand, e-books, kindle, advertising on the internet and through social media have all made the small publisher's life considerably easier.
Lewis Stevens's own book is published by Troubadour Publishing Ltd under its Matador imprint or, in other words, it was self-published because, presumably, none of the big boys and girls had heard of Rosa Newmarch and were no interested in her. A professional woman who has achieved a great deal but was not on the left? Pshaw!
As TH is a great book-lover, one thing remains troublesome. Will these books survive if only as many copies are published as are required immediately or if they are published only on the internet? One hopes so, of course, but it is a worrying thought. At the same time, it is a cheering thought: small publishers might become bigger but not too big. In any case there is now a far greater variety of publishers and publications than there were when the big conglomerates were conquering all.
Viscount Castlereagh has never been given his full due by his own countrymen, argues Professor Bew in this article. There is, he says, an attempt to make him sound entirely relevant to the modern age but that is wrong, too.
The truth is that Castlereagh can be understood only as a product of the time in which he operated, rather than as a bearer of any timeless insights. Nonetheless, as his descendant, the Marchioness of Londonderry, argued in 1904, he was not ‘the old-fashioned Tory that ignorant opinion supposes’. Often presented as the enemy of Enlightenment, he travelled widely in Europe, read a broad range of literature and eschewed the anti-Catholicism of many of his peers in England and Ireland. He was convinced that the only approach that government could take towards religion was one of toleration and that each man had the right to make his peace with God on his own terms. True, he was an enemy of political reform, but this was because of the dangers of mob politics which he saw first-hand in Paris during the French Revolution and Ireland during the rebellion of 1798.Professor Bew's own book will undoubtedly put the matter right. Well, we hope so, anyway.
Thus Castlereagh’s mind was conservative and enlightened at the same time – and no less the one for being the other. ‘I think those people who are acquainted with me,’ he told the House of Commons in 1817, ‘will do me justice to believe that I never had a cruel or unkind heart.’
Tory Historian was delighted to read in History Today that the Samuel Johnson Prize (named after a truly great Tory) was awarded this year to Frank Dikötter’s Mao's Great Famine, a book TH has not yet read right through, so devastating it is. There is also the new biography of Bismarck, short-listed for the prize, to read. Jonathan Steinberg's book is described as "a genuine game-changer whose influence will be enormous and sustained".
Together with the author of the blog on the subject Tory Historian is stunned by the comment reportedly made by the biographer Brenda Maddox, who was on the jury, about the Mao book.
I was puzzled by the comments of one of the judges, though, the biographer Brenda Maddox, who is reported to have said: ‘Why didn’t I know about this? We feel we know who the villains of the 20th century are – Stalin and Hitler [I could add a few more to that]. But here, fully 50 years after the event, is something we did not know about. It’s testament to the power of non-fiction that it can rock you back on your heels.’ Well, she’s right on the last point, but her comments only serve to reinforce my view that the literati should get out more. Has Maddox not read, or even read a review of Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, for example? Or does her knowledge of Maoism derive from the films of Jean-Luc Godard and the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir? Dikötter gives us much valuable and fascinating new detail, but he does not alter the thrust of what has been known for some time now about the nature of Mao’s appalling regime.There is none so blind as those who do not want to see.
According to Andrew Roberts, our leading conservative historian, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury did not think so. In his magisterial biography of the great man he says after writing of the Cecil family's holiday home in France:
Salisbury was never a believer in tourism per se, perversely thinking that 'the more the faciliteis of travelling bring the two nations into contact the less goodwill is likely to be generated'. Other than the occasional visit to a Swiss spa town for his health, and one diplomatic mission to Constantinople, he never travelled beyond France, Germany and Italy in the last fifty years of his life.This raises a few questions. Firstly, is that opinion really perverse? We generally assume that if people go from their own to other countries a lot then there will be more friendly feeling between all these countries and peoples. Is that really so? Do we or anybody else feel particularly well-disposed towards hordes of tourists? Do people who endlessly travel round, boasting of the number of places they have been to, know anything of those places or leave happy memories behind them whatever they may carry away?
Secondly, one can't help comparing Salisbury's attitude to the modern insistence that political leaders should always be visiting different countries for vaguely defined puposes. As it happens the young Lord Robert Gascoyne-Cecil had travelled to various parts of the world, such as Australia and did not carry away particularly good impressions. Clearly, he did not consider that it was in any way necessary for the Secretary for India, the Foreign Secretary or the Prime Minister to visit many other countries though Britain at the time was undoubtedly a world power or, even the world power. Did this attitude and behaviour in any way prevent him from carrying out his tasks well? Can we honestly say that his much-travelled successors are better at their jobs than he was?
Or so thought the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury when still an MP under the courtesy title of Viscount Cranborne.
Tory Historian has been reading Andrew Roberts's magisterial biography of Salisbury and cannot recommend it highly enough. Roberts's step by step account of the ferocious debates around the 1867 Representation of the People Act (a.k.a. the Second Reform Bill) makes many matters clear. Cranborne was suspicious of the measure from the very beginning but was particularly incensed, to the point of resigning from the Cabinet, by the underhand methods whereby Derby and Disraeli pushed through a measure that was more radical than the one Gladstone had proposed the previous year, which Disraeli had opposed allegedly out of principle.
Not only was the Tory Bill more radical than the Liberal one had been but during its passage through the Commons it had shed all the supposed safeguards, ending up with a measure that simply enfranchised a great proportion of the urban working class men. Cranborne was against that for various reasons: ideological as he did not approve of a wide franchise and pragmatic as he thought that this would be a disaster for the Conservative Party in electoral terms (he turned out to be wrong on that). But, most of all, he was incensed by the political legerdemain practised by the leaders of his own party.
Mr Roberts describes Cranborne's speech during the Third Reading of the Bill on July 15, 1867 as "possibly the greatest oration in a career full of powerful parliamentary speeches". It was an open attack on Disraeli though he was not named in the speech. Mr Roberts considers the peroration to be worthy of being quoted in full and Tory Historian agrees though, this being a blog not a very long book, "in full" has to be limited to one rather than two paragraphs:
I entreat honourable Gentlemen opposite not to believe that my feelings on this subject are dictated simply by my hostility on this particular measure, though I object to it most strongly, as the House is aware. But, even if I took a contrary view - if I deemed it to be most advantageous, I still should deeply regret that the position of the Executive should have been so degraded as it has been in the present session: I should deeply regret to find the House of Commons has applauded a policy of legerdemain; and I should, above all things, regret that this great gift to the people - if gift you think it - should have been purchased at the cost of a political betrayal which has no parallel in our Parliamentary annals, which strikes at the root of all that mutual confidence which is the very soul of our party Government, and on which only the strength and freedom of our representative institutions can be sustained.
It was not so long ago that I discussed with a regular contributor to the Conservative History Journal the paucity of Robert Peel biographies. Well, sometimes you wait for ages and then several come at once.
In 2007 we had Douglas Hurd's Sir Robert Peel: A Biography and today the postman delivered Richard Gaunt's new book that I have mentioned in a previous posting. More about it as I read it but as a taster, here is a quotation from Richard Gaunt's musings about Peel's reputation:
At the start of the twenty-first century, we remember Peel for breaking down what he built up (notably his 1842 Corn Law and, more controversially, the Conservative Party itself) or amending what he found (for example, in Ireland and at the Home Office) as well as for the unintended consequences of some of his achievements (not least in respect of the Income Tax and Bank Charter Act). from his youth, Peel was offered up on the altar of Pittite pieties to the future service of the nation. To that extent he has become party of the heroic genealogy of politcal leaders stretching thenceforth from the Younger Pitt by way of Canning down to Gladstone and the triumph of a progressive strand of Conservatism, and/or conservative strand of Liberalism. To designate him a false 'Tory', a renegade 'Conservative', a 'Liberal Tory', a 'Liberal Conservative' or a proto-Gladstonian Liberal, is to play, semantically, with the career of a shrewd, ambitious and complex political operator and try and give it helpful characterisation within a sometimes limited politicla vocabulary. Peel's own outlook and views combined a rigid adherence to certain fixed principles - his Protestantism, his executive outlook, his attachment to Bullionist theory and his growing commitment to the tenets of Free Trade - within an overall process of self-education as to the means of furthering them.As they used to say in examination papers: discuss.
Tory Historian returns after an unconscionably long period of silence with news of a book, published in 2005 and bought in one of the few remaining second-hand bookshops in Charing Cross Road.
The Princess and the Politicians subtitled Sex, Intrigue and Diplomacy in Regency England is a biography of the Princess Lieven by one of our conservative (and Conservative) historians, John Charmley.
Tory Historian recalls the intriguing (in both senses of the word) character of the Princess Lieven appearing in history books as a minor character. That, says Professor Charmley, is how she has, quite erroneously in his opinion, viewed by historians who have too often assumed that politics remained an exclusively male sphere for the centuries before women had the vote.
Feminist historians, on the other hand, have not been particularly interested by aristocratic ladies who played a very large part in political life in Britain. As Professor Charmley does not add (perhaps he is being uncharacteristically charitable) this attitude has prevented many feminist historians from perceiving women's achievements in the past.
Nobody could call Professor Charmley a feminist (or any other kind of -ist) historian. His task here is to restore an important historical figure to her rightful place of which she has been deprived by being female, foreign and of somewhat lose morals.
More reports of the book will follow as Tory Historian progresses with the reading.
There will be further postings on the subject of dates and, Tory Historian hopes, further discussions before some kind of an agreed list is produced. The suspicion is that we might have to have a list of 100 or, at least, 75. It is obvious that 50 is an inadequate number.
In the meantime, Tory Historian has been reading various books, including Amanda Vickery's fascinating account of a number of Georgian families and their womenfolk in Lancashire. Her study is based on the ladies' diaries and letters, giving the reader a strong feeling of entering those lives.
"The Gentleman's Daughter" refutes the accepted historical argument that women of the middle class lost various freedoms and occupations in the eighteenth century and shows their lives in their full and active reality.
A couple of quotations from the introductory chapter set the theme:
What follows then is a study in seemliness; a reconstruction of penalties and possibilities of lives lived within the bounds of propriety. Yet, as will emerge, even the bounds of propriety were wider than historians have been apt to admitPresumably that means that Keira Knightley will not be playing any of them in a bad film. Something to be thankful for.
....
It is hard to imagine them [those gentlemen's daughters, wives, sisters and mothers] ever smiling on the likes of a feminist writer such as Mary Wollstonecraft, a mannish lesbian as Anne Lister or a fashionable adulteress such as Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.
Part of Tory Historian's reading matter is Alan Ebenstein's biography of Friedrich Hayek, not a Tory, not even a conservative, strictly speaking but one of the greatest and most inspiring thinkers of the twentieth century, inspiring for the right in general.
Almost immediately, TH found an interesting quotation about Hayek's influence on opponents of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, first published in Time Magazine on April 6, 1972:
Tomas Jezek, who became Czech minister of privatization after the collapse of the communist rule, said that if the "ideologists of socialism would single out the one bookd that ought to be locked up at any price and strictly forbidden, its dissemination and lecture [sic] carrying the most severe punishments, they would surely point to The Road to Serfdom".Clearly, they did not lock the book away securely enough.
The glamour of the Duchess of Devonshire has eclipsed a very important historical fact. She was not the only lady to have become involved in politics long before female suffrage had become a political fact. Nor were the Whigs the only ones to have powerful and influential political hostesses.
Tory Historian is reading Diane Urquhart's "The Ladies of Londonderry", a history of that powerful family through the distaff side. The book follows the story for 150 years, from 1800 to 1959, by which time the role of the political hostess had diminished though had not disappeared completely.
With women entering politics directly and, as it turned out, ready to rise to the very top, back-stage management seemed to be a little less important. Further reports of the book will follow.
