History

Your quiz for the week is to make the connection between the following people: fun-loving Greek hack Homer, veteran US centrist Democratic party politician Dianne Feinstein, dodgy-night-at-the-theatre president Abraham Lincoln and Middlesbrough-born peripatetic James Cook. The answer is that they are the latest individuals to have been ‘cancelled’ by the woke Taleban. Don’t worry, they’ll get around to you soon enough. Homer is being kicked off college curricula in the USA because his character, Odysseus, had a habit of mansplaining to thick Greek women. It has always been my view that mansplaining means ‘telling someone, often a woman, something they don’t want to hear, but need to hear nonetheless’, as

Did you know that February is LGBT+ history month? If you have a ‘progressive’ employer you probably do. Banks, universities, local councils, NHS services and train operators are all getting on board. Rainbow flags are flying high above buildings across Britain. But do lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people really need their own month to reflect on the past? Or is this more an occasion to virtue signal in the present? To be fair to the Bank of England, when it raised the rainbow flag on Threadneedle Street on 1 February, it was also commemorating Alan Turing. A war hero, who was gay, it is believed Turing took his own life after undergoing chemical

Thursday 3 April 1721 was an unremarkable day in political London. No fanfare or ceremony surrounded King George I’s appointment of Robert Walpole as First Lord of the Treasury (Prime Minister), merely a paragraph buried in the press: ‘We are informed that a Commiffion is preparing appointing Mr Walpole Firft Lord…’ Yet here was the start of what has become the longest-lasting head of government job in the democratic world — and its 300th anniversary falls on 3 April this year. Expect no fanfare or drone pyrotechnics in political London to mark the occasion. Our leaders will, inevitably, be attending to the pandemic and other pressing concerns. But that does

Diversity is ‘about empowering people by respecting and appreciating what makes them different, in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, education and national origin’. If this means making their differences the most important thing about them, it fails to answer the question about what such empowering will enable them to do. A famous story about Heracles illustrates ancient priorities. He was on the cusp of manhood and wondering what path in life to take. Vice and Virtue approached him and made their different pitches. Vice (‘but friends call me “Happiness”’) offered a life of endless pleasure, Virtue something very different. ‘Men will get no fine or noble

In his 37-book Natural History, Pliny the Elder (d. ad 79) wondered why we wished people ‘Happy new year’ (primum anni diem laetis precationibus faustum ominamur), or said ‘Bless you’ (sternuentes salutamus) when someone sneezed. Was this mere superstition, or something else? Pliny devoted a lot of time to denigrating all forms of superstition and magic, arguing that they were attempts to control the uncontrollable in human affairs, and citing Nero as an example of someone whose interest in magic was nothing but an ‘overwhelming desire to force the gods to do his will’, as if such a thing were ever possible. Beliefs about such phenomena, whose origins Pliny found

Professor Toope, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge university, had proposed a motion ordering all members of the university to ‘respect’ each other, or else. But significant numbers of members argued strongly against it, and rightly so: ‘respect’ is an emotional term implying deferential regard or special concern or solicitude for someone, a response more in line with the world of counselling and social welfare than with rigorous academic debate. Further, if ‘respect’ became justiciable because an academic appealed against dismissal from his job on that account, where would that end? Thankfully Professor Toope failed, as history suggests he should have. On the ancients’ intellectual agenda, respect had to be earned. Rival

New York I received a letter from a long-time Spectator reader, James Hackett, enquiring about books I am reading. It is not often that I get letters that delight me, as this one did. It is a far cry from the readers’ letters you see in newspapers and magazines in the United States. Lots of them seem sanctimonious, holier than thou; others, I suspect, are written by the glossy magazines themselves promoting their own celebrity culture worship. James Hackett is an American gent whom I’ve never met, and I hope I don’t disappoint with my choices. The last time I read novels was literally some 50 years ago. I stopped

To what use does one put history? Romans thought it provided ‘lessons’. Modern historians rather sniff at the idea, but do in fact dance to the same tune. For Romans, the study of history was all about discovering exempla (‘models, examples’) applicable to current circumstances. Indeed, Valerius Maximus (1st C ad) composed his Memorable Deeds and Sayings entirely out of historical exempla, as ‘torches or spurs that make humans burn with desire to help others and win their respect’. This may seem charmingly naive, but consider two stories from the historian Livy. Manlius Torquatus, ordered by his father the consul not to leave his position, accepted a challenge from an

I am in an Eliot mood, not a Keatsian one. ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ is a surprisingly… mellow poem. There must have been a brief ceasefire between poor Keats and the advancing forces of premature mortality. But I have just heard of the appallingly premature death — by today’s standards — of a fascinating fellow. So it is more a matter of ‘Under the brown fog of a winter dawn… I had not thought death had undone so many’. At 69, Tim Beardson died of the ultimate effect of a tick bite, which compounds the sadness. At the beginning of the 1970s, he read history at the House.

The next time you settle down in the evening to enjoy the latest work by your favourite historian, treasure it, because it may be their last for a while. This is for the simple reason that historians are effectively being denied access to one of the most essential tools of their trade — the National Archives. For many, this non-ministerial government department may just be an ugly slab of 1970s concrete that sits on the Thames in Kew, but it is actually nothing less than the nation’s memory — for it is here that millions of documents produced by the British state during the past thousand years are held. From