Jonathan Sumption The reputation of Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916, has never recovered from the pasting he received in Lloyd George’s war memoirs. Lloyd George thought that his deliberate ambiguity about Britain’s intentions led us into the first world war. If you read just one book of history this Christmas,
Anna Aslanyan A decade after Londoners, we have another wonderful work of oral history from Craig Taylor. New Yorkers: A City and its People in Our Time (John Murray, £16.99) is a collection of monologues that makes you feel as if you are there, listening to these people. A nurse, an activist, a nanny, a
The Young H.G. Wells is a biography that takes biology seriously. This is partly because H.G. Wells was a biologist before he became a writer of science fiction (his first publication was A Text Book on Biology, which he illustrated himself), but also because Claire Tomalin is alert to the life of the body as
In the 1920s the linocut broke out of the schoolroom and on to gallery walls. Here was a democratic new art form, perfect for the times with its lowly materials — a piece of old linoleum flooring for the block, while the best tools, according to the artist Claude Flight, were an old umbrella spoke
Every British historian has a story about the witlessness of Americans when it comes to our Georgian kings. The fate of Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III is notorious — Hollywood turned it into a film entitled The Madness of King George, in part lest American audiences assume it a tertiary sequel to
The Booker used to be more enthusiastic about the historical novel than it now is. Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle (Doubleday, £16.99) is about an imagined woman pilot who makes her way in the first years of aviation and is thought to have died in a daring feat of navigation from Pole to Pole in 1950.
It would seem, if recent publications are anything to go by, that we have an insatiable appetite for this subject. A quick search of books on colour throws up six titles in just the past three years, a further half dozen published as a set in February this year, another volume in a series by
Manuscripts have something of the appeal of drawings. They bring you closer to the creative process. Even a copy adds something special to the text: an editorial twist, a decorated initial, a margin full of beasts or just a beautiful script in which every letter is fashioned by hand like no other. Manuscripts do more
When two post-Soviet supermodels committed suicide in the noughties, both throwing themselves off high buildings in New York and Kiev, the trail into what made them so depressed led to a ‘personality development’ organisation in Moscow that offered ‘trainings’ that would help ‘find your truer self’. The moment you entered the dark Stalinist gothic theatre,
Ever since a consensus emerged that trees and, by extension, their ecosystems, were both vastly interesting and badly threatened, great tottering logpiles of books about woods or individual tree species have seen the light of day. Of these books, one of the most influential has been The Hidden Life of Trees (2018), written by Peter
The Caucasus, a popular saying goes, is a ‘mountain of tongues’. Describing this region requires a strong constitution, determination and brilliance because, as Christoph Baumer writes in this magnificent book, ‘in many ways, the Caucasus region is a puzzle’. That is something of an understatement. For one thing, the mountains usually referred to as the
Like department stores, empires and encyclopaedias, the multi-volume narrative national history is an invention of the later 18th century. It reaches its apogee, promising to bring everything important within a single enclosure, in the 19th and early 20th century. After that, ambitious examples appear to be fighting against a general lack of enthusiasm. Most of
And so the reckoning begins. As frantic Afghans wrestle with the agonising, life-and-death choice between staying in Kabul and risking execution by the Taliban or running the gauntlet of checkpoints around the airport in search of freedom overseas, it’s noises off in the West. Pundits and policy- makers pontificate, grizzled generals rue another foreign adventure
W.G. Sebald is the modern master of the uncanny — or perhaps that should be ‘was’, as he died in a car crash near Norwich in 2001 at the age of 57. Deciding which tense to use depends on whether you mean ‘W.G. Sebald’ as a shorthand for his body of work, which outlives him,
The veteran journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft claims in his prologue to Churchill’s Shadow that: ‘This is not a hostile account, or not by intention, nor consciously “revisionist”, or contrarian,’ before launching into a long book that is virtually uninterrupted in its hostility to Winston Churchill, his memory and especially anyone who has had the temerity to
If you crush the right testicle of a wolf and administer it in oil or rose water it will induce a loathing for sex. The Turks have a drink called coffee (for they use no wine). The Chinese have no nobility, or only those philosophers and doctors who have raised themselves by their worth. If
November 1974 was the month to disappear. On the 7th, Lord Lucan went missing, and a fortnight later John Stonehouse MP dis-appeared from a beach in Miami. Lucan was never found, so remains prominent in our national mythology. Nothing endures like a mystery. Stonehouse, on the other hand, was discovered in Melbourne six weeks later,
On Easter Monday 2018, Donald and Melania Trump stood on the balcony of the White House next to a giant bunny. It’s part of the job: since 1878, presidents have hosted a children’s Easter egg hunt on the south lawn. Usually they rhapsodise abut what fun the kids are going to have. Trump, true to
In January, the United States declared that China’s brutal treatment of the Uighur people in Xinjiang amounted to genocide. ‘I believe this genocide is ongoing, and we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy the Uighurs by the Chinese party-state,’ said Mike Pompeo, the former US secretary of state. British MPs made a similar declaration
Santiniketan, in West Bengal, about 100 miles from Kolkata, is one of the most magical places on Earth. The Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore used a stretch of family land there to set up a great university. Modestly scaled buildings are scattered among groves; classes are conducted under the trees. The last time I was there,
