History

Thursday

Kate Womersley

The germ of a revolutionary idea

Every operation starts the same way. Chlorhexidine scrubbed under nails, lathered over wet hands, palm-to-palm, fingers interlaced, thumbs, wrists, forearms. A soothing routine accompanied by the sound of water hitting a steel trough sink. Washing is an act of safety but also humility. It acknowledges a doctor’s capacity to cause disease as well as cure it. More than once I have thought of Joseph Lister — the father of antisepsis (killing germs) and forefather of asepsis (excluding germs completely) — as I perform this hygienic set-piece. Not that he would have liked the idea of me, his sister’s great-great-great granddaughter, studying medicine. Lister ‘could not bear the indecency of discussing

A.S.H. Smyth

Cannon law

Many and various are the things one finds in Kentish pubs (I’m told); but few could top the sepoy’s skull discovered at The Lord Clyde, Walmer, complete with brief biography: Skull of havildar ‘Alum Bheg’, 46th Regt. Bengal N. Infantry… blown away from a gun. From this grisly starting point, Kim Wagner, lecturer in British imperial history at Queen Mary University of London, narrates how, in the swelter of mid-1857, following outbreaks throughout British India, native Bengal Army units at Sialkot mutinied, killing officers and civilians and looting the cantonment, and then set out for Delhi to join Bahadur Shah, the briefly-minted ‘Emperor of India’. They didn’t make it. All

Nicholas Shakespeare

The greatest journeys ever made

Many believed in Australia for 1,000 years before its discovery. There had to be a commensurate weight — somewhere Down Under — to counter the northern land mass; an ‘unknown Southland’ which was crucial to maintaining the balance of the world. To confuse matters, this theoretical continent was dubbed for a while Austrialia del Espiritu Santo — in honour of the House of Austria. A socially awkward Lincolnshireman, Matthew Flinders, in 1804, was the originator of Australia as the name for what had for centuries been called New Holland, but two French sailors, an aristocratic cartographer, Louis Freycinet, and a manipulative, one-eyed anthropologist, François Péron, showed for the first time

Wednesday

Clinton Heylin

Hey nonny nonny

After hundreds of densely packed pages on folk song in England — a subject for which I share Steve Roud’s passion — I am none the wiser as to why folk song collectors assumed that a man singing in a pub for free drinks in, say, 1890 or 1920 was de facto a folk singer? A singer of folk songs, yes. A folk singer, maybe not. Such men were ‘professional’ singers of popular songs. They sung what people wished to hear, for recompense: a pint. If a collector was lucky — and they often weren’t — he might hear on a particular evening the weal and woe and muck and

Nicky Haslam

Littering castles all over the land

I rashly discarded this book’s dustjacket when I received it, and thus saw only the unlettered cover, a faded photograph of three generations of an aristocratic family, somewhat camera-shy in their silken breeches. Oh I see, I thought, this is one of those books on the foibles of the aristocracy, always an entertaining subject. How wrong can one be? Instead, it’s a polemic against crats aristo, auto, mono or pluto; and the author apparently yearns for any crat of a different stripe — not just demo and bureau, but mobo, neo and probably ochlo to boot. Naturally I went immediately to the index, to look up my family. It lists

James Walton

Easy on the hard stuff

It’s one of the more mysterious features of human history that people of every era and in almost every place have regularly striven to reduce their intelligence, impair their reflexes and generally ensure that everything about them functions far less well. So what is about getting drunk that we love so much? According to Mark Forsyth’s breezy new book, the best answer comes from somebody not often thought of as a classic roisterer: William James, the American philosopher and brother of Henry. ‘Sobriety,’ James wrote, ‘diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.’ And the way Forsyth tells it, drink has caused us to say yes to

Mervyn King

Murder, fraud and bankruptcy

Hamilton, created by the remarkable Lin-Manuel Miranda, has brought the financial musical to the London stage: a serious biography of a great man translated into rap. What comes next? Now we know. It is the story not of one individual but of a national institution — the life and times of the Bank of England. I can’t wait for David Kynaston’s new history to reach the stage. We may have to call on Tim Rice, a revolutionary himself in the world of musicals, to generate a libretto from the long original text. But there is a wealth of material in this fascinating book. Often seen as a rather traditional and

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Cold comfort | 7 December 2017

Mrs Thatcher once explained that she adored cleaning the fridge because, in a complicated life, it was one of the few tasks she could begin and end to total satisfaction. In this way are refrigerators evidence of our struggles, our hopes and our fears. Moreover, if you accept that the selection and preparation of food is a defining part of our culture, then you must acknowledge the primacy of the refrigerator in human affairs. In 2012, The Royal Society declared refrigeration to be the single most significant innovation in food technology since Fred Flintstone invented the barbecue. Me? I wrote these notes while chewing chilled sapphire grapes from Brazil, via

Thursday

Katrina Gulliver

On with the new

I grew up knowing 1947 as the year of my father’s birth, in a black-and-white faraway time. I was told about rationing and petrol coupons, as yet another chapter in the long book of ‘how good you have it now’ — along with chilblains, measles, castor oil and walking ten miles to school neck deep in snow, uphill both ways. The Swedish author Elizabeth Åsbrink presents the year as the fulcrum of modern history, when ‘everything seemed possible, as it had already happened’. Month by month, she shows us the year through the eyes of a disparate cast of characters. Some of them are well known (George Orwell, Simone de

Harry Mount

… while Rome freezes

Why did the Roman Empire collapse? It’s a question that’s been puzzling writers ever since Edward Gibbon wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the late 18th century. One classicist — a German, inevitably — bothered to count up all the various hypotheses for the fall, and came up with 210. The conventional explanation is that, in 410 AD, King Alaric and his Visigoths sacked Rome. Across the Empire, from Hadrian’s Wall to Africa, legionaries folded their tents and deserted their posts. Several centuries of self-indulgent, over-reaching and in-fighting emperors had done for the whole shooting match, leaving the Eastern Roman Empire to stumble

Philip Hensher

A whistle-stop tour of the East

For many of us, life has become global. Areas which were previously tranquil backwaters are now hives of international activity. Leisure travel has given us the possibility of first-hand exposure to once very remote places. You don’t have to be particularly privileged or adventurous to go on holiday in January to south-east Asia: two weeks in a western chain hotel plus flights to Thailand may only cost £1,000. The increase in migration to western countries since the 1940s means that many lives are bound up with previously distant cultures — we have spouses, in-laws, lovers, friends and connections of all sorts whose origins lie in different countries and continents. And,

Thursday

Iain Hollingshead

Country music | 9 November 2017

Americans may be able to draw on only 250 years of history, but they’re not shy of making a song and dance of it. In early December, Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s $1 billion-grossing, hip-hop and show-tune extravaganza about one of the country’s founding fathers will finally open to sold-out crowds in London. It joins the Menier Chocolate Factory’s sold-out revival of Sondheim’s Assassins, the Tony Award-winning musical about the cranks and misfits who have, to paraphrase its opening number, exercised their right to follow their dreams by attempting to assassinate US presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan (but not, yet, Trump). Both shows fit neatly into the American tradition of making successful

Thursday

Ruth Scurr

A vanishing vision

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey were undergraduates when they met in June 1794, Coleridge at Cambridge university and Southey at Oxford. One of their earliest conversations concerned the political implications of the passions. A month later, on 28 July, the French Revolutionary Terror climaxed in the guillotining of the Incorruptible, Maximilien Robespierre. Evidence from across the Channel notwithstanding, Coleridge and Southey were certain that the passions are not vicious — ’tis society makes the indulgence of them so. They resemble an assemblage of waters, destructive if they run wildly over the country, but the source of abundance if properly guided. With youthful utopian optimism they theorised an imaginary community

Roy Foster

Gerry and the peacemakers

When I recently asked a sardonic Northern Irish friend what historical figures Gerry Adams resembled, the tasteless reply came back: ‘A mixture of Jimmy Savile and Oswald Mosley.’ There are elements of both archetypes in this new unauthorised portrait, but it stops short of going the full distance. Perhaps we should not be surprised. The Savile reference is to the grisly theme of child abuse in Adams’s family, leading to his brother’s conviction for offences against his own daughter, and the revelation that Adams père had also sexually abused his children. Though no such accusation attaches to the Sinn Fein leader, these episodes have affected him politically as well as

Thursday

Roger Lewis

Broken dreams | 19 October 2017

In the expensive realm of musical comedy, it’s impossible to predict what will take off and what will crash and burn. Oliver! ran for 2,618 performances, but no other Dickens adaptation has succeeded— and Oliver! had to overcome a reluctant producer who’d suggested it could be much improved with an ‘all-black cast’. And would Lionel Bart’s plan to cast Elizabeth Taylor as Nancy, Richard Burton as Bill Sikes, and Spike Milligan as Fagin have helped or hindered the longevity of his show? Flops provide rich subject matter —lovingly explored in Must Close Saturday — and it is easy with the benefit of hindsight to scoff at the bizarre notions that

Thursday

Simon Ings

The magic of maths

It’s odd, when you think about it, that mathematics ever got going. We have no innate genius for numbers. Drop five stones on the ground, and most of us will see five stones without counting. Six stones are a challenge. Presented with seven stones, we will have to start grouping, tallying and making patterns. This is arithmetic, ‘a kind of “symbol knitting”’ according to the maths researcher and sometime teacher Paul Lockhart, whose Arithmetic explains how counting systems evolved to facilitate communication and trade, and ended up watering (by no very obvious route) the metaphysical gardens of mathematics. Lockhart shamelessly (and successfully) supplements the archeological record with invented number systems

Paul Levy

Pleasure palaces and hidden gems

Theatre buildings are seriously interesting – as I ought to have appreciated sooner in the course of 25 years writing about theatre and opera. This coffee-table whopper, weighing in at just under a kilo, dazzles: Michael Coveney’s text is even better than Peter Dazeley’s remarkable photographs. And in a luminous foreword, Mark Rylance sets out the not-so-obvious difference between theatre and cinema: ‘In a theatre you need to hear the truth. In a cinema you need to see it.’ Most of the theatre audience can’t see the actor’s eyes, and have to rely on hearing emotion in the voice and, to a lesser extent, detecting emotion in body language. Hence

Alan Judd

Armageddon averted

From 1945 to 1992 the Cold War was the climate. Individual weather events stood out — the Korean War, the Cuban missile crisis, the Hungarian and Prague uprisings, the fall of the Berlin wall — but the possibility of nuclear annihilation, the great divide between the broadly capitalist West and the broadly socialist East and the numerous proxy conflicts it spawned, were the background to daily life. In retrospect, it seems stable, almost cosy: you knew where you were. Its ramifications were so many and so all-encompassing that virtually everything you say about it will be true of some part, somewhere. Odd Arne Westad, a Norwegian who is a Harvard

Thursday

Alexandra Coghlan

Mozart’s mischievous muse

If you were to compare Mozart to a bird it wouldn’t be the starling. Possibly the wood thrush or nightingale, with their beautiful, haunting songs; or maybe the lyrebird with its astonishing ear for imitation; or perhaps the composer would find his match in the exotic rarity of the ivory-billed woodpecker or giant ibis. But the common starling? More pest than pet in its adoptive North American home, this ‘ubiquitous, non-native, invasive species’ seems an unlikely fit for a singular prodigy. So thought the ecophilosopher and naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt, when she started work on this book, exploring the composer’s relationship with the bird he bought after hearing it singing

Thursday

Dorian Lynskey

A countercultural upheaval

‘New York stories in a way are always real estate stories,’ says the journalist Alan Light in Lizzy Goodman’s bustling oral history of the city’s music scene at the dawn of the century. The same goes for all music scenes. Talent clusters and thrives only where there are cheap places to live, hang out, play shows and, crucially, fail. New York in 2001 was such a location. The Lower East Side was still affordably sketchy and Brooklyn far from hip. When Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio moved to Williamsburg and invited his Manhattan friends to visit, ‘It was like I was asking them to go to China on