Austerity Reading

All week, as this new reality continues to settle in upon us, I have been regularly thinking of my Glaswegian grandparents living through the Second World War in an area around the River Clyde ("Red Clyde") that was regularly targeted by the Luftwaffe (because it was the largest scene of shipbuilding in the British Empire at the time). The war is, at best, a very imperfect analogy because we are not being shot at or bombed day and night. Nor are we living--yet--with really severe austerity.

Nevertheless, when they listened to Neville Chamberlain on the wireless in 1939 declaring war, they must have had a similar sense of horror at the unfolding uncertainty before them, as we do now, and the dread of not knowing how it would all play out, or when it would end.

If you do suddenly find yourself with a lot of time on your hands, and are interested in wartime Britain, then let me recommend to you the three volumes authored by David Kynaston, beginning with Austerity Britain 1945-1951, which I discussed in some detail here. Until reading it, I had not realized that rationing got much worse only after the war, thanks in part to the immediate withdrawal in the summer of 1945 of American financial aid.

And yet, this was also the period in which the Labour government came to power and led in part by Aneurin Bevan, introduced the National Health Service. I discussed here a fascinating study of Bevan's "socialism."

Here I discussed a new and utterly riveting biography of Bevan's chief, Clement Attlee.

The picture of unrelenting privation improves somewhat in the second volume, Family Britain 1951-1957.

One of the many fascinating things he unearths here is the complexity of views on, and practice of, Christianity in Britain. The idea, which I heard often growing up, that the 1950s were a time of unvarnished church growth and vigorous and enthusiastic practice of the faith is not nearly so clear in what Kynaston writes.

It's also very clear that the much-discussed turmoil and change almost always associated with the late 1960s was clearly already at work in subterranean social tumult in Britain a good decade earlier.

Kynaston's genius is to write these big books, amassing huge amounts of evidence from then-new Gallup and World Observation and other surveys of mass opinion, but to maintain a lively and cogent narrative throughout, never lagging or losing focus amidst so many numbers. They are almost compulsively re-readable books.

The third, which I'm soon to begin, is Modernity Britain 1957-1962. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

The late 1950s and early 1960s was a period in its own right-neither the stultifying early to midfifties nor the liberating mid- to late-sixties-and an action-packed, dramatic time in which the contours of modern Britain started to take shape.

These were the “never had it so good” years, in which mass affluence began to change, fundamentally, the tastes and even the character of the working class; when films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and TV soaps like Coronation Street and Z Cars at last brought that class to the center of the national frame; when Britain gave up its empire; when economic decline relative to France and Germany became the staple of political discourse; when “youth” emerged as a fully fledged cultural force; when the Notting Hill riots made race and immigration an inescapable reality; when a new breed of meritocrats came through; and when the Lady Chatterley trial, followed by the Profumo scandal, at last signaled the end of Victorian morality.

David Kynaston argues that a deep and irresistible modernity zeitgeist was at work, in these and many other ways, and he reveals as never before how that spirit of the age unfolded, with consequences that still affect us today.

Things Spotted While Reading the London Review of Books

I'm a bit behind here, but last week on a plane greatly enjoyed the 2 January 2020 edition of the London Review of Books. In there I found notices for, and long review essays about, various books, including the following.

David Runciman reviewed the third and final volume of Charles Moore's Margaret Thatcher: the Authorized Biography vol. III: Herself Alone (Allen Lane, 2019), 1072pp.

I've read the first volume, but not this one yet, though it sounds fascinating. I've also read several other biographies of her over the years, and some of her own works, including The Downing Street Years.

Thatcher, of course, is routinely credited for working with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II in helping to dismantle the Soviet Union which destroyed so much of Eastern Christianity and so many Eastern Christians.

Also not to be missed are the uproariously funny and farouche diaries of her junior defense minister Alan Clark. I've read them probably three times over the last twenty years, and having read rather a lot of British political memoirs and diaries, can safely say nothing comes close to these.

Clark was also something of an historian manqué, and his scathing book of British military leadership during the Great War, The Donkeys, is a quick, devastating, but not entirely fair critique.


The highlight of this issue for me was a long essay by Jean McNicol discussing three new books, the first of which is Maggie Craig's When The Clyde Ran Red: A Social History of Red Clydeside.

Socialism here in this time was not just a program of political revolution, though it was that, and awakened close and ongoing interest on the part of Lenin and others in Russia. Socialism here, according to Craig's book (quoting an article in the Times from 1922) included

‘Socialist study circles, socialist economics classes, socialist music festivals, socialist athletics competitions, socialist choirs, socialist dramatic societies, socialist plays – these are only a few of the devious ways in which they attempted to reach the unconverted.’ 

This essay and the books awaken a feeling of personal albeit distant connection insofar as my maternal great-grandfather was a ship-builder along the River Clyde in the late 19th and early 20th century. McNicol's essay, "The Atmosphere of the Clyde," does a splendid job of capturing the sense of social and economic tumult, suffering, but also real progress especially during and right after the Great War.

The Clyde was then, and for some time afterwards remained, one of the largest shipbuilding sites in the whole of the British Empire, employing tens of thousands at its height, including the long-suffering John Maclean: Hero of Red Clydeside, the second book reviewed here and written by Henry Bell. MacLean and others fought for just wages, rent reforms, adequate housing, and a 40-hour work week among other things we now take for granted.

The third book is Glasgow 1919: the Rise of Red Clydeside by Kenny MacAskill, who is a sitting MP for the Scottish National Party.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

On the 31st January 1919 Glasgow was in the midst of a strike for a 40-hour week. A demonstration in George Square saw the Red Flag hoisted and panicked police baton charge the milling crowd.

The War Cabinet in London monitoring the developing situation had declined pre-emptive arrests of strike leaders, but now unleashed the military. That evening 10,000 British soldiers started to arrive in the city, supported by tanks and guns. Howitzers protruded from the City Chambers and barbed wire surrounded it. Armed soldiers guarded critical sites and tanks were based at the cattle market. Images of these events have entered collective memory of the city's inhabitants.

In context this was a time when fears of Bolshevism were spread amongst western ruling elites. The first month of January saw western allied troops fighting in Russia, Trotsky leading the Red Army in Poland, the Spartacist Rebellion suppressed in Germany and the Irish Republic declared by victorious Sinn Fein MPs. Glasgow, crucial to Britain's war effort was conversely, one of the most deprived cities in Europe, and ripe for change. It was a world in turmoil.

Sightings in the LRB for 26 September 2019

Continuing with some periodic notes and musings on things discovered in the always delightful London Review of Books, I spy the following of interest.

First up, amidst the endless Brexit discussions, it is easy to forget that the roots of some of the "thinking" (or, rather, emoting) that led to the narrow victory for Leavers in 2016 go back a half-century and more. We are reminded of this in Ferdinand Mount's fascinating review essay of Paul Corthorn's new book, Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain (Oxford UP, 2019).

Mount's essay contains some acute commentary on modern nationalisms, and avers to a relatively old book which I have long profited from reading: Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism. Mount notes, rightly, that "nationalist rhetoric is so saturated with false consciousness" that none of it can be trusted. All nationalisms have "rubbish heaps of false memories and embroidered legends."

This, of course, puts me in mind of Vamik Volkan, whom I have often cited on here over the years, and found useful in trying to understand, e.g., Orthodox narratives of the Fourth Crusade. Volkan talks about "chosen trauma" and "chosen glory," and these concepts are as useful in looking at nationalist histories as at some ecclesial-national ones. Volkan has written many books about nationalism and its bloodlines, and about conflicts between ethno-nationalist groups in Israel-Palestine, the Balkans, Turkey-Cyprus, and elsewhere.

Back to Mount's essay for a moment. He goes on to argue that we need not be especially concerned with the "sentimental content" of nationalist mythologies. The real problem is their "iron framework: the insistence that the nation is the supreme fact, the one in which every citizen finds, and ought to find, his or her greatest fulfillment and which therefore demands all our loyalties." It is striking how many people nowadays are coming to this realization, questioning at long last the pious certainty many have that the state is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, than which no higher authority exists or could exist. Recent converts to questioning the idolization of the state are welcome aboard, but the great moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre got there first in an essay published some thirty years ago now.

Say it with me again, dear friends, in MacIntyre's acid and unforgettable words:

The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf … it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.

When the state refuses to realize it is just like the telephone company, and instead inflates itself all out of proportion and begins demanding one's highest allegiance, then we are on the verge of fascism. A new book from Michigan State Press sounds very timely indeed: (New) Fascism, by Nidesh Lawtoo.

Michigan State is the publisher of a some works by and about René Girard, whose work clearly figures in Lawtoo's book, as the publisher tells us:

Fascism tends to be relegated to a dark chapter of European history, but what if new forms of fascism are currently returning to the forefront of the political scene? In this book, Nidesh Lawtoo furthers his previous diagnostic of crowd behavior, identification, and mimetic contagion to account for the growing shadow cast by authoritarian leaders who rely on new media to take possession of the digital age. Donald Trump is considered here as a case study to illustrate Nietzsche’s untimely claim that, one day, “ ‘actors,’ all kinds of actors, will be the real masters.” In the process, Lawtoo joins forces with a genealogy of mimetic theorists—from Plato to Girard, through Nietzsche, Tarde, Le Bon, Freud, Bataille, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy, among others—to show that (new) fascism may not be fully “new,” let alone original; yet it effectively reloads the old problematics of mimesis via new media that have the disquieting power to turn politics itself into a fiction. 

While on the topic of Girard, I failed some time ago to give you my thoughts on Cynthia Haven's lovely biography of him, which I read on the plane to Romania in January. I should write up a long review, but in the meantime let me simply say that it was a very enjoyable and edifying read and you will not regret picking it up.

In other matters, I spy an ad for a new book from Bloomsbury, Sex and the Failed Absolute by (you guessed it) Slavoj Žižek. If not always edifying, he is almost invariably amusing in some measure, provocative in many others, and rarely boring.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

In the most rigorous articulation of his philosophical system to date, Slavoj Žižek provides nothing short of a new definition of dialectical materialism.

In forging this new materialism, Žižek critiques and challenges not only the work of Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Joan Copjec, Quentin Meillassoux, and Julia Kristeva (to name but a few), but everything from popular science and quantum mechanics to sexual difference and analytic philosophy. Alongside striking images of the Möbius strip, the cross-cap, and the Klein bottle, Žižek brings alive the Hegelian triad of being-essence-notion. Radical new readings of Hegel, and Kant, sit side by side with characteristically lively commentaries on film, politics, and culture. Here is Žižek at his interrogative best.

Notes on the London Review of Books 41/10 (23 May 2019)

If there's a theme to this issue of the London Review of Books it is surely historical materialism and its ghosts, for lack of a better phrase. A case in point is a review of Brett Christophers, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (Verso, 2018), 394pp. The review discusses Christophers' evidence of how much land has been sold off, and so cheaply and with so few requirements or regulations, in the last several decades in the United Kingdom, whose government has deliberately kept poor, vague, or non-existent records of much of this transformation. One result of this is that it has jacked up housing prices by an enormous margin ("on average--that is, for all kinds of housing--land now accounts for 70% of a house's sale price. In the 1930s it was 2 per cent").

Jacqueline Rose has a long essay, "One Long Scream," that makes for very harrowing reading indeed. She has done some very interesting work in a number of areas, including the intersection of psychoanalysis, politics, and trauma. She also notes one of the few psychoanalysts in South Africa today, Mark Solms, whose work has gained international attention

Her essay looks back over the last quarter-century in South Africa, discussing a number of works, including My Father Died for This by Lukhanyo and Abigail Calata.

As an Anglican coming of age in the 1980s, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a hero to me from a great distance. I followed the move from apartheid to freedom with great interest, and later on I would review the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in great detail for how it handled some truly vexed questions about memories of the past and their possible healing.

But I have not followed events closely since the turn of the century, blithely assuming that progress was being made much more quickly and comprehensively than Rose shows it actually is. The tortured state of progress is illustrated in part by Rose discussing various presentations and evaluations of the life of Winnie Mandela, including, most recently, The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018).

Clair Wills next reviews Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town (Haymarket, 2018), 330pp. This is a reissue of a book McCann first published in the 1970s. It shows the enormous complexity of the issues in the latter half of the twentieth century and how the politics was often shifting.

The essay has really forced me to start reading in Irish history. Previously I confess that my Scottish and English grandparents have left me with a residue of snobbery about the Irish, and a very strong pride about British imperialism. But I am increasingly recognizing that both were grossly unjust.

Sudhir Hazareesingh next reviews Herrick Chapman's France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic (Harvard UP, 2018). It only reinforces my desire to read more about de Gaulle, who seems by all accounts to have been a maddeningly complicated man.

Poor Charles Darwin. Rosemary Hill reviews the latest volume (26) of his Correspondence. It seems the fate of all revolutionary men that they are bombarded with letters, and Darwin, we are told, is no less the case. But apparently with extraordinary patience and effort, he responded to nearly all his letters personally.

Notes on the London Review of Books 41/8 (18 April 2019)

I began last month a new series on here: annotations from my reading of the London Review of Books, which comes every two weeks and is savoured for many hours afterwards. Herewith a few notes on books discussed in the above-referenced issue.

I have had a growing interest in interwar and postwar politics of the British left, and previously noted on here, e.g., biographies of Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan. But that interest has been expanding to the nineteenth century, and lately I've been reading about the celebrated Gladstone-Disraeli rivalry. So I read with keen interest Jonathan Parry's long review of The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History 1800-2000, eds. D. Brown et al (OUP, 2018), 626pp. Parry notes that there are a few areas the collection short-changes, but overall it sounds like a worthwhile endeavor.

British historians are often themselves fascinating characters--from what I've read of the lives of, e.g., Toynbee, Hugh Trevor Roper, Martin Gilbert, and a few others. So I paid special attention to Susan Pedersen's very conflicted review (titled "I want to love it") of Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (Little, Brown, 2019), 800pp. I've only read smatterings of and about Hobsbawm, and Pedersen brings out some fascinating details of his rather charmed life. So I'll look forward to reading this biography at some point. About it the publisher tells us this:

Eric Hobsbawm's works have had a nearly incalculable effect across generations of readers and students, influencing more than the practice of history but also the perception of it. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, of second-generation British parents, Hobsbawm was orphaned at age fourteen in 1931. Living with an uncle in Berlin, he experienced the full force of world economic depression, and in the charged reaction to it in Germany was forced to choose between Nazism and Communism, which was no choice at all. Hobsbawm's lifelong allegiance to Communism inspired his pioneering work in social history, particularly the trilogy for which he is most famous--The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, and The Age of Empire--covering what he termed "the long nineteenth century" in Europe. Selling in the millions of copies, these held sway among generations of readers, some of whom went on to have prominent careers in politics and business. 

In this comprehensive biography of Hobsbawm, acclaimed historian Richard Evans (author of The Third Reich Trilogy, among other works) offers both a living portrait and vital insight into one of the most influential intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Using exclusive and unrestricted access to the unpublished material, Evans places Hobsbawm's writings within their historical and political context. Hobsbawm's Marxism made him a controversial figure but also, uniquely and universally, someone who commanded respect even among those who did not share-or who even outright rejected-his political beliefs. Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History gives us one of the 20th century's most colorful and intellectually compelling figures. It is an intellectual life of the century itself.

The review of this biography was followed by Christina Riggs reviewing Jonathan Conlin's biography, Mr Five Per Cent: The Many Lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, the World's Richest Man (Profile, 2019), 402.

Gulbenkian seems to have been one of those characters who probably could only have lived, and prospered, in the era he did using the methods he did. Among other things he shows the power of money to insulate an Armenian in the last days of the Ottoman Empire from its many attacks on his compatriots. As the publisher tells us:

When Calouste Gulbenkian died in 1955 at the age of 86, he was the richest man in the world, known as 'Mr Five Per Cent' for his personal share of Middle East oil. The son of a wealthy Armenian merchant in Istanbul, for half a century he brokered top-level oil deals, concealing his mysterious web of business interests and contacts within a labyrinth of Asian and European cartels, and convincing governments and oil barons alike of his impartiality as an 'honest broker'. Today his name is known principally through the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, to which his spectacular art collection and most of his vast wealth were bequeathed. Gulbenkian's private life was as labyrinthine as his business dealings. He insisted on the highest 'moral values', yet ruthlessly used his wife's charm as a hostess to further his career, and demanded complete obedience from his family, whom he monitored obsessively. As a young man he lived a champagne lifestyle, escorting actresses and showgirls, and in later life - on doctor's orders - he slept with a succession of discreetly provided young women. Meanwhile he built up a superb art collection which included Rembrandts and other treasures sold to him by Stalin from the Hermitage Museum.Published to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, Mr Five Per Cent reveals Gulbenkian's complex and many-sided existence. Written with full access to the Gulbenkian Foundation's archives, this is the fascinating story of the man who more than anyone else helped shape the modern oil industry.

When it first came out at the start of our decade, I read Eric Kaufman's Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century with great interest, though without being entirely persuaded by his thesis. So when I saw he has a new book out, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities I read Daniel Trilling's review of it with particular interest. Trilling notes that Kaufman has some interesting arguments in places and data, but overlooks a number of factors, too. Here is the publisher's blurb about the book:

This is the century of whiteshift. As Western societies are becoming increasingly mixed-race, demographic change is transforming politics. Over half of American babies are non-white, and by the end of the century, minorities and those of mixed race are projected to form the majority in the UK and other countries. The early stages of this transformation have led to a populist disruption, tearing a path through the usual politics of left and right. Ethnic transformation will continue, but conservative whites are unlikely to exit quietly; their feelings of alienation are already redrawing political lines and convulsing societies across the West. One of the most crucial challenges of our time is to enable conservatives as well as cosmopolitans to view whiteshift as a positive development.

In this groundbreaking book, political scientist Eric Kaufmann examines the evidence to explore ethnic change in North American and Western Europe. Tracing four ways of dealing with this transformation—fight, repress, flight, and join—he charts different scenarios and calls for us to move beyond empty talk about national identity. If we want to avoid more radical political divisions, he argues, we have to open up debate about the future of white majorities.

Deeply thought provoking, enriched with illustrative stories, and drawing on detailed and extraordinary survey, demographic, and electoral data, Whiteshift will redefine the way we discuss race in the twenty-first century.

My ignorance of modern poetry is lamentably vast, but one of the very few poets I have long read and admired is the subject of the next review by Robert Crawford of the seemingly endless volumes to be published of The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume VIII: 1936-38, eds. V. Eliot and J. Haffenden (Faber, 2019), 1100pp. For such a brief period, this is a massive volume, indicating just how loquacious a correspondent Eliot was, perhaps all the more astonishing in view of his vast literary output. 

The Mirage of Socialism?

To my enormous surprise and delight--never expecting to find such a book in so notoriously a Republican town as Ft. Wayne--I found at a sale at the Allen County Public Library's main branch downtown a copy of John Campbell's Aneurin Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism (Norton, 1987). The timing was impeccable: just as I finished John Bew's new biography of Clement Attlee--discussed here--I found this book of Campbell's almost the next day. I have been reading it off and on over the past few months along with any of the other dozen and more books I typically have on the go at a given time. Fittingly if unintentionally I finished it on the Welsh patronal feast of St. David last Friday.

It is a curious book, largely a biography but also a work of political analysis. It does both well enough to have been enjoyable, though it leaves things to be desired. E.g., it leaves parts of Bevan's biography insufficiently explored--the last year leading up to his very early death gets about two paragraphs, and his wife is never more than a stilted cartoon figure who walks on and off the edges of his life but rarely. Still, we have, as the author recognized, other fuller biographies even at the time this was published more than 30 years ago, including especially that written in 1963 by fellow Labour politician Michael Foot, a book Campbell says is excessively hagiographic.

The title half led me to expect some kind of right-wing attack on Bevan's politics, but it does not do that. Rather, it takes a very sympathetic approach to Bevan's life but argues--and not without a good deal of evidence--that by 1950 Bevan was about the only socialist left in the Labour government, which continued both to run out of steam and in so doing to list rightward. Bevan himself began to lose interest in a wavering government, which was constantly trimming its sails in response to American pressure, financial issues (especially the American demands for absurd increases in defense spending to respond to the Korean war), and the changing politics of Britain, where there seems to have been a direct relationship between the increase in postwar prosperity and the decrease in support for socialism. Bevan constantly wanted to fight things out from first principles, but as time went on he seems to have been an increasingly lone voice in adopting this approach.

Attlee, of course, appointed Bevan in 1945 to head up both housing and health, either portfolio being massive given the huge demands for new housing to be built as quickly as possible. Bevan gave less attention to the latter, building fewer (but larger, and of higher quality) houses than his Tory successor would after 1952. But Bevan's signature achievement, for which he continues to be celebrated regularly as the greatest Welshman of the last century and more, is the National Health Service, which he brought into being in 1948, and defended even against his own party (especially Herbert Morrison and Hugh Gaitskell) ever after.

In addition to that, he was regularly counted the only equal to Churchill in being able to give stem-winder speeches to rally his side or to attack the government. Churchill apparently came to loathe him but respected his ability in this area, as did others, including Attlee, who would reluctantly but reliably trot Bevan out to bring a debate to a rousing conclusion.

If there are lessons here for current American debates about a supposed "return to socialism" they are to be found in Campbell's key word: mirage. The current attacks from the right on "socialism" are all about optics and making certain ideas appear to be terrible without having to define, much less debate, them. But equally, as he shows, fewer and fewer people in the Labour party after 1945 themselves had a coherent understanding of socialism, let alone attempted a full implementation of it--apart, that is, from Bevan, whose own character flaws, and then premature death, combined with a rightward moving political environment, made the achievements of 1945-48 about as far in the direction of "socialism" as any government has ever gone. We can therefore confidently assert that whenever "socialism" and its cognates are trotted out today, they are always in the genre of phantasmagoria.

Cyprus Under the British

Cyprus seems to be coming in for some recent scrutiny, as a recent book, noted only last month, bears on parts of its history. Now another new book treats its more recent history: Christos Ioannides, Cyprus under British Colonial Rule: Culture, Politics, and the Movement toward Union with Greece, 1878–1954 (Lexington Books, 2019), 340pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

This is a unique book that combines a political narrative with poetry to examine the role of culture and the fusion of religion and politics during the struggle against colonialism. The context is Britain’s geopolitical interests in the Middle East. The author utilizes a vital cultural source echoing the authentic voice of the people, Cypriot folk poems, which has remained virtually unknown to the English reader until now. Translated into English, they are interwoven into the book’s narrative to reflect the yearning for social justice and the political sentiments of the vast majority of the population, the peasants, in a rural society. Lawrence Durrell’s literary masterpiece, Bitter Lemons, his politico-cultural chronicle on British-ruled Cyprus, is also discussed critically.

The Greek Orthodox Church led the anti-colonial movement revolving around union with Greece. Through his intimate knowledge of Greek Orthodox practices, the author elucidates how religious customs and rituals were intertwined with the nationalist ideology to lead to political mobilization. In the process, culture, with its religious underpinnings, shaped politics. This dynamic has been the case from the Middle East, Turkey and North Africa, to Eurasia and South East Asia. Prime examples are the Iranian revolution and the more recent Arab Spring, both of which caught the West by surprise. In Cyprus, the British, with their sense of superiority, remained alien to the local culture and discounted popular sentiment. The two rebellions that ensued caught Britain totally by surprise. This is a valuable case study on the convergence of religion and politics. Academics, students and non-specialists will find a captivating narrative on Britain’s colonial encounter in an idyllic but strategic island in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Politicians Who Aren't Loathsome: A Long-Lost Species

I have been reading biographies of, books by, books about, and books written by people somehow connected to, Winston Churchill for two decades now. Even before that, when I was quite young, my Glaswegian grandmother got me interested in him and in the war by telling me harrowing tales of her surviving the Blitz and Battle of Britain: her father worked in the shipyards on the River Clyde around Port Glasgow, and these were of course the subject of special attention from the Luftwaffe. She also mentioned the unity felt by the country as a result of his Churchill's famously stirring speeches, a unity she claimed was lost after the 1945 election. (Andrew Sullivan also indulges more recently in some Churchill nostalgia here, asking if we will have another today. I think the better question, after the turmoil of Trump, is whether we can have an Attlee instead.)

She put me off Churchill's successor, Clement Attlee, and the post-war Labour government, through for reasons that were never clear until recently reflecting on it more than a decade after her death. I think hers was the unreflecting prejudice of the family she married into in 1942: my grandfather's family were small-business owners who fell for Tory propaganda about Labour somehow being against them. As a result of all this, I never bestirred myself to look closely into these questions until early in 2017 I went back and read Alasdair MacIntyre's many "lost" essays from the postwar period in which he was actively involved in the politics of the British left. Those essays are found in an indispensable collection. I will soon read that collection alongside John Gregson's forthcoming study, which looks most fascinating: Marxism, Ethics and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 224pp.

So as a child and then adult who adored his grandmother and her often fiercely expressed opinions, I never realized what an utterly compelling life Clement Attlee led until I just finished reading John Bew's new and splendid biography of him, Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain (Oxford UP, 2017), 688pp. To my mind, it is a mark of a good biography that one is a little sad at coming to the end of it, and immediately files it away to be read again down the road, as I shall do with this one. For those with any interest in biography, wartime Britain, and the politics of the British left, this is a must-read.

Attlee, of course, was compulsively reticent and an almost sadistically taciturn man. I knew that much of him (and have often quoted his apparent response to Harold Laski's endless and prolix agitations: "a period of silence from you would be most welcome"), but not how far he carried that until reading Bew's biography. Once, a BBC interviewer had prepared 28 questions for what was to be a half-hour broadcast with Attlee, who answered all her questions in 5 minutes flat and then stared at her with his pipe as both wondered what to do next.

Attlee emerges as a thoroughly admirable character who seems never to have sought office, honours, or glory for himself. But he was certainly no pushover, no pious pacifist afraid of a fight. (Even though initially turned down as too old at the age of 31, he was eventually enlisted and fought in the Great War, including at Gallipoli, and was twice invalided out but kept wanting to get back into action as soon as possible.) He could be withering when needed, and saw off many attempts on his job as Labour leader (1935-55), which he usually managed to rebuff without scruple.

He didn't have much truck with explicit forms of Christian faith, but he had many virtues nonetheless, perhaps none so clear as his genuine desire to help the poor of the slums of London (and the Welsh coal-miners from whom key Labour ministers like Aneurin Bevan came), among whom he began to work as a social worker at the end of the Victorian era. Unlike some with such motivations, he seems never to have been condescending about it, and never to have thought himself above such people, or the working classes and trade unionists on whom he and his party depended so much. Almost until the end of his parliamentary career in the mid-1950s, he took the tube by himself to Westminster quietly reading the paper, and would often be asked by people "Has anyone ever told you you bear a striking resemblance to Clement Attlee?" to which he would reply "Yes, often" and leave it at that.

Having some time back read David McCullough's fascinating biography Truman, there are, I think, certain parallels between him and his contemporary, Attlee: both thrust most unexpectedly into office within weeks of each other in 1945 (almost everyone thought the Churchill Tories would be returned with a modest majority: nobody, least of all Attlee himself, thought Labour would win the largest landslide in its history), and both replacing wartime leaders who were then, and have remained since, giants on the global stage partly for their compelling ability to communicate with their followers--whether in FDR's fireside chats, or Churchill's speeches on the BBC and in Parliament. Both Truman and Attlee were moderately of the left, and both came after larger-than-life leaders and presented a welcome contrast of much more contained, direct, business-like and modest leadership without flashy rhetoric or fiery oratory. Both did not appear over-much to enjoy the perks of power or especially the limelight, and both gratefully retired to very modest surroundings in the 1950s.

When his memoirs, As It Happened, were published, the New York Times review said that Attlee had the maddening habit in every chapter of leading readers up to a cliff's edge and having them sit there, so drained was the text of all drama and so heavily downplayed the many major events and personages he was involved with. Bew retails many amusing instances of this, and it drove some people like Aneurin Bevan to distraction. Bevan, of course, was the fiery Welshman who brought in the National Health Service in 1948, and was always pushing Attlee from the left to do more and faster. But Bevan could not always restrain himself and often overshot.

Attlee, no violent firebrand or revolutionary he, much preferred the slow and incremental approach. In doing so, he strikes me as a quintessential character of his generation of the type well-understood by his contemporaries the Scottish psychoanalyst W.R.D. Fairbairn (whose rather interesting biography by John Sutherland I also recently read) and his English counter-part D.W. Winnicott: the "good enough" leader not overly concerned with ideological orthodoxy whose schizoid aloofness allowed him to survive much political turmoil and intra-Labour intrigue, and in doing so managed to accomplish a very great deal of good without going too far. In the end, he outlived almost all of the 1945 government, including those who would have gladly replaced him--Nye Bevan, Stafford Cripps, Ernie Bevin and others--and died full of honours: ennobled as an earl, and made Knight of the Garter, Companion of Honour, and Order of Merit. In typical fashion, he mocked this gently in a bit of doggrel he composed looking back on his improbable life:

Few thought he was even a starter.

There were many in life who were smarter.

But he finished PM,

A CH, an OM,

An earl and a Knight of the Garter. 

But the End of the Beginning: on the Centenary of the End of the Great War

More than five years ago now, I noted that the eve of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War was already occasioning a slew of new books from publishers. Without in any way pretending to be an historian of that conflict in all its complexity, I have nonetheless read a great deal for many years now, some of it connected with lectures I gave on the centenary of the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides of 1915 at the hands of the Ottomans. I am convinced, as many other historians are, that the First World War shaped everything that came after it, and shapes us still. The person who has argued this most persuasively--at least among those I have read--is the Cambridge historian David Reynolds, particularly in the book, The Long Shadow, which I noted here.

In anticipation of today's anniversary of the end of the fighting, I recently finished a book that has been out for some time: Joseph Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918, World War I and Its Violent Climax (Random House, 2004). It's a not bad book, though its format takes some getting used to as the author jumps back and forth, sketching individual characters or units on 11 November 1918 and then earlier in the war to see where they were, how they changed, and whether they survived to the end or not.

A just-released book also focuses on this particular day: Guy Cuthbertson, Peace at Last: A Portrait of Armistice Day 1918 (Yale UP, 2018), 304pp. I look forward to reading it.

One of the men in Persico's book, as he is of course in myriad others, is General Haig, a man for whom it is almost impossible to have any sympathy. (I have, I suppose, been influenced in my judgment by the ferocious attack on British army leaders in The Donkeys by Alan Clark--he of the uproarious diaries.) Haig is featured in a new study released this spring by Jonathan Boff, Haig's Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany's War on the Western Front (OUP, 2018).

Boff's book is featured in the history catalogue sent to me in October from Oxford University Press. In it they are featuring a number of new and forthcoming books connected to the end of the war.

Coming out early next year is Owen Davies, A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination, and Faith during the First World War (OUP, 2019), 304pp. About this book the publisher tells us the following:

It was a commonly expressed view during the First World War that the conflict had seen a major revival of "superstitious" beliefs and practices.

Churches expressed concerns about the wearing of talismans and amulets, the international press paid considerable interest to the pronouncements of astrologers and prophets, and the authorities in several countries periodically clamped down on fortune tellers and mediums due to concerns over their effect on public morale. Out on the battlefields, soldiers of all nations sought to protect themselves through magical and religious rituals, and, on the home front, people sought out psychics and occult practitioners for news of the fate of their distant loved ones or communication with their spirits. Even away from concerns about the war, suspected witches continued to be abused and people continued to resort to magic and magical practitioners for personal protection, love, and success.

Uncovering and examining beliefs, practices, and contemporary opinions regarding the role of the supernatural in the war years, Owen Davies explores the broader issues regarding early twentieth-century society in the West, the psychology of the supernatural during wartime, and the extent to which the war cast a spotlight on the widespread continuation of popular belief in magic. A Supernatural War reveals the surprising stories of extraordinary people in a world caught up with the promise of occult powers.

Davies' book immediately puts me in mind of a similar study, that of Phillip Jenkins' The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade, which was published in 2014. It is a fascinating book I have often recommended to others and returned to many times, not least for its insight that Catholics, so hysterical about some apparent happenings in some obscure Portuguese village, were far from alone in claiming divine apparitions: it was a game that everybody got in on, with French atheists in foxholes claiming visions of their dead comrades in arms; Russian Orthodox peasants claiming divine visions; staid German Lutherans and English Anglicans also had their own supposed apparitions; and even Muslims were also claiming to have had visions.

Another book just out this month will also disabuse us of common assumptions today about the supposed origins of "fake news" under Trump. Au contraire, as Gill Bennett suggests in The Zinoviev Letter: the Conspiracy that Never Dies. About this book Oxford tells us this:

This is the story of one of the most enduring conspiracy theories in British politics, an intrigue that still has resonance nearly a century after it was written: the Zinoviev Letter of 1924. Almost certainly a forgery, no original has ever been traced, and even if genuine it was probably Soviet fake news. Despite this, the Letter still haunts British politics nearly a century after it was written, the subject of major Whitehall investigations in the 1960s and 1990s, and cropping up in the media as recently as during the Referendum campaign and the 2017 general election.

The Letter, encouraging the British proletariat to greater revolutionary fervor, was apparently sent by Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Bolshevik propaganda organization, to the British Communist Party in September 1924. Sent to London through British Secret Intelligence Service channels, it arrived during the general election campaign and was leaked to the press. The Letter's publication by the Daily Mail on October 25th 1924 just before the General Election humiliated the first ever British Labour government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, when its political opponents used it to create a "Red Scare" in the media. Labour blamed the Letter for its defeat, insisting there had been a right-wing establishment conspiracy, and many in the Labour Party have never forgotten it. 

The Zinoviev Letter has long been a symbol of political dirty tricks and what we would now call "fake news". But it is also a gripping historical detective story of spies and secrets, fraud and forgery, international subversion and the nascent global conflict between communism and capitalism.

When the war ended, the armistice was of course signed at Versailles. That treaty is the subject of a recent Oxford UP book by Michael Neiberg, The Treaty of Versailles: A Concise History. I look forward to reading it in due course.

But Versailles was preceded by half a year of hard slogging among various powers in Paris. That process was covered by the superlative and unsurpassable book by  Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. which I have read three times with delight. It has justly won several awards.

Austerity Britain

This book has nothing especially to do with Eastern Christianity; but I make note of it in case there are others who would be interested in the history it recounts so splendidly: David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945-1951 (New York: Walker & Co., 2008), viii + 692pp.

It's been out for a decade, but I just found a copy in a used bookstore a few weeks ago, and read it not merely with interest but with something approaching delight in the prose and the author's deft control of what, in lesser hands, could easily have been a sprawling and uncontrolled narrative bloated on masses of data. It has won consistently, and deservedly, high praise from all the reviews I've seen. You might think, given the unrelentingly grim era it covers, and the masses of data it draws on, that this book would be a plodding dullard, but you would be wrong. The author's wry outlook and propensity for finding the telling detail without being overwhelming is excellent.

I read it because I wanted to understand in more detail what drove my Glaswegian grandparents to flee to Canada after the war, my grandfather leaving in 1948 to find work and a home, and my grandmother, with my mother and her brother, following in 1949. They never really talked in a lot of detail about why they left, other than vaguely mentioning "greater economic opportunities." And, regrettably, I never thought to ask them about all this when they were still alive.

One thing, after reading Kynaston's book, that is now clear to me is the timing: my grandfather left in early 1948, not long after the worst and coldest winter (1947) in modern British history. Now I understand why, whenever I visited their house in Canada, the heat was always utterly unbearable: 85 degrees and above. You absolutely sweltered in their house (or in the car, if driving with them) and longed to go outside and roll in a snowbank. But for them it could never be too warm.

I knew that they had had many close calls during the war, living as they did along the River Clyde, then the largest shipbuilding site in the British Empire and thus an object of particular attention from the Luftwaffe; and I knew, vaguely, of the rationing; but I knew nothing of the detail and extent of the destruction--how many hundreds of thousands were living in the barest of "houses" with no plumbing, dozens packed into a few rooms without heat; and I did not understand how grim and far-reaching was the rationing--until reading Kynaston's book, which shows how the rationing got worse after the war, and in some cases things that were never rationed during the war ended up so afterwards. Again a piece clicked for me: my grandmother used to apply butter to her bread with a trowel, half an inch thick. Now I understand why--as, also, I understand why every meal included as fat a roast (pork, beef, ham) as they could lay their hands on. Oh, and the sugar. My grandfather was notorious for putting huge quantities of sugar on everything along with gallons of cream. They were making up for what they had not known for so long during a pivotal and memorable part of their life.

These factors--food, the cold, and the need for basic housing for hundreds of thousands of people--when combined with the huge numbers suffering from medical conditions they could not afford to treat also helped me understand the seemingly mysterious 1945 election with Labour's massive majority: it wasn't a repudiation of Churchill (whom my grandmother taught me to revere), who remained hugely popular and venerated; but it was a long-simmering desire for much better social conditions after enduring so much hardship in the war. (This election, I'm somewhat chagrined to admit, was also, I recall, one of the factors that my grandparents said drove them to leave. My grandfather's family were small business owners who felt like Labour would destroy the economy.)

Thus, for those interested in politics, this book covers, of course, the Labour government under Clement Atlee, when dramatic social changes--not least the National Health Service--were brought in. Had members of that government--in particular the fascinating and fiery orator and Welshman Aneurin Bevan--had their way, the changes might have been even more dramatic. The battles Bevan (who grew up in the staggeringly horrid conditions of the coal mines of Wales) fought against other more right-wing Labour ministers and members--to say nothing of the reactionaries in the British medical establishment--are retold in this book, making it of interest to those who follow, as I do, some of the intellectual developments of postwar British politics of the left. Nobody who doubts the existence of "class warfare" can do so after reading Kynaston's fascinating book--the first of a series, followed by, inter alia, Family Britain 1951-1957, and Modernity Britain 1957-1962, both of which I look forward to reading.