Whisky Galore 1949 DVD

 

Ealing Studios 1949

I found this film - naturally, with a glass of whisky (not whiskey) in my hand - good fun. There were some excellent cameos from some well honed actors. As an aside, I was surprised at the early deaths (certainly for these times) of the main thespians. Basil Radford (1897-1952 - just three years after the film) died of cirrhosis of the liver, aged only 55. I hope it wasn't due to whisky; Joan Greenwood (1921-1987), whose husky voice enthralled audiences - to good effect in Moonfleet - died aged 65 of acute bronchitis and asthma; James Robertson Justice (1907-1990) passed away penniless, aged 68; John Gregson (1919-1975) of a heart attack aged only 55; Duncan Macrae (1905-1967), that rather hatchet-faced Scottish actor, aged 61; and Gordon Jackson (1923-1990), who I thought performed poorly in the film, of bone cancer at the age of 66. Not one reached 70. Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972), the author of the original book, partial screen writer of the film, and bit-part actor in it, made the grander age of 89.

The doctor calls (James Robertson Justice)

The scene above was one which occasioned a genuine titter - James Robertson Justice was born to be a doctor; rather Sir Laurence Spratt than this avuncular islander, though.

Down the hatch

Filmed on the island of Barra, the weather was so bad that the original 10-week schedule was overrun by five weeks and its projected budget by £20,000. Due to the main production staff being otherwise engaged at the main Ealing Studios, many of the island team were inexperienced. The director - a debut by Alexander Mackendrick - was not happy with the film. He told Gordon Jackson that it would probably turn out to be a dull documentary on island life...it looks like a home movie. It doesn't look like it was done by a professional at all. And it wasn't.

There was tension between Mackendrick and one of the scriptwriters. The former sympathised with the attempts by the pompous but high-minded Waggett (Basil Radford) to foil the looting of the cases of whisky from the shipwreck;   Danischewsky's sympathy lay with the looters. Due to the lack of accommodation on Barra, the cast were based with the islanders - at least it allowed the former to immerse themselves in the local accent. Although Joan Greenwood was a talented ballet dancer, she could not master the steps of the Highland reel - a local stood in as a body (or legs) double.

Much of the film's humour was directed at Waggett - the English intruder. One film historian sees Whisky Galore as one of several films that show an outsider coming to Scotland and being either humiliated or rejuvenated (or both). Jonny Murray was rather more disparaging, likening the film's portrayal of the islanders to those of the Kailyard school of literature - really a false image. The sense of community, however, was stressed by all contemporary critics.

The film was a financial success. Critics were mainly full of praise: a film with the French genius in the British manner...put together with tact and subtlety...one of the best post-war British films...with the sort of fancy that is half child-like and half agelessly wise. One praised the actors for portraying real people doing real things under real conditions...a talented cast sees to it that no island character study shall go unnoticed. Perhaps that was a major reason for my enjoyment.

Clare Asquith's 'Shadowplay' 2005

 

Public Affairs first edition - 2005

It's not often that I get to discuss a book with its author. I stayed at Clare Asquith's lovely home in Mells - to research quite another topic - and had a most enjoyable (for me, at least) hour or so ruminating on her arguments in support of Shakespeare's 'hidden beliefs and coded politics'. I told her the book was a tour de force and thought-provoking and asked her if she had changed her mind over the ensuing seventeen years since publication, or had she doubled-down? It was definitely the latter!

A major problem with reviewing the book is that one simply doesn't know enough - to argue, refute or concur with the synopsis. I was most comfortable with the Introduction and Chapter I The Silence of Nobody. Both during my Sixth Form and University studies, as well as in my teaching career up to the late 1980s, the standard secondary sources of information came from such titans as A.G. Dickens (Thomas Cromwell and the English Reformation, 1959; The English Reformation, 1964); S.T. Bindoff (Tudor England, 1950); G. R. Elton (England Under the Tudors, 1955); Owen Chadwick (The Reformation, 1964). Moreover, J.E. Neale's magisterial biography of Elizabeth I (Queen Elizabeth, 1934) still held sway. Hovering in the background were the so-called Whig Historians, most recently epitomised by G.M. Trevelyan. The Roman Catholics were damned by their association with 'Bloody' Mary's burnings, by the treacherous behaviour of, particularly, the Jesuit priests during the long reign of Elizabeth. As for Shakespeare? I simply read and watched them for shining a light into not just the English past but also the present of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The Comedies I enjoyed for the humour. 

We regularly visited Ludlow (and braved the often inclement weather) for the town's annual Summer Shakespeare festival and saw the following plays:

As You Like it (1992); Othello (1993); The Taming of the Shrew (1994); Richard III (1995); King Lear (1996); Much Ado About Nothing (1997); Hamlet (1998); A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999); Pericles (2000); Macbeth (2001); The Merry Wives of Windsor (2002); The Merchant of Venice (2003); Twelfth Night (2004); Richard II (2005); A Midsummer Night's Dream (2006); The Comedy of Errors (2007); Richard III (2008); Romeo and Juliet (2009); Othello (2010); Twelfth Night (2011). Not once did I think they were all harbouring a dangerous secret - Roman Catholic shadowplays. I think I am correct in saying that in none of the Programme notes accompanying the plays was this angle drawn attention to.

Certainly, by the last two decades of the twentieth century, a new generation of Reformation scholars were emerging, who, as Clare Asquith maintains, painted a picture of widespread resistance, surveillance, coercion and persecution in 16thc England. Their accounts traced the growth of a coded, dissident language in the repressive years following the Reformation, years of censorship and propaganda during which the subjects of religion and politics were forbidden to dramatists. I was aware of, and certainly read and made use of, some of these historians: J.J. Scarisbrick (The Reformation and the English People, 1984); Rosemary O'Day (The Debate on the English Reformation, 1986); Eamon Duffy (The Stripping of the Altars, 1992); Christopher Haigh (English Reformations, 1993). Instead of a late medieval church, administered by corrupt and carnal priests, presiding over outmoded services, raking in money from relics and pilgrimages, Duffy argues against this Protestant myth and suggests the religious life of the laity in this period was rich and varied and the majority in England resisted these changes in all manner of ways - from overt rebellion (1536, 1569) to more secretive methods (Jesuit infiltration in the 1580s onwards). The Reformation had been an act of state, an imposition by Tudor despots riding roughshod over the predominant wishes of their people.

I have recently purchased Nicholas Orme's excellent Going to Church in Medieval England (Yale, 2021). It charts, on a wide canvas and over a long period, the story of the parish church and its role in daily life during the Middle Ages and through the 16th century. Towards the end of the book he emphasises how much survived despite the Reformation. Reformers remained attached to many aspects of the past: a Christian state and society, parish structures, church patronage, infant baptism, a set liturgy with traditional features, adult communion, and many calendar observances. Churches could only be adapted, not rebuilt, for Reformed worship. It was unwise to push the congregations too far...the Reformation may be likened to a tide washing over a reef. At the upper level the tide carries all before it, but underneath the reef remains: in historical terms the resistant compound of customs, vested interests, and stubborn human nature.

It is Clare Asquith's belief that William Shakespeare was part of this 'majority'; moreover he skilfully developed a hidden code on nearly all his works - poetic and dramatic - employing a sophisticated art form, integrating it into his more familiar work with dazzling skill. The essence of this coded method of writing, of course, was that it be 'deniable' - in other words, incapable of proof. The Protestant Reformation, far from being welcomed by the English, was opposed by the majority, mainly through passive resistance. The two bêtes noire of the author are William Cecil and his son Robert, who supervised the repression, almost the police state. Clare Asquith charts Shakespeare's life and works through the prism of a time of persecution, not helped by the serious misjudgement of Pope Pius V's Bull of 1570, which turned Catholics into putative traitors.

In a series of closely argued chapters, amply backed up by quotations from the texts of his plays and poems, Shakespeare is shown to have cleverly (and dangerously) inserted clear messages to the English Catholics, often doing more than hinting to both Elizabeth I and James I what he was about. I am not attempting in this short Blog to give a detailed analysis of the author's arguments. They are powerful but, inevitably, there are many instances of 'it could have been' or Shakespeare 'must have known'. 

Critiques of her thesis include:

...the interesting elements are swamped by the way Asquith attempts to shoehorn everything into a simplistic historical framework in which the Reformation was unambiguously negative... she presents Shakespeare and all of his work as being solely motivated by a desire to defend Catholicism.

...code-breaking author Clare Asquith is an excellent interpreter and fashions a page-turning thriller from a tangled web of period politics...it's the breadth and depth of Asquith's research in support of her conclusions that make the book so compelling...

the book is a tendentious peroration disguised as literary analysis...one problem with Asquith's thesis is that there remains zero proof that Shakespeare was Catholic...her palpably aggrieved history of the Reformation is so acute...her bias is so manifest that it severely undercuts her credibility.

...along come Clare Asquith with a remarkably erudite study of an aspect of the plays which, as far as I am aware, has never been taught before...revelatory of Shakespeare as someone intensely involved with the England of his times...your appreciation of the Bard will be enhanced by this text, whether you agree with Ms Asquith or not.

It is not an easy book to read, but I shall certainly be returning to it whenever I have gone to a Shakespeare play in the future e.g. The Tempest at Stratford in February next year.

Ethan Bale's 'Hawker and the King's Jewel' 2022

Canelo first paperback edition - 2022

To be praised by Bernard Cornwell, no mean historical fiction writer himself, is a good start, as was the book’s Prologue. So, the two Princes escaped – or, did they? Ethan Bale, a nom de plume, has delivered a gripping yarn, with a measured and well-paced narrative.  Wound into the journey from the battlefield of Bosworth to the floating city of the Venetian Republic is a believable plot.

It is late August 1485. King Richard III has summoned a faithful campaigner to the White Boar Inn at Leicester, prior to a likely battle. The latter’s task is two-fold: to return an old gift, a great ruby - the ‘Tear’ of Byzantium - to the Doge of Venice; and to give protection to a young, recently knighted lad if Richard should fall in battle. The same henchman, Sir John Hawker, had originally borne the gem from Venice to King Edward IV – it was never to be sold, only returned to the giver.

From then on, this character driven plot keeps the reader’s interest to the end. Hawker is a 49 year-old warrior – “he was a henchman, a king’s knave and he knew it”. He had not only fought at Towton, at Barnet and Tewkesbury, but had spent time as a condotierro abroad – for the Venetian Republic (through a mercenary’s contratto) in Bosnia and then in Austria and France. Shades of a real life near namesake, Sir John Hawkwood (c.1323-1394)? A return to Venice means also a return to a married lover. Hawker is an ageing, flawed character and it is in his description of the man’s inner turmoil, his mistakes, his bursts of energy and, above all, loyalty that the author has created a living soul. 

Hawker is supported by an equally realistic and compelling cast of characters. They include his long-time chief man-at-arms, Flanders born Jacob de Grood; 14 year-old Jack, a Lincolnshire lad who slowly realises his role “in this grim pageant was now becoming clearer. And it was like a bit of gristle between the teeth, not easily shifted”; Sir Roger Beconsall “a brash knight, built like a siege tower and with a head as empty as a beggar’s pantry”, a braggart but good in a fight; and the young Breton, Gaston Dieudonné – “tall, curling brown hair to his shoulders, a dark complexion with hard cheekbones and a thin nose -  who had never trusted anyone in his entire life, only his instincts” and a calculating bisexual. Each of the above are realistically delineated, genuine in their individuality; there are no caricatures. We know King Richard had two illegitimate children – John of Pontefract and Katherine Plantaganet - well, here’s a third: the lad entrusted to the care of Hawker, known as Sir Giles Ellingham. Son of a miller’s daughter at Middleham, the 18 year-old learns from Hawker who he really is. Again, Bale skilfully develops the lad’s awakening to his ancestry.

Bale is able to bring to life other figures in his story: Richard III, always spinning webs to his advantage, but whose sister, Duchess Margaret of Burgundy, dismisses as a fool, “a fool who has destroyed his entire house”. Now, ceaseless worry had led to “a gauntness in those cheeks, a weariness in the eyes, crow’s feet spreading towards the temples and a brow as furrowed as a villein’s furlong”.  Margaret herself, “with large grey eyes, birdlike and almost unnaturally round. Her chin was as sharp as a rose thorn”; and the mysterious Maria Hunyadi, kin to Matthias Corvinus, who plays a major role in the denouement.

The author is equally adept at describing the maelstrom of Bosworth; the claustrophobic fight in the Bishop’s Lynn tavern; the swift destruction of brigands on the road to Italy; the sinister meeting with the three Capi of the Council of Ten in the windowless, stuffy upper room of the doge’s palace;  and the battagliola, or mock battle, with the San Polo and Santa Croce contingent against the men of the Dorsoduro. He has a pleasing turn of phrase, whether it is describing the Venetian light changing “from azure blue to ultramarine, to amethyst”, or the ‘Tear’ as “a large blood-red oval with a surface as uneven as a crumpled bedsheet”.

Compelling and authentic characters; a tight narrative which drives the story forward with verve; an artistic description of scenes; one or two ‘earthy’ moments; dialogue which is neither mock Gothic nor anachronistic; all allow the reader to feel part of the sounds and sights of the late 15^th century, almost as a participant in the tale. The novel deserves high praise.

Jill Dawson's 'The Great Lover' 2009

 

Sceptre first edition - 2009

Having been slightly dissatisfied with the portrait of Rupert Brooke in John Frayn Turner's near hagiography, I thought I would purchase and read this fictionalised version. One might use that ugly word 'faction' as the novel weaves real persons, Brooke above all, and real events (the author has read his and others' letters, as well as extracts from his poems), around the fictional Nell Golightly.

There's a clever introduction to the novel, in the shape of a letter, dated le 23 avril 1982, sent by the real life sixty-seven year-old Arlice Rapoto from Tahiti to any 'Kind Stranger' living in Granchester, Cambridge. She is asking for information about Rupert Brooke, her father. Her mother was Taatamata, who met up with Brooke when he came to Tahiti in 1914 and stayed for three months. His relationship with Taatamata led to Arlice's birth, something which was not revealed in the early biographies of Brooke. Mike Read's Forever England. The Life of Rupert Brooke (Mainstream Publishing, 1997) dealt with the event in some length. Early in 1936, Dudley Ward, the close friend of Brooke, began to make enquiries as to a child who would have been born to Taatamata towards the end of 1915. After a convoluted chain, including Viscount Hastings and Norman Hall (who had recently directed Mutiny on the Bounty), eventually Hall's daughter Nancy confirmed that her mother had always known that Arlice was Brooke's daughter. Not only does Read's book have a photograph of Taatamata, but there is one of Arlice, taken around 1950. Whether Brooke knew he had a daughter is a matter of conjecture.

Arlice Rapoto is second from the right

The fictitious ninety year-old Nell Sanderson (née Golightly) replies to Arlice from Granchester. Like Arlice's mother, she too had loved Brooke and, possibly, had a child by him (her eldest son, but this is only implicit; she has three daughters as well). Back in 1909, as a teenage girl, she met the poet when he took up digs at the Orchard House in Grantchester. She reveals she has written a biography of Brooke, based on her relationship with him. She is now widowed (My Tom died in 1965, having had a good innings, as we say - he was seventy-four) but she says one of her daughters, Janet - quite an expert on Literature here in Cambridge (she's retired now)... told me that Rupert's poetry was sentimental and it was unfortunate that he wrote such patriotic nonsense when other poets were about to see for themselves how bad the war was. The rest of the novel is Nell's 'biography' and it is a very compelling account of Brooke's character and relationships with other real-life people - such as Justin Brooke, Noel Olivier, Ka Cox, James Strachey, Augustus John, Denham Russell-Smith, Eddie Marsh, Phyllis Gardner (who does not come out of it well) and Cathleen Nesbitt.

It alternates between Nelly's reminiscences and Brooke's own account of his life between 1909 and 1914 and they complement each other quite naturally. After the Great War, Nelly took several courses at Night School and had stories published in magazines such as Woman's Realm and Woman's Weekly. That explains the well-crafted biography of Brooke!  Her letter to Arlice includes one or two mildly caustic comments about Brooke's character: his letters...are full of loving sentiments - he was good at that, in writing!... in your father's early letters there's a fair bit of showing off. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying you father was a false man. But he was a clever letter-writer... he was a difficult man to pin down, and he was in the habit of saying things playfully that he did not mean at all, or were quite the opposite of his meaning, so maybe it's true he was a little more of a slippery fish than some. This appears spot on!

In her Acknowledgements at the end of the book, Jill Dawson writes: This is a novel. I have made things up. Nell and her family are made up, as are the other maids. Of course I made Rupert up, too, as he is 'my' Rupert Brooke, a figure from my imagination, fused from his poetry, his letters, his travel writing and essays, photographs, guesswork, the things I know about his life blended with my own dreams of him, and impressions. It is an amazing, life-like blend and the further notes in the Acknowledgements reveal a detailed research and study of the biographies and letters of Christopher Hassall, Geoffrey Keynes, Phyllis Gardner, John Lehmann, Gwen Raverat, Noel Olivier, Nigel Jones and Michael Hastings. The result of Dawson's researches and skills as a writer have produced a first-class rendering of 'her' Rupert Brooke.

John Frayn Turner's 'The Life & Selected Works of Rupert Brooke' 2004

 

Pen & Sword Military revised edition - 2004

Ever since, in the Sixth Form in the mid 1960s, I bought a selection of Rupert Brooke's poems in the little The Pocket Poets series produced by Vista Books, I have been fascinated by him.  Over the more recent years, I have purchased several books on Rupert Brooke, and last week I picked this one up cheaply in the Minster Bookshop in York. It makes for an easy read but too often borders on mere hagiography - certainly hero worship - and leaves out important aspects of the poet's life and - more importantly - character. It is the story of a talented, handsome young man who barely put a foot wrong throughout his short life, whereas from other sources we now know (and knew in 2004) that Brooke was a troubled soul, often depressive, tormented even, by his love life.

The author is clearly enamoured with Brooke's looks and character:

He grew in mind and body; developed a natural charm with magnetic manner and features to match...the secret lay in his immense sense of fun...the combined sense of the poem and Brooke's voice moved Dalton deeply as he listened amazed at their imagery and music...although extremely emotional, he was never swamped by sentiment, but could spice it with another mood to give extra point and piquancy by contrast...(he lands in Hawaii) ... several of the Hawaiian girls looked longingly at the strangely beautiful Englishman (and, when he leaves Fiji) ...he was departing - to the sincere sorrow of many of the people there, who had been as usual attracted by his charm. Back in the USA,  someone else fell under the incomparable Brooke personality.

When one reads, but Brooke was human; it would be wrong to depict him otherwise, the reader can surely be allowed a mild, ironic smirk, as that is exactly what the author has been doing.

Turner also rarely criticises the poetry. On Brooke's The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, Turner writes Here, for the first time he perfected that mature marriage of light and lyric; wit and wonder. He ends his book, The vital thing is that although he died so young, Rupert Brooke has left us a living force of poetry, imperishable, inspired.

The author has written 28 books, mostly modern history and aviation. He is an authority on aviation... No harm in that, but it means this book only touches the surface of both the life and work of Brooke. There is minimal analysis of either, but a plain narrative throughout. However, it is very useful to have 63 pages of Brooke's poetry  as a Part Two. By the revised edition of 2004, many of the books below had been published. Turner would have produced a more realistic appraisal of Rupert Brooke, if he had used the material from some of them. The proper title for his book would have been The Selected Life & Selected Works of Rupert Brooke.

As a footnote, it is interesting to record what Charles Hamilton Sorley, in my opinion a better poet (who was killed aged 20 later in 1915), wrote about Brooke.

That last sonnet-sequence of his...I find...overpraised. He is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice, regarding the going to war of himself (and others) as a highly intense, remarkable and sacrificial exploit, whereas it is merely the conduct demanded of him (and others) by the turn of circumstances, where non-compliance with this demand would have made life intolerable...He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he has taken the sentimental attitude. 

Books in My Collection

1964    Christopher Hassall - Rupert Brooke. A Biography (Faber and Faber)

1967    Michael Hastings -    The Handsomest Young Man in England (Michael Joseph)

1980    John Lehmann - Rupert Brooke. His Life and his Legend (Weidenfeld and Nicolson)

1987    Paul Delaney - The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle (Macmillan)

1991    ed. Pippa Harris - Song of Love. The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier (Bloomsbury)

1997    Mike Read - Forever England. The Life of Rupert Brooke (Mainstream) 

1998    ed. Keith Hale - Friends & Apostles. The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Stracey 1905-1914  (Yale University Press)

1999    Nigel Jones - Rupert Brooke. Life, Death & Myth (Richard Cohen)

2004    John Frayn Turner - The Life & Selected Works of Rupert Brooke (Pen & Sword Military)

2015    Lorna Beckett - The Second I Saw You. The True Love Story of Rupert Brooke and Phyllis Gardner (British Library)

2019    Sarah Watling - Noble Savages. The Olivier Sisters. Four Lives in Seven Fragments (Jonathan Cape)

James Morris' 'Heaven's Command' 1973

 

Faber and Faber first edition -  1973

Some years back, I bought the Penguin paperback The Venetian Empire - first published in 1980 - and thoroughly enjoyed reading the account of six centuries of a successful republican city state; whose empire consisted of islands, isolated fortresses and trading routes. An early run-out for the first stages of the British Empire?  Now, I have tackled Morris' first volume of the trilogy on the Rise and Decline of the British Empire. It is a huge canvas but, by having chapters concentrating 'patch-like' on particular issues in particular areas, Morris covers much ground coherently and knowledgably.

Morris (I hesitate to use 'he' or 'she', as in 1973 his outward persona was still James, rather than the later Jan) has the gift of words and what could have been a tedious account is replete with compelling images of personalities and places. In the years prior to writing the book, Morris visited many of the places described and this adds to its authority and pace of narrative. One moment the mindset of the Transvaal Boers is discussed; then Thuggee in the sub continent; then Lord Durham laying down the law in Canada; then the appalling story of the Famine in Ireland. The book continues with the Indian Mutiny; the search for the source of the Nile; the Jamaican Rebellion; the Ashanti Wars; Parnell in Ireland; and 'the martyr of Empire' - Charles George Gordon. Along the way, Morris delivers some memorable sentences (truths?): It was only to be expected that the improving instinct would presently father the interfering impulse, as the evangelical power of Britain pursued new fields of action; ...Force was ever the fuel of empires...and inevitably Victoria's was very soon at war; ...the conviction of Empire was increasingly reinforced by a sense of duty, and became heavily veneered with religiosity; ...the British army was the striking force of the imperial mission...and it is said that there were only two years during Victoria's reign when the British Army was not somewhere fighting a skirmish;...yet there were forebodings. To many the Empire seemed too diffuse an organism, set against taut new Powers like Germany or the United States, and throughout the 1870s and 1880s there were repeated attempts to give it logic. By the penultimate chapter, Scramble for Africa, Morris is arguing that the idea of Empire was becoming vulgarized, like some fastidious sport cheapened by arrivistes...Africa and the New Imperialism tainted this conception...the Africa scramble was a chronicle of squalor - chiefs gulled, tribes dispossessed, vast inheritances signed away with a thumb-print or a shaky cross...avarice was the most obvious motive.

The chapter that shocked me most was No. 23 - The End of the Tasmanians: The obliteration of a subject race. There really can be no defence of this major blot on the Empire's story. Morris starts the chapter: Empire was Race. For an illustration of this truth at its cruellest and most poignant, let us see what happened to the aboriginal people of Tasmania, when they fell beneath the aegis of Victoria's Empire.  Morris describes the Tasmanians as a seemingly insubstantial people. Polygamous by custom, they were affectionate by disposition, and merry, singing in a sweet Doric harmony, and dancing strenuous, hilarious and frequently lascivious animal dances. When the British settled in Tasmania the natives were defined as enemies, treated more and more as predators or vermin. Sometimes they were hunted just for fun, on foot or on horseback. They were flushed out and some 200 were sent  to nearby Flinders Island, there to rot away...they wasted, declined to have babies, and grew thinner, and more morose, and more hopelessly melancholic. Eventually, 12 men, 22 women, 10 youngsters were taken to a disused penal settlement twenty-five miles from Hobart. By 1855 only 16 were alive. The last male Tasmanian was an alcoholic whaling seaman, 'King Billy' Lanney, who died of chronic diarrhoea in the Dog & Partridge.  His skull was later dug up for the Royal Society of Tasmania's collection. The full page photograph of Truganini, the last Tasmanian (who died in 1876), is sobering. Her body was also dug up and her skeleton, strung upon wires and upright in a box, became for many years the most popular exhibit in the Tasmanian Museum.

It is in this Chapter that Morris quotes the famous resolutions passed by a New England assembly of Britons. (1) The Earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. Voted. (2) The Lord has given the earth or any part of it to his chosen People. Voted. (3) We are his chosen people. Voted.

Morris succeeds is putting flesh on the names of those who carved out and ran the Empire - many of whom have striking monuments in London. Lord Auckland, Charles Buller. Lord Chelmsford, Bishop Colenso, George Colley, Edward Eyre, Sir Bartle Frere, Charles Goldie. Gordon of Khartoum, Henry Havelock, Sir Henry and John Lawrence, Frederick Lugard, Charles Napier, Sir James Outram, Cecil Rhodes, Sir George Simpson, Henry Stanley and "All" Sir Garnet Wolseley. A brilliant cast in an uneven Play.

***********************

Interestingly, The Spectator has just reviewed a biography of Morris (the jaunty travel writer and pioneer of modern gender transition): Jan Morris: Life from Both Sides. The Trilogy, Pax Britannica, is rightly praised but, inevitably, the review deals at some length with her 'transition', the event which defined her life. I have no comment to make on this aspect, but am glad she wrote the trilogy when she did, before she became more avowedly republican and Welsh nationalist.