History

Thursday

Allan Mallinson

Day of infamy

On 7 December 1941, without declaration of war, 350 Japanese carrier-borne aircraft struck at the US Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii — in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ringing words, ‘a date that will live in infamy’. For the 75th anniversary, Craig Nelson, a New York Times journalist, has, says his publisher, produced ‘a definitive account’. I disagree. Indeed, if this book were a motor car (or ‘automobile’, for it is a re-print of the US edition, with American usage and spelling), it would have to be recalled for extensive safety modifications and replacement parts. The errors, mis-understandings and omissions are markedly misleading, sowing doubt about the accuracy

Philip Hensher

Sins of the flesh

Bill Schutt has an excellent subject, and he explores it from a promising angle. Cannibalism has long interested zoologists, anthropologists, historians, criminologists, literary theorists and students of theology and blasphemy — the absurd claim that Roman Catholics were commending it in their account of transubstantiation was a favourite with 18th-century English blasphemers. Few people have tried to bring all these together, and perhaps by the end we have to conclude that there is not much connecting the very different elements at the remote ends of the scale. Still, it was worth a try. Schutt is an animal scientist, and he begins with the simpler organisms. At the bottom of the

Thursday

David Butterfield

Keep the change

Can we do without cash? Since 2015, digital payments in the UK have outnumbered those in cash, and we are invited by the great and the good to cheer this on. The fully cashless era will be magnificently convenient, they say, with goods delivered directly to the door: no fumbling for change, just tap and go. Some London branches of several chains (Waitrose, Tossed, Doddle) don’t accept cash any more. Many others fast-track customers who can pay by contactless means. Businesses and banks want to abolish cash because they have near-pathological fears of the black market and tax avoidance. Yet we should worry about the death of cash, because physical

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 19 January 2017

Starting cold Why is US Presidential Inauguration Day always on 20 January? — The date was moved from 4 March in the 20th amendment to the US constitution, passed on 23 January 1933, but it is hard to find any significance to the date. The change was made in an attempt to reduce the lame-duck period of an outgoing president, though it did increase the risk of a repeat of what happened in 1841 when William Henry Harrison was sworn in. Choosing not to wear a coat, hat or gloves, he made the longest inaugural speech of any president, at two hours. Three weeks later he was reported to be

The Spectator

Letters | 19 January 2017

Particle of faith Sir: Fraser Nelson draws our attention to the most worrying aspect of economists getting it wrong, which is their reluctance to recognise it (‘Don’t ask the experts’, 14 January). Some economists, seduced by sophisticated mathematical models, aspire to the status of, say, particle physicists, who can tell us they have found something called the Higgs boson. The fact that we tend to believe the particle physicists despite being more familiar with prices, jobs and buying and selling than with quantum equations comes down to physicists having a long track record of heeding the biologist E.O. Wilson’s advice: ‘Keep in mind that new ideas are commonplace, and almost

Simon Jenkins

Monumental folly

The astonishing has happened at Stonehenge. Some prehistoric force has driven ministers to make a decision. It is to spend half a billion pounds burying the adjacent A303 in a tunnel, to bring ‘tranquillity’ to the ancient place. The result has been a predictable outcry from protestors. The television historian Dan Snow has compared the Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling, with Isis in Palmyra: ‘vandals and zealots who destroy ancient artefacts’. Stonehenge drives men mad. The stones have for a quarter of a century been as impregnable to change as they have always been to interpretation. Whitehall has been unable to decide what to do with a single-carriageway road which runs

The Spectator

Who commands the sea?

From ‘Raiders, submarines and some naval problems’, The Spectator, 20 January 1917: At the moment the enemy’s fleet is compelled to remain in its own ports and to challenge us from safe retreats, sometimes behind lock-gates and always behind well-sown minefields. Still, the fact remains that the enemy can come out if they like, though we cannot make them do so when we like, and further that with good luck they can actually smuggle out a raider or two. We are top-dog, but up till now we have not been able to get a good bite at the under-dog, and he remains, though in a humiliating position, quite fit for work

Thursday

Hakim Adi

A shameful whitewash

I have been researching and writing about black British history for over 30 years but never before have I been fortunate enough to review a 600-page book on the subject, published to accompany a recent major BBC documentary. The book and the four-part series give some indication of the extent of a history which David Olusoga presents as ‘forgotten’: the subject, he argues, has been largely excluded from the mainstream narrative of British history. Why it should be forgotten, and who might have forgotten it should give us all pause for reflection, since the denial of black British history by those who should know better could be considered tantamount to

Nigel Jones

The puppet queen

It is easy to see why the bare century of the Tudor dynasty’s rule has drawn so much attention from contemporary women historians. Without breaking sweat, I can think of at least ten — four of whom garland this book with advance praise — who have written biographies or studies of the Welsh upstarts, leaving aside the acclaimed fictional efforts of Hilary Mantel. For of the six Tudor monarchs who steered England’s destinies through the tumultuous 16th century, three were female. The half-sisters Elizabeth and Mary — who both loom large in Nicola Tallis’s stunning debut — need no introduction, but the third, Lady Jane Grey, the subject of her

Owen Matthews

Only obeying orders | 12 January 2017

Spare a thought for the poor Gulag guard: the rifleman standing in the freezing wind on the outside of the wire, almost as much a captive of the Stalinist prison machine as the inmates he’s guarding. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg and Varlaam Shalamov have left the world a rich, searing portrait of the Gulag from the point of view of the prisoner. But the diary of Ivan Chistyakov is unique — a narrative of the brutal conditions in Stalin’s Gulag, told from the point of view of one of the captors. Chistyakov was a senior guard at the Baikal-Amur Corrective Labour Camp or BAMLag, and he wrote his personal diary

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Red faces

How to celebrate the centenary of the Russian revolutions of 1917? Modern Russians are deeply divided over the legacy of that tumultuous year. Russia’s few remaining liberals remember that the overthrow of the tsar in February 1917 ushered in a flowering of the artistic avant-garde, a brief period of feminism, liberal values and democracy. Putin supporters, on the other hand, have been convinced by years of state television propaganda that popular revolutions are by definition dangerous and anarchic, and usually orchestrated by dark outside forces. Whether in Maidan Square in Kiev in 2013, Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011 or Palace Square in Petrograd in 1917, the very idea of

The Spectator

A killing to celebrate

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 6 January 1917: The war has been crowded with romantic adventures by sea and land in every part of the world, but perhaps nothing is more sensational, more reminiscent of blue lights and the accents of warning and suspense from the orchestra, than the murder of the monk Rasputin in Petrograd… Whether those who took his life did so on the grounds of private revenge or of patriotism remains to be seen. In any case, we agree with Reuter’s correspondent that the disappearance of this sinister figure is a subject for congratulation for all true friends of Russia.  

Piers Paul-Read

Emile in exile

Michael Rosen, a poet, journalist and prolific author of novels for children, has written an account of Emile Zola’s year’s exile in England between July 1898 and June 1899, as a result of his involvement in the Dreyfus Affair in France. It is not a dispassionate work of history but a homage to Zola, ‘a hero in my eyes’, for his fight against anti-Semitism. Zola not only made ‘a brave, unpopular, self-sacrificing decision to support a wrongly convicted man’, but also persuaded the socialist leader Jean Jaurès to join the fight against anti-Semitism: at the time of Dreyfus’s conviction in 1894, both Jaurès and Georges Clemenceau had called for him

Thursday

Simon Kuper

Knowing the score

When I come home from work and stick my key in the door, there is a pitter-patter of tiny feet as my eight-year-old twin boys run up to me and shout: ‘Paris St-Germain won 3-1! First he scored, then he missed, then…’ They are suffering from a harmless case of sports geekery. I had it myself as a child, and have gone on to hold down a job, albeit in the dying industry of journalism. The only difference is that as a child I wasn’t encouraged to bore my dad with my findings, because helicopter parenting hadn’t been invented yet. A complicating factor in our family is that we live

Max Hastings

Red with the people’s blood

Few 20th-century historians doubted that the 1917 Russian revolution was one of the most influential events of their time, indeed of all time. As the centenary commemoration approaches, however, it seems remarkable how far and how fast the ideology that inspired Lenin and millions of his worldwide followers has receded in significance. Many are the imperfections of capitalism, but almost nobody outside Jeremy Corbyn’s office any longer supposes that communism, least of all the old Soviet brand, offers a credible alternative. This would amaze our grandparents’ generation on both sides of the struggle. The novels of C.P. Snow are indifferent fiction but intriguing middle-class social history. During the interwar era,

Mark Forsyth

The invention of Santa

Santa Claus ate Father Christmas. It happened quite suddenly. Well, it took about a decade, but that’s suddenly in cultural terms. Over the course of the 1870s the venerable British figure of Father Christmas was consumed by an American interloper. Father Christmas (first recorded in the 14th century) was the English personification of Christmas. Just as Jack Frost is a personification of the cold and the Easter Bunny is a rabbitification of Easter, so Father Christmas stood for Christmas. He was an old man (because Christmas was ancient) and he was plump (because Christmas was a feast). But Father Christmas did not give presents, did not come down the chimney,

The Spectator

Faith in the trenches

From a letter published under the heading ‘The religion of the ordinary soldier’, The Spectator, 23 December 1916: During a discharge of gas at the beginning of July along our front, one of the cylinders was displaced by the near bursting of an enemy shell. It turned the nozzle round, and the gas began to pour into our own trench. One of my lads, who was acting as orderly, heard from the communication trench that something was happening and ran into the front line… He ran forward unprotected, tugged at the cylinder, and pointed its nozzle outwards again before he fell unconscious. He died a few minutes afterwards. Those who saw

Jonathan Mirsky

A girl in a million

All readers know that good novels draw us into other worlds. I cannot think of another, however, which so alarmed me as this one, just as events alarmed and frightened its central character. She is Okatsu, a young woman from the samurai Satsuma Clan in mid-19th-century Japan. The country has been ruled by the shogunate, a military caste, since the early 17th century; the emperors were remote figures until their restoration to power in 1868. China is already under attack and exploitation by Britain and the US, and many Japanese fear they may be next. Some urge driving the foreigners off, while others — realists — insist that treaties must

Paul Keegan

Snow on snow

Here is William Diaper in 1722, translating Oppian’s Halieuticks (a Greek epic poem on the loves of the fishes): As when soft Snows, brought down by Western Gales, Silent descend and spread on all the Vales . . . Nature bears all one Face, looks coldly bright, And mourns her lost Variety in White. Unlike themselves the Objects glare around, And with false Rays the dazzled Sight confound. Lost variety is the nub: before it is anything else, snow is Nature’s alienation-effect, making all things look the same and ‘unlike themselves’ — even while we watch, or else behind our backs, noiselessly. But snow also carries contrary meanings: an image

Thursday

The Spectator

Food on the home front

From ‘The food shortage and how to meet it’, The Spectator, 2 December 1916: A rise in prices, if properly understood and properly used, will be our salvation, not our injury. High prices help conservation, and, what is still more important, they help supply… If we artificially cut down prices here, we sterilise instead of stimulating the impulse to feed us from abroad. We are in effect saying to the world: ‘If you are such fools as to send us food, we warn you that you are not going to obtain inflated prices. You will get nothing more here than what we choose to tell you is a fair price. Our