Martin Meredith's 'The State of Africa' 2005

 

The Free Press first edition - 2005

Where to begin?! If I thought the tale of The Scramble for Africa was filled with horror, then this story of the 50 Years since Independence for the majority of the African countries is far worse. For every abomination created or supported by the ex-colonial countries, then the behaviour of nearly all the indigenous African leaders - the 'Mr Bigs' as Meredith calls them - has been even more dreadful. I have now spent the whole of January reading just these two huge books and it has been intensely depressing. Essentially they are both accounts of Man's inhumanity to Man.

There is so much to digest (so much indigestible) and so many leaders to comment upon, that it is more sensible to pick out a few of them. I have not dealt with Haile Selaissie of Ethiopia, Gaddafi of Libya, Sadat of Egypt, Numeiri of Sudan, Charles Taylor in Liberia, Arap Moi in Kenya, Sekou Toure in Guinea - frankly the reader is bogged down and crushed by the feeling of 'No, not another one'.

• SETETSE KHAMA (Botswana - was Bechuanaland). There are only four references in the book: Botswana provided a rare example of an African state that used its bonanza of mineral riches wisely...corruption hardly existed; Botswana stood out as an example of a liberal democracy, tolerant of opposition activity, where the rule of law was held in respect and where economic development proceeded apace;(sadly) Botswana has the highest infection rate in the world, more than 37% of its population of 1.6 million are HIV-positive; in the age group of 15-49, the infection rate is 40%. By 2010 life expectancy in Botswana is expected to fall to 27 years; half of all children in the country are likely to be Aids orphans; Botswana stands out as a unique example of an enduring multi-party democracy with a record of sound economic management, that has used its diamond riches for national advancement and maintained an administration free of corruption.  I would have liked to have heard more about this from the author; above all, WHY?  In 2023, Botswana is the least corrupt country in Africa and ranks just below Portugal and South Korea (Transparency International)

• NELSON MANDELA Somewhere Over The Rainbow. Mandela stands out as a Beacon of what might have been and what could be. Unique, remarkable, awe-inspiring. A GREAT 'Mr Big'!

STRONG LEADERS?

• GAMAL ABDEL NASSER (Egypt) triumphs during the first years in power were followed by a catalogue of disappointments and disasters...he quarrelled constantly with other Arab governments, retreating more and more into isolation...yet whatever disasters befell Egypt, Nasser never lost his popularity with the masses.
• JOMO KENYATTA (Kenya) enjoyed massive authority. Even critics of his government accorded him due respect...he adhered to capitalist policies, encouraging both indigenous private enterprise and foreign investment...he was ruthless in dealing with any challenge to his authority
• JULIUS NYERE (Tanzania) socialist experiment stood out as a beacon of hope...he became the most influential thinker and writer in Africa of his time...took on the drive for socialism virtually single-handedly...between 1973 and 1977 some 11 million people were placed in new villages, in what amounted to the largest mass movement in Africa's history...there were numerous reports of coercion and brutality...by the end of the 1970s Tanzania was in dire straits...what progress was made was financed largely by foreign aid... He stepped down voluntarily, after 23 in power.
• LEOPOLD SENGHOR ( (Senegal) a centralised system of groundnut management soon became bogged down in incompetence and corruption...Senghor steered through these difficulties with a mixture of compromise, coercion and pork-barrel politics. He was one of the few (6 out of 150) to relinquish power voluntarily, after 20 years in office.
• SAMORA MACHEL (Mozambique). I would have liked much more comment on Machel. The little there is about him in the book suggests he was a skilful pragmatist.
• KENNETH KAUNDA (Zambia) was equally adamant about the merits of one-party rule and his own leadership, despite a catastrophic record of economic mismanagement over 25 years in office. I recall him for his hair quiff, his large white hankie and his predilection for weeping in public!

DICTATORS OR WORSE

• KWAME NKRUMAH (Ghana) No other country demonstrated the decline of Africa so graphically as Ghana. Although a few countries in the continent were independent before 1957 (Liberia, South Africa,  Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco), the British colony of Gold Coast becoming the independent Ghana was seen as a trailblazer, as was its new leader Nkrumah.  Meredith heads his early chapter on Ghana, The Gold Coast  Experiment, and a later one on Nkrumah Feet of Clay. Tragically, it now feels like an experiment in dictatorship, and worse, which was to be replicated throughout the dark continent.
• ABEID KARUME (Zanzibar). His regime was bizarre and vindictive from the outset...the Revolutionary Council ordered arrests, imprisonment without trial, torture and execution as it saw it.
• JEAN-BEDEL BOKASSA (Central African Republic) combined not only greed and personal violence but delusions of grandeur unsurpassed by any other African leader...he also gained a reputation for cannibalism...
• MILTON OBOTE (Uganda) in common with many other African leaders, he set his sights on establishing a one-party state, arguing that tribal and factional groupings tended to threaten the stability of the country...his style of government became increasingly secretive and autocratic.
• HASTINGS BANDA (Malawi) his dictatorship degenerated into tyranny...incarcerating thousands of Malawians in detention centres

TYRANTS

• JOSEPH MOBUTU (Zaire). The Congo/Zaire, with Rwanda, Burundi, truly represent Hearts of Darkness and Mobutu one of the worst of tyrants. Amazingly, he lasted so long. But as with so many other corrupt leaders, he lasted thanks to outsiders' support; in this case, the USA who, with France, Belgium, Britain, Russia and China, could not leave Africa alone. Their dirty fingerprints are all over this tragic 50 years - for plunder, Great Power rivalry, weaponry profits. The UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali does not come out of things smelling of roses, either.
• IDI AMIN (Uganda) organised death squads to hunt down and kill scores of army and police officers...within a few months, mass killing of Langi and Acholi began. 'It was impossible to dispose of the bodies in graves'...thousands died at the hands of his special squads. No one was immune.
• FRANCISCO MACIAS NGUEMA (Equatorial Guinea) steadily sank into a morass of murder and mayhem...thousands were incarcerated in prison and murdered there...many were executed on a whim...out of a population of 3000,000, at least 50,000 had been killed and 125,000 had fled into exile. 
• MENGISTU HAILE MARIAM (Ethiopia) thousands died in the red terror, thousands more were imprisoned, many were tortured and beaten
• ROBERT MUGABE (Zimbabwe). The author correctly heads the chapter on Mugabe's seizure of, and maintenance of, power in Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, as A Degree in Violence. Perhaps it was because his regime started later (1980) than most of the others, the fact that it was a British colony, that much of the terror was aimed at whites and the growth of more intrusive media to report everything, leads one to feel his rule was one of the most tyrannical and repulsive of all. He fought the war not to achieve democracy but to gain total control...by the end of the 1990s Zimbabwe was in dire straits. In 2003, he warned he would use even worse violence if necessary. 'If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold. Ten times. That is what we stand for'.

.

The cancers of Communism (Russia, China, Cuba) and Radical Islam have only added to the poison.

Having ploughed through this woeful tale of dictators, tyrants, massacres, brutal tribal wars etc., I still believe that only one-party governments are the way forward BUT they should be paternal not tyrannical. All attempts at democracy led to one man/party quickly taking dictatorial power. Some leaders, although brooking no dissent, managed to stay just this side of tyranny and were - on a sliding scale - far less corrupt that others; but, almost inevitably, familial and tribal loyalties came before country's. Here one can certainly blame European governments. So many new countries' borders had been drawn on a map in Berlin or elsewhere. They were no respecters of tribal areas and one can look at almost any African state (Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan, Zaire) and realise just how artificial a creation they were. Is there any hope for the future, when one adds natural disasters (although 'famine' was often caused by warfare) and ruthless arms traders into the mix? 

One can do no better than to quote in its entirety Meredith's last paragraph:

The same lament applies to Africa. Time and time again, its potential for economic development has been disrupted by the predatory policies of ruling elites seeking personal gain, often precipitating violence for their own ends. 'The problem is not so much that development has failed,' observed the Nigerian academic, Claude Ake, in his essay on Democracy and Development in Africa, 'as that it was never really on the agenda in the first place.' After decades of mismanagement and corruption, most African states have become hollowed out. They are no longer instruments capable of serving the public good. Indeed, far from being able to provide aid and protection to their citizens, African government and the vampire-like politicians who run them are regarded by the populations they rule as yet another burden they have to bear in the struggle for survival.

And, so, millions died during those 50 years, through disease, hunger, displacement and genocide. A shocking, shocking tale of repetitive evil. Meredith's book was published eighteen years ago. Has anything changed? I doubt it.

Thomas Pakenham's 'The Scramble for Africa' 1991

 

Weidenfeld and Nicolson first edition - 1991

Wow, what an achievement. Pakenham's book, now thirty years' old, is a triumph of research and exposition. The canvas is vast, but he has managed to wrestle successfully with a myriad of sources and used them to back up his own visits to 22 of the 47 independent countries of Africa. No wonder he spent a decade working on the book. The result really is a tour de force.

Of course, it is impossible to give a detailed appraisal of such a huge book, but here are a few basic reactions.

• as with India and elsewhere, it is nearly incredible that so few controlled so many. Whether it was Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal or the King of the Belgians, each used a tiny amount of Europeans to lead exploration or establish and run colonies
• not until the late 1870s was there a real push to colonise rather than to trade (whether it be precious metals, ivory, rubber, oil, cocoa etc.) Only in the next two decades did the coastal forts and settlements expand up rivers (Niger, Congo etc) in pursuit of economic gain and, thanks to David Livingstone, Christian missionising (The Flag follows the Cross).
• the Scramble - above all between Britain and France and then, later, Germany, was led as much by individuals 'on the ground' - H.M. Stanley, Carl Peters, Frederick Lugard, George Goldie, Cecil Rhodes, Pierre Brazza, Jean-Baptiste Marchand - as by governments (although imperialists such as Joe Chamberlain and Gambetta were only too ready to support the intrepid explorers/colonists). Some leaders, such as Gladstone and Lord Granville, were usually opposed to any expansion; even Lord Salisbury was ambivalent. Others, like Bismarck, changed their minds about colonies. Apart from the strategic race for the Nile, the running had been left to individuals: enterprising capitalists such as Cecil Rhodes and George Goldie, humanitarians such as Lugard and Mackinnon, eccentric naturalists such as Harry Johnston.
• The brutality of all races, including the various African tribes, was shocking (and still is).
• Whilst there were clearly some genuine, upright, god-fearing missionaries, some were hand-in-glove with the dreadful behaviour of their secular compatriots - none worse than the silence of the Baptists and Roman Catholics in the Congo.
• the single-mindedness and bravery of the explorers and military officers was astounding. So many Europeans lost their lives in all the spheres - West, East, Central and South Africa - killed in battles, skirmishes, ambushes and, above all, diseases. For every well-known name - the Stanleys, Gordons, Marchands, Goldies, Wolseleys - there was a myriad of others, a few with memorial plaques on church walls back home, but most lost to the jungle etc. or, worse, eaten by cannibalistic tribes.
• the 'origin' of the Union of South Africa explains everything about its later tragic years.
• As for King Leopold of the Belgians - you need to read the book. No words here can sum up the evil done in his name, usually knowingly. Yet he died in his bed.

A few examples of the above:

1. (Uganda) Of all the freelance imperialists who promoted the Scramble, Lugard was to prove the most tenacious and, ultimately, the most successful. In the next forty years no other proconsul would put such a powerful moral stamp on the character of European rule in Africa. Significantly, both his parents were missionaries, and his hero was David Livingstone. Yet he had sailed for Africa more to cast away his life than to build an empire.
2. (German East Africa) Carl Peters was said to model himself on Nietzche's 'Superman'...not for him the usual euphemisms about the importance of 'firmness' and the regrettable need for 'vigorous measures'. He bragged to his readers about his 'exultation' as he shot down any African bold enough to oppose him, and boasted of the trail of destruction he had left along the valley of the Tana...
3. (German South-West Africa) ...the station officer at Jaune, Lieutenant Schenneman, who had taken a black mistress, heard rumours of her affairs with three Africans. He told his black servant to castrate the three men. The servant mistook his instructions, marched off with a party of soldiers and castrated the first three men he met in a nearby village. On another occasion, a Lieutenant Dominik was sent on an expedition to negotiate a treaty with the Bahoro. Instead, he shot down all the men and women in the village, and the fifty-four children that survived were put in baskets and drowned like kittens.
4. (Cecil Rhodes) These years between 1886 and 1890 were the most astonishing of Rhodes's astonishing life. It was as though he had been given the magical power to live four careers simultaneously and they were all telescoped into those four years. In Kimberley he was the Great Amalgamator, the Bismarck of the diamond mines. In Johannesburg astride the Rand gold-mines, he was a pioneer of goldbugs and Randlords. At the Cape he was the august Prime Minister of Cape Colony, trusted by both Afrikaners and the English-speaking community. Across the Limpopo he was to be a new kind of colonial imperialist, outflanking all rivals, Boers, Germans and Portuguese, as he pushed up into Mashonaland and the north. 

Pakenham's last chapter is entitled 'Scrambling Out' - The Scramble out of Africa in the eleven years from 1957 to 1968 was pursued at the same undignified pace, taking the world as much by surprise, as the Scramble into Africa more than half a century earlier. I am old enough to recall some of the newspaper headlines of this period, particularly Harold Macmillan's 'Wind of Change' speech.

1847:  Liberia    1910:  South Africa    1922:  Egypt    1941-2:  Ethiopia    1951: Libya

1956: Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan

1957:  Ghana

1958:  Guinea

1960:  Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Togo, Benin, Nigeria,                        Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, Gabon, Congo Republic, Zaire, Somali Republic,

1961:  Sierra Leone, Tanzania

1962:  Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi

1963:  Kenya

1964:  Zambia, Malawi 

1965:  The Gambia

1966:  Botswana, Lesotho

1968:  Swaziland, Equatorial Guinea

1969:  Algeria

1974: Guinea Bissau    1975:  Angola, Mozambique    1976:  Western Sahara    1977:  Djibouti

1980:  Zimbabwe

It is hard not to see the hundred years or so involvement by the European Powers in the continent (and some for much longer than that) as a mere interlude - albeit a rapacious one - in its grim history of inter-tribal violence, even genocide, and brutal, corrupt (yes, evil) dictators and autocrats. Aptly named "The Dark Continent".

I am going to read Martin Meredith's The State of Africa (2005) soon. It is subtitled A History of Fifty Years of Independence. Just reading the last few pages fills one with despair.

Robert Peston's 'The Whistle Blower' 2021

 

Zaffre paperback edition - 2022

I am afraid that when I read the name of the author of the novel (kindly given as a Christmas present by my daughter), the image that came immediately to mind wasn't overly flattering. Peston is in a long line of people who are remembered as much for their strangled vowels or other speech oddities as for their actual thoughts. One of the early faces on television was that of the sainted Malcolm Muggeridge who, rather like Saint Augustine, wanted chastity "but not yet" (Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo). More memorable were the grimaces and contortions which constantly erupted across his gargoyle-like face as he expounded yet one more hypocritical point of view (was there a hornet trying to escape from his mouth?) Lloyd Grossman was another who wrestled with the dictates of 'correct' pronunciation - it was not enough to say that it was mid-Atlantic, even though it should have been drowned. In a different way, Ted Heath is remembered by me as much for his cringeworthy vocal chords as for his appalling tenure of office - did Lord Curzon sound like that?

Well, once I got past the nameplate, I settled down to the book. As with so many first novels, it reeks of autobiography. The very first page wrote itself from Peston's own experiences. He wrote for the Financial Times, his alter ego for the Financial Chronicle. He describes himself as culturally Jewish - so is the novel's main protagonist (he is not a 'hero') Gilbert Peck. The Peston/Peck father seems remarkably similar: Bernard Peck, world-renowned Professor of Sociology and Politics at the London School of Economics, fellow of the British Academy, adviser to successive (and now dead) Labour leaders... compared with Maurice Peston, founder of the economics department at Queen Mary College, London, advisor to various government departments and Labour Secretaries of State from the 1960s through to the 1990s. Maurice Peston died in 2016 - did this give the go-ahead for his son to write books including him? Certainly the uncomfortable fictional father-son Peck relationship feels close to home. Peck is an Oxbridge-educated, know-it-all Jew shunned by other hacks - is that written with some bitterness by Peston?

Peston admits he drank too much at university - Balliol College, Oxford, if you must know and Peck is no stranger to the bottle and more; whether the author  enjoyed a clandestine sex life is another matter. Peck certainly does with Marilyn Krol, with her greying white T-shirt, with a fading Labour red rose on the front and silk culotte knickers, who has one objective (two, if you include her romps with Peck) - to install Johnny Todd in Number 10. Todd (the closest thing to Hollywood that British politics has seen since, well, ever) is a shoe-in for Tony Blair and a variety of other real politicians of the mid-late nineties make their appearance under nom de plumes: Sir Peter Ramsey - John Major; the smoothy Tory Keith Kendall - could be one of several real-life MPs in Major's sleaze-ridden government!

There is also the deeply unpleasant South African-born billionaire Jimmy Breitner, owner of  The Globe - surely an amalgam of the Czech-born Robert Maxwell (The Daily Mirror) and Australian-born Rupert Murdoch (The News of the World and The Sun). Maxwell is actually mentioned as a crook in the novel.

Peck's sister, Clare, gets the plot rolling by being knocked off her bike, dying in St. Thomas's Hospital of her injuries. Whilst  dozing next to Clare's bedside, Peck hears a man's voice with the tones of someone feigning classlessness, like a BBC presenter (that surely was an early giveaway, as well as a shaft at Peston's ex-employers). What originally appears to be bad luck takes on a sinister twist. Yes, skullduggery is afoot in the corridors of power as well as on the streets of the Great Wen. Clare certainly had a good take on her brother's (and Peston's) work: a scavenger on the scrapheap of better men's efforts. The novel is dedicated To my darling sister Juliet - thankfully very much alive but also once hospitalised after a car crash and not expected to live. What she thought of her brother's first effort (particularly what emerges about Clare's sex life and with whom) is probably best kept within the Peston family.

Clare's PA is Jeremy MacDonald (tortoiseshell glasses, North Face anorak and mousey hair). A character to keep an eye on throughout the book.

There are some nice touches - both regarding the characters and snippets of dialogue, but the prose is occasionally 'clunky' and it is obvious that Peston has a journalist's style rather than a novelist's. If half of what he writes is based on his own experiences, then the world of politics is claustrophobic, murky, self-serving and distasteful. But we knew that anyway, didn't we?

To end on a plus - Peston, apparently, likes John Buchan's novels.

John Sutherland's 'Mrs Humphry Ward' 1990

 

Clarendon Press, Oxford first edition - 1990

Having read three of Mrs Humphry Ward's books -  Robert Elsmere (1888), Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898) and The Case of Richard Meynell (1911) - this year, I wanted to find more about her. John Sutherland I knew from his excellent The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (1988), so I plumped for his biography, rather than Ward's granddaughter's (Janet Trevelyan).

Quite apart from Sutherland's detailed chronology and comment on her books, two aspects of Mary Ward's life stood out for me - both deleterious. He gives a whole Chapter (17) to 'Health 1890-1900'.  In fact, Mary appears to have been 'ill' on and off throughout her life; as Sutherland says, one could write her biography as a sixty-nine year medical case report or an anthology of the age's female invalidisms. Over the years she was racked by a baffling array of chronic, acute, subacute, psychosomatic, and organic ailments. Few pages go by without comment on another medical problem. As a baby and girl she appears to have been predisposed to persistent lowering complaints of two types - colds and rheumatism. She was, as her father told her grandmother a very sickly child - with perpetual colds, hacking coughs and dire teething problems.  Infection-prone, Mary suffered throughout her life from 'septic' throats, from inflamed or 'lumpy' tonsils, and earache. On the evidence of her daughter's diaries, her mother regularly caught at least a dozen colds or 'flu infections annually. In the early 1880s Mary began to experience 'writer's cramp'; it continued throughout her life being particularly acute during the most stressful  phase of her novel writing. Bad teeth plagued her throughout her life (5 were pulled out under gas in 1905-6). Insomnia led to use or abuse with sleeping draughts. She regularly used chlorodyne, trional and morphia. The most intractable and puzzling illness was what she termed 'side' or 'the old enemy'. it was eventually thought to be gallstones. In later life she suffered from excruciating eczema - a mass of white blisters would scavenge her arms; styes and boils added to her problems. From 1906 onwards she was never a well woman again.                                                     

Mary Ward in the early 1890s

The other deleterious aspect was her 'men'. Her father, Tom Arnold (Dr Arnold of Rugby's second son) would these days be accused of cruelty to his eldest daughter Mary. Up until her mid teens she rarely saw him, being shoved off to various schools while her siblings mainly enjoyed the comforts of a home life. He vacillated between Anglicanism and Catholicism (Newman was there to tempt him) and comes across as a thoroughly selfish man. If he was second rate, then Mary's husband Thomas Humphry Ward (1845-1926) was third rate, spending his life working for The Times as their Art critic, whilst dabbling in purchases of Old Masters (more often than not being bamboozled or bamboozling himself). For much of their marriage, and increasingly so, he sponged off his wife's earnings. There was worse to come: Mary's only son, Arnold Sandwith Ward (1876-1950) was a fourth-rater. An inveterate gambler, often worse for drink, every position or job (the Army, the House of Commons) his mother's influence gained for him was to prove disastrous. In the end, her husband's spendthrift ways and her son's gambling, meant Mary Ward had to keep churning out books to pay for them. No wonder, Arnold's cousins, the Huxleys, and his younger sister Janet (who married G.M. Trevelyan) came to dislike him intensely. There are few heroes or heroines. The ones that stick out are Mary's eldest child, Dorothy (1874-1964), who never married and who spent her life supporting her mother and trying to minimise the malodorous effect of her brother; George Smith and his son-in-law Reginald Smith, of the publishing house Smith, Elder were not only to be her publishers but her benefactors and saviours on many occasions. Not only did the benefit from her successes but they kept faith with her during the remorseless decline in standards (and sales) from the 1900s onwards.

The tragedy of Mary Ward's career (and she is not alone as an author in this) is that she fell out of fashion. The American book-buying public made her name (from Robert Elsmere onwards for some dozen years), but they lost interest in her type of novel as the 20th century dawned. From 1900, she wrote some good novels, and some good characters and descriptions in the not-so-good works. But one gets the feeling that they had to be written to keep the creditors at bay - the town house and Stocks, the country mansion, the incessant needs of husband and son, were only dealt with by her churning out book after book. She was briefly a useful propogandist during the Great War (egged on by the ex-USA President Roosevelt and others), but her general work was long past its sell-by date.

Mary Ward's work in supporting or setting up University Hall, Marchmont Hall and then the Passmore Edwards Settlement in Tavistock Square certainly deserved more than a measly CBE. THE PES proved a boon not only for the Working Class and children with the Vacation schools, but also for hundreds of handicapped children, as 'special' schools were developed round London. The debit side is filled with Mary Ward's major involvement in the Anti-Suffrage League. She launched the Anti-Suffrage Review in December 1908, led an anti-suffrage deputation to the Prime Minister Asquith in June 1910, and ensured her son championed the cause once he was elected to Parliament. It is a strange course as her own life and activities (surrounded by second-rate men) surely should have suggested that women were at least men's equal.

Virginia Woolf made a typically shrewish remark in her diary, on hearing of Mary Ward's death: Mrs Ward is dead; poor Mrs Humphrey Ward; and it appears that she was merely a woman of straw after all - shovelled into the grave and already forgotten. Unfeeling, but with more than a grain of truth in it. I like to think it is also true of Virginia Woolf.

I will probably look out for three more of Mary Ward's books - Marcella (1894), Lady Connie (1916), and her memoir A Writer's Recollections (1918). However, I have large pile of books on my Study floor looking at me accusingly. Their needs will be attended to first.

Mary Moorman's 'George Macaulay Trevelyan' 1980

 

Hamish Hamilton first edition - 1980

G.M. Trevelyan had published an un-self-revealing autobiography in 1949 and forbade anyone to write his biography - he had also burnt all his personal papers. His daughter, Mary Moorman, decided to ignore his request for two reasons. Firstly, having studied other letters (such as to his father, brother Charles and herself), she considered them to have literary and historical importance. Secondly, she argued that the world he grew up in has passed away so completely that it is as much a part of 'history' as the age of Napoleon or of the Stuarts. That was in 1980 - so much more so in 2022.

There had already been a short appraisal/tribute of Trevelyan in 1951 by J.H. Plumb, in one of a series of pamphlets published as Supplements to British Book News. Then, in 1992, David Cannadine published a full-length biography, which I read a few years back.

J.H. Plumb 1951                 David Cannadine 1992

Plumb bordered on the hagiographic (Trevelyan was still alive) but his sincerity shines through. On Trevelyan's early work England Under the Stuarts (1904), Plumb wrote of its outstanding quality...it may be generations before the most dramatic century in English history is so finely portrayed between the covers of a single book...surely no text-book has ever before or since been written with such a gusto... In his summary, Plumb stated, if one quality is to be singled out, it should be this, for, of all historians, he is the poet of English history.

I have, tucked inside the back of Cannadine's biography, a TLS review by Christopher Haigh. Historians are, perhaps, renowned for their bitchiness, but I found Haigh's approach overly spiteful. He says he had disliked Trevelyan since being set England under the Stuarts to read at A-level. He didn't like other Trevelyan books and wrote Thank heaven for Christopher Hill. Well, that sums Haigh up for me! He takes Cannadine to task for campaigning yet again against the professionalisation of history; variations on an old theme by Sir John Plumb. Haigh snidely writes of Trevelyan coming from the landed gentry, having friends such as John Buchan and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and drafting George V's silver jubilee speech, and what a monument of ignorant irrelevance it now seems - its confidence in parliamentary government, industrial recovery and affection for the Royal Family a mockery of our own times. Trevelyan himself thought the world was turning sour... Well Tutor Haigh, studying the Britain of the last 60 years, certainly of the last ghastly 30, I can absolutely empathise with Trevelyan and not with your viewpoint. Give me the literary histories of Trevelyan, John Buchan, Jack Plumb. C.V. Wedgwood, A.L. Rowse, Peter Ackroyd, even Arthur Bryant, rather than the plodding, boring 'professionals' of today, with their endless endnotes and bibliographies often taking more pages than their main text. The best History is literary and imaginative, it's about people not economic graphs. I recall a mild criticism of one of my essays for the M.A. course in English Local History being commented upon as rather literary. I took it as a compliment.

As for Mary Moorman's book, she rightly calls it a Memoir rather than a Biography. It is based on GMT's letters and is therefore dependent on which were available to her. It means that the period when he seemingly wrote the most to his Family was when he was in Italy during the Great War, working as the Commandant of a Red Cross Unit. Clearly this was an important aspect of his life, supporting his beloved Italy and Italians, but it is the least interesting part of the book for this reader, as it is crammed with lists of people, places and incidents which become hard to follow. A map of the area would have been invaluable. What his daughter has got across is GMT's love of life, places and people. Nine years before his death in 1962, he published Carlyle: An Anthology, where he showed how Carlyle had taught him that history is not statistics or constitutional documents, though these have a part in it, but a living scene pulsing with life, full of passions and faiths and fears of men.

I looked up references to Trevelyan in my copy of The Diaries of A.L. Rowse, edited by Richard Ollard (Penguin, 2003). Rowse visited the old man in Cambridge and at Hallington and recorded that Trevelyan hates the modern world - more completely and consistently than any of us; for he hates modern science and the world it has made...I suddenly thought that G.M.T. is really an eighteenth-century figure (1955) and, in 1959, at Hallington, Rowse gives over nearly nine pages in Ollard's selection to the three days he spent with Trevelyan. G.M.T. has very strict and upright moral principles...evidently not a love-match (with Janet) on his part...he had to stand by and see Wallington go to his eldest brother (Charles), whom he strongly disapproved of ('He never had any morals')... Virginia Woolf - 'a horrid woman' (hear! hear!) ...he detested Bloomsbury and its works (hear! hear!) ...of Belloc, 'he was a liar'. Rowse continued of G.M.T. , he is a man of absolutely firm and simple principles, which he applies consistently to history. Thank you, A.L. Rowse, for adding to my liking for G.M. Trevelyan. It has persuaded me to get down off my Study shelves my copy of the first British edition of English Social History (printed by Novographic process in 1944 by Longmans, Green and Co.) - I see on the front flap of the dust wrapper the TLS has commented: A history which is also literature. Good!

Eamon Duffy's 'A People's Tragedy' 2020

 

Bloomsbury Continuum first edition - 2020

Eamon Duffy describes himself as a cradle Catholic and he is clearly a Catholic apologist, although he can have some sharp words for individual Roman Catholics, including popes. I already had his The Stripping of the Altars (1992), for which he is probably best known, and Marking the Hours (2006). He is an excellent historian, gifted with subtle insight and a deep historical understanding, wearing his undoubted learning with commendable lightness. So, what of this tome, subtitled Studies in Reformation?

It is divided into two Parts: the first using the same subheading and the second entitled Writing the Reformation. I found the latter by far the most interesting and informative. There are five sections, concentrating on Martin Luther, J. A. Froude, A.G. Dickens, Walsingham and Fiction and Faction. I learnt something from each chapter. I hadn't realised how, as long ago as the mid-1960s, many theologians had come to believe that there was fundamental agreement between Catholics and Protestants on the contested issue of Justification. However, others like Cardinal Josef Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)  and the English historian Richard Rex, argued that in the end Luther was a heretic not a Catholic dissident. The chapter on Froude highlights the fact we should know the Historian and his times before we know his History. My thought was, "yes we must, Eamon Duffy"! Froude could be commended for his untiring use of source material (usually manuscripts no-one else had used), but he distrusted the masses, accepted contemporary racial theories (English over Irish and whites over blacks) and regarded the advent of Protestantism and the repudiation of papal authority as an immense blessing. A.G. Dickens was one of the mainstays of my student and teaching careers. Duffy suggests that G.G. Coulton, a more polemical historian (a fanatic, with a deep loathing and fear of Roman Catholicism in general and monks in particular), influenced Dickens, who weighed the late medieval Church and invariably found it wanting. The more I read the chapter, the more I came down on the side of Dickens and not Duffy! The chapter on Walsingham merely showed to me that some Anglicans could be as superstitious as Roman Catholics. I have never supported Marian idolatry.

The most interesting chapter to me was the last. I liked the way Duffy explored the importance of historical fiction in shaping people's minds - the sectarian propaganda of Fr Robert Hugh Benson; the more measured approach of Ford Madox Ford; the very different treatment of Cromwell and More in Robert Bolt's play, A Man for all Seasons, and Hilary Mantel's trilogy, beginning with Wolf Hall. We all have our prejudices, and I haven't read a word of Mantel's hagiography of Cromwell and her malign disparagement of More. Duffy clearly doesn't agree with her portrayals and David Starkey, typically, is contemptuous of such historical novelists.

As for the first Part, the chapters are what one would expect from a Catholic historian, who calls his book A People's Tragedy. That on cathedral pilgrimages only highlights for me the cupidity of the church as well as the genuine need to provide for the superstitious masses; he (I believe rightly) emphasises the genuine religious conservatism behind the 1569 Rebellion; explains very well the importance of the Catholic colleges set up at Douai and Rheims; provides a well researched account of the origins and influence of the King James Bible; and praises the not-so-well-known reminiscences of Richard Baxter. 

It does a (nominally) Protestant good to read a different slant on the Reformation. Eamon Duffy has produced an excellent (by and large) defence of Sixteenth Century and Late Medieval Catholicism. 

Dan Brown's 'Origin' 2017

 

Corgi paperback edition - 2018

It's been quite a while since I read one of Dan Brown's 'International Best sellers'. I have one or two on my bookshelves:

First published in 2000          First published in 2003

I recall the excitement in 2003 (is it really 20 years ago?) when The Da Vinci Code was published. I hadn't realised he had already written Digital Fortress (1998) and Angels & Demons (2000). The former - about covert intelligence agencies, clandestine organisations and code breaking - was apparently written as a result of the author's interest being sparked by US Secret Service agents visiting his college to interview a student who had joked in an email about killing the President. The second novel introduced Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of symbology, who races to protect the Vatican from the Illuminati, a secret society established during the Renaissance which had opposed the Roman Catholic Church. Another novel followed - Deception Point (2001). It was only when Brown returned to Langdon that he made his breakthrough - with The Da Vinci Code (2003). This centred on Christianity's origins and art history. Commencing with a murder in the Louvre, the fast-paced thriller involving mysterious organisations such as The Priory of Sion and Opus Dei was a huge success, selling more than 80 million copies by 2009. It also sparked interest in the earlier novels. In 2004 all four of his works appeared in The New York Times best-seller lists. These spawned other Code-related books, film adaptations of The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Angels & Demons (2009) with Tom Hanks as Langdon - I have both on DVD.

I also have two large paperbacks purporting to explain the Secrets of two of the books:

2005 paperback edition      2004 paperback edition  

In other words, Dan Brown has raked in a fortune since 2003. Langdon subsequently appeared in The Lost Symbol (2009):

Bantam Press first edition - 2009

and Inferno in 2013. The former concentrated on the Freemasons and the latter dealt with efforts to stop the release of a plague. Inferno was also made into a movie in 2016, with Tom Hanks again cast as Robert Langdon. 

I have just finished the 2018 Corgi paperback edition of Origin, published a year earlier. It had the same elements of the earlier works - codes, a general dislike of religion (especially the Roman Catholic Church) and a key aspect of thrillers, ever since John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) - the Chase. Did I enjoy it? The prose was occasionally clunky, the computer-jargon and symbolism often above my head and much of it preposterous! 

The Prologue sees billionaire American (well, his mother was Spanish) Edmond Kirsch giving three religious leaders - Bishop Antonio Valdespino a conservative Roman Catholic, Rabbi Yehuda Kȍves and the respected allamah, Syed al-Fadl - of an illustrated talk he is to give at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. It is no ordinary lecture, but one which will shake to the core not only the three religious leaders but the world. Kirsch will answer the questions human beings have asked from the beginning - How did it all begin? Where do we come from? and Where are we going? To forgo any spoiler alerts, I will simply say there is an assassin, Admiral Luis Avila, determined to stop Kirsch from giving his earth-shattering news; there is the strikingly beautiful Ambra Vidal, director of the Museum and betrothed to the Prince Juliάn, heir to the Spanish throne; there is Prince Juliάn himself; and, above all, there is Winston, the computerized British docent, who enables both Langdon and the author to get out of impossible situations.

There are some, usually successful, red herrings; some well described architecture - particularly of the famous Barcelonan Gaudí's La Sagrada Família (The Basilica of the Holy Family); some hair-raising scenes; and much Dan Brown 'chatter' using computer-speak etc. I quite enjoyed it all, but had to suspend my disbelief on several occasions.

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It has inspired (if that's the right word) a rewatching of The Da Vinci Code on DVD. I was not impressed - it was not only slow, it 'sagged'. I didn't think much of the acting - by Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Alfred Molina, Paul Bettany and over-the-top Ian McKellen (shades of Peter O'Toole?). I think Angels & Demons probably shaded it.