David Crane | The Spectator columnists & writers

Straight lines and grandiose schemes — Napoleon the gardener

On 1 January 1806, a little over one year after his coronation, the Emperor Napoleon ordered the abolition of France’s new republican calendar and a return to the old Gregorian model. Over the past seven years republicans had grown used to ‘empire creep’, but even for those who had been forced to watch the principles of the revolution dismantled one by one and a republican general metamorphose into Emperor of the French, this last insult carried a peculiarly symbolic charge. For all its engaging dottiness — each new year, coinciding with the autumnal equinox, would begin on a different date — the short-lived republican calendar had embodied some of the most attractive and fragile dreams of the revolution. Instituted in 1793 and backdated to the founding of the republic, it represented not just a break with a calendar ‘soiled on every page with the prejudices and falsehoods of the throne and the church’, but a recognition and celebration of man’s place in the natural world.

Up close and personal: voices from the Great War, week by week

In the summer of 2014, David Hargreaves was invited by Robert Cottrell, the editor of The Browser, to write a series of articles shadowing, week by week, the course of the first world war. Over the next four years Hargreaves and his researcher and co-author, Margaret-Louise O’Keeffe, brought these out online, and they have now been published, originally by subscription, in a set of four volumes that runs in all to a monumental 2,200 pages. It is one thing to have dreamed up the project, it’s another to have carried it off with the collaborative skill and commitment on show here. It is impressive enough that over those years they never missed a single deadline; but what seems every bit as remarkable is the emotional stamina that saw them return, week in, week out, to a war in which success could be measured in yards, and lives expended with a profligacy that beggars belief.

Holding the Empire responsible for the state of modern Britain is becoming commonplace

It seems to have become a virtual orthodoxy of the academic and publishing worlds that history and fiction now have their ‘reserved areas’. Sathnam Sanghera’s sprawling and intimidating bibliography — more than 50 pages of it — underlines just how wide and eclectic his own reading has been, but there is one sentence, more than half way into Empireland, that might make readers think. He is talking about a passage from Jan Morris’s Heaven’s Command, dealing with British racial atrocities, that seems, to Sanghera, indecently trivialising in its tone: The comment briefly makes me wonder whether you need to be a descendant of the colonised or a person of colour to feel the full, gut-wrenching horror of it all. It would be a desperately sad thing if that were true, but true or not, there is no questioning Sanghera’s own credentials to write about race and racism in modern Britain.

Is Indian cricket no longer cricket?

There is nothing in world sport, ‘nothing in the history of the human race’, Ramachandra Guha modestly reckons, that can remotely match the passions that surround Indian cricket. I have no idea how many listeners or viewers hung on every ball of Ben Stokes’s Headingley heroics last year, but it is a safe bet that had it been Sachin Tendulkar or Sunil Gavaskar batting, and an India victory over Pakistan at stake, then you could add as many noughts to that figure as will accommodate a cricket-mad population edging its way towards the one and a half billion mark. The Commonwealth of Cricket is part celebration, part elegy, but before all else unashamedly the book of one of those tens of millions of India’s cricket fans.

Vain, inbred and inept: how could the Habsburgs have survived so long?

One of the great mysteries of European history is how for the best part of 700 years a family who produced so many complete duffers as the Habsburgs managed to play such a crucial role in world affairs. There was certainly the odd exception to the general rule, and some highly effective women; but it says a lot about a family that once controlled much of the Old and the New Worlds that at the end of this lucid and entertaining history Martyn Rady can offer up Dr Otto von Habsburg, the last ‘pretender’ to the Austrian throne and MEP for the Bavarian conservative CSU party, as the ‘best emperor the Habsburgs never had’. One of the more mundane reasons for their remarkable durability in the early days was their canny gift for outliving their neighbours.

Is there no field in which the Jewish mindset doesn’t excel?

More than 20 years ago, George Steiner, meditating on 2,000 years of persecution and suffering, posed the ‘taboo’ question that no one dared ask: ‘Has the survival of the Jew been worth the appalling cost?’ It was not just the horrors of the pogroms or of Auschwitz that ‘enforced’ the question for Steiner, nor the centuries of exclusion and violence but — equally destructive — ‘the fear, the degradation, the miasma of contempt, latent or explicit,’ which has been the hereditary birthright of every Jewish child ‘across the millennia’. ‘Would it not be preferable, on the balance sheet of human mercies,’ Steiner asked, ‘if he was to ebb into assimilation and the common seas?’ For the Orthodox believer, armed with the certainties of God’s covenant with His people, the question might not exist, but for those who cannot go down that road Norman Lebrecht’s urgent and moving history provides a different and stirring answer.

The man and the legend

It is not often that a book’s blurb gives any idea of what’s inside, but Helen Castor’s endorsement — ‘a masterclass in the practice of history’ — is as good a description of this brilliant new biography of Charlemagne as we are likely to get. The broader contours of the life will be familiar to many readers, but what we have here — pace Janet Nelson — is less the ‘old-fashioned’ biography that she claims but a wonderfully generous sharing of knowledge that combines the conversational tones of the ideal classroom with the intensity of the trained anatomist, poised, knife in hand, to reveal the musculature beneath the skin. Of course, the one thing that the anatomist cannot do is to bring the corpse back to life; but Nelson needs no reminder of that.

King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV

I was flicking through an old copy of The Spectator the other day, one of the issues containing contributors’ ‘Christmas Books’, and there was a comment of Jonathan Sumption’s that ‘as a general rule, biography is a poor way to learn history’. It is primarily a matter of approach rather than simply subject of course, but if one was drawing up a shortlist of men who might qualify as exceptions to the rule, then Philip Mansel’s ‘King of the World’, Louis XIV, would surely be very near the top. Louis XIV came to the throne in 1638 at the age of four with the monarchy ‘on a knife edge’ and died 72 years later with his country virtually bankrupt; but in the decades between he left a mark on France and Europe that no French king can match.

The Elder, the better

I couldn’t help thinking, as I read this book, of an old story, vaguely recalled from English A-level classes, about the poet and verse dramatist Gordon Bottomley. I can’t remember now which of his plays it concerns, but it must have been just after the notorious MP and swindler Horatio Bottomley had been imprisoned for fraud in 1922, because as the curtain fell on the final excruciating scene there was a shout from the audience: ‘My God, they’ve gaoled the wrong Bottomley!’ A reader is not going to get very far with Daisy Dunn’s new biography — the opening four lines, in fact — without a sinking sensation that the author has landed herself with the wrong Pliny. It feels very much as though this book was originally conceived as a dual biography; and even in its finished form, the figure of Pliny the Elder — soldier, administrator, admiral, naturalist, inexhaustible encyclopaedist and most famous victim of Vesuvius — looms large enough in the background to make his decent, rather timid and mildly self-congratulatory lawyer of a nephew seem pretty dull fare.

Europe’s front line

In 1919, only months after the end of the Great War, a French airman called Jacques Trolley de Prevaux, accompanied by a cameraman, piloted an airship down the line of the old Western Front that stretched from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. The result is a haunting piece of film in many ways, and yet what is perhaps most moving is not the scenes of devastation, but the sight of the people below, picking up again the threads of their old lives among the shattered ruins of what had once been homes, with the resilience of a people whom history had long accustomed to the miseries of war. It is no coincidence that the Western Front — running down the old historical European fault-line that separates Germany from France — more or less exactly follows the spine of what was once, briefly, Lotharingia.

An age of paradox

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us ... in short,’ as Charles Dickens famously told the first readers of A Tale of Two Cities, it was a period very much like their own. Dickens was right. John Stuart Mill once claimed that the two great ‘seminal minds’ of the period were Coleridge and Bentham, and in that brilliant yoking of opposites — the warm, creative current of Coleridgean thought and the chillier stream of Benthamite utilitarianism — is summed up all the contradictions and paradoxes that the Victorian age was heir to.

A date with Venus

There is something about the Transit of Venus that touches the imagination in ways that are not all to do with astronomy. The last Transit occurred in 2012, and if nobody who watched it will ever see another, the sight of that small black dot, making its almost imperceptible progress across the disc of the sun, offered, across the span of 243 years, an oddly moving connection with the scientists and sailors who quartered the globe and, sometimes, risked their lives in 1769 to attempt the first comprehensive observations of the event. There is no shortage any more of ‘global events’ — a good, old fashioned footballing brawl between England and Colombia will stop the planet — but in the more localised world of the 18th century it was another matter.

Change and decay | 5 July 2018

It seems somehow symptomatic of David Edgerton’s style as a historian, of a certain wilful singularity, that even his book’s title requires explanation. On the face of it ‘the rise and fall of the British nation’ seems a comforting enough notion, but when Edgerton deploys the term British nation he is not talking about any long perspective, but a very specific, post-imperial, nationalist project of internal reconstruction that rose and flourished between 1945 and the 1970s, only to sink back into the global system from which it had emerged. ‘Making the national explicit’ in this way, he writes, allows us to notice the non-national features of earlier and later periods. Recognising its temporary existence allows us to also write what might seem paradoxical — a non-national national history.

Riding for a fall | 8 March 2018

On 20 July 1805, just three months before the battle of Trafalgar destroyed a combined French and Spanish fleet, the Emperor Napoleon ordered his chief-of-staff to ‘embark everything’ for the invasion of England that he had been dreaming of for two years. ‘My intention is to land at four different points,’ he explained to Berthier, ‘at a short distance from one another... Inform the four marshals there is not an instant to be lost.’ While there is possibly no saga in his whole astonishing career — Russia included — that so vividly exposes the curious and almost wilful blind spots in Bonaparte’s make-up, his enemies would have done well to pay closer attention. It is impossible to say if the invasion was ever more than fantasy; but those two years since the collapse of the Treaty of Amiens had not been wasted, and just a month after that letter to Berthier, the Army of the Ocean Coast, which for month after month had been trained and drilled and hardened and forged into the greatest army Europe had ever seen, turned its back on its channel camps and England to march on a world hopelessly ill-prepared to face it.

Mother of the nation

It can sometimes seem — unfairly but irresistibly — as if the sole function of the myriad Lilliputian German statelets of the Holy Roman Empire was to provide the royal families of Europe with some of their most dismal consorts. In the century and a half after George I came to the throne in 1714 Britain imported more than its fair share, but if in Caroline of Brunswick we drew quite possibly the rummest of the whole lot, in another and largely forgotten Caroline, Wilhelmine Karoline of Ansbach, the wife of George II, 18th-century Britain and Matthew Dennison struck, if not quite gold, then at least a good solid lump of iron. No one could have been dreaming of thrones at her birth, though, because as the youngest daughter of the Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach — Rutland by any other name — Caroline’s destiny would have seemed to lie somewhere among the lower divisions of the imperial marriage market.

Raising Cain

It is a pretty safe bet that for every 1,000 people who know of William Wilberforce, no more than the odd one might have heard of Benjamin Lay. In many ways this is understandable enough, but if anyone deserves to muscle in on the mildly self-congratulatory and largely middle-class pantheon of Abolitionist Saints, it is the gloriously improbable and largely forgotten Quaker throwback and hero of Marcus Rediker’s generous and absorbing act — his own phrase — of ‘retrospective justice’. There was probably only one period of English history in which Lay would have found himself at home, and that period, along with all the hopes and aspirations it had given birth to, had ended 20 years before he was born. The revolutionary wars of the mid-17th century had spawned an exhilarating range of religious and political radicalism, and it was among the visionaries, reformers, cranks, madmen and prophets of the New Model Army and Commonwealth — the Levellers and True Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Seekers, Familists, Grindle-tonians, Chiliasts, Anabaptists, Quakers, Proud Quakers and all the rest of them — that Lay would have found his natural bedfellows.

Blood and bling

There must be any number of self-respecting gemmologists out there on first-name terms with other diamonds, but for most of us the Koh-i-Noor is pretty well it. Most of what we think we know might be myth, guesswork or just plain wrong, and yet in spite of — or perhaps because of — that, the diamond which once adorned the Mughal empire’s Peacock Throne still retains all its old, ambiguous allure. If Anita Anand can trace her own fascination back to a childhood visit with her father to see the stone in the Tower of London, it is rather harder to see just what — other than ‘an ingenious agent’ — might have persuaded William Dalrymple to turn a ‘momentary jeu d’esprit’ into a full-blown book. He is obviously utterly at home with the cultural and historical background to the story, but that doesn’t get round the tricky fact that for the first million years of its history and 60 pages of the book there is absolutely nothing that can be said with any confidence about the Koh-i-Noor.

Too young to die

In the north transept of Westminster Abbey, there is a memorial by Joseph Nollekens to three British captains killed at the Battle of the Saintes. It is hard to imagine that many visitors notice it, but when the news of the battle reached London from the West Indies in May 1782, it inspired the same kind of hysteria that 120 years later would greet the relief of Mafeking. The victory might not have been all it was cracked up to be — Rodney had let the French fleet escape — and yet at a time when a bitterly divided country was embroiled in a losing struggle for its American colonies and a mismanaged war with France and Spain, anything which promised that Britannia still ruled the waves and Britons could fight and die as their forefathers had done was manna from heaven.

Spectator Books of the Year: Why Martin Luther was an extraordinary and unpleasant man

Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (Bodley Head, £30) is an impressive and fascinating read. I have no idea what Lutherans have made of it, but for those of us who have harboured an irrational dislike of this extraordinary and unpleasant man, it’s a comfort to know we weren’t completely wrong. It’s taken me a long time to come across her, but it’s hard to imagine there is a better short-story writer than Deborah Eisenberg. All unmistakably hers, all intriguingly different, and almost all brilliant, her Collected Stories (Picador USA, £17.75) brings together 30 years’ work that shows no sign of going off in quality. Click here for more Spectator Books of the Year

England’s unloved king

Aethelred the Unready (c.968—1016) has not, as Levi Roach acknowledges, enjoyed a good press. In recent times there may have been some attempt in academic circles to take a more measured view of his calamitous reign, but the fact remains that if most us would have trouble saying quite what he did or did not do, or even what ‘unraed’ actually means, we all know how it ended. ‘And that is called paying the Dane-geld;’ wrote Kipling, But we’ve proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane. On the face of it the revisionists have an uphill battle, too, because when Aethelred came to the throne as a child the kingdom was looking in pretty good shape. Less than a century before his birth his great-great-grandfather Alfred had defeated the Danes and unified the Saxon kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia, and over the succeeding reigns, his son and grandson had extended their power across the east and north so that for the first time a Saxon king could legitimately style himself rex anglorum and we can reasonably begin to speak of a coherent ‘English nation’.

The man who changed the world

On 31 October 1517, as every child once knew, an obscure German monk nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg’s castle church and so began the Reformation. It would seem that there is no firm evidence that this ever actually happened as myth would have it, but whether Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door or glued them or merely posted them to Germany’s leading churchmen, the Christian world would never be the same again. Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet is an exploration of a man’s interior life and development and not, as Lyndal Roper insists, either a general history of the Reformation or even of the Lutheran revolution in Wittenberg. She is only too aware of the reductive dangers of shrinking great historical events and theological arguments to the emotional and psychological struggles of an individual.

When English Catholics were considered as dangerous as jihadis

Martyrdom, these days, does not get a good press. Fifty years ago English Catholics could take a ghoulish pride in the suffering of their 16th-century Tyburn heroes, but in a western world that has learned to be wary of extremist talk of ‘holy war’ or the intoxicating visions of the martyr’s crown that fuelled the prayers of England’s young exile priests — ‘the supreme privilege, of which only divine grace could make them worthy’, as Evelyn Waugh put it — somehow makes for less comfortable reading. It is hard to know whether the modern jihadist has given us an unwelcome insight into the past or disabled us from understanding it, and yet what is certainly true is that Queen Elizabeth I’s government saw these priests pretty much as governments now see terrorists.

The forgotten faithful

It is often said that cricket was ‘a game invented by the English and played by Indians’, and every so often a book comes along that makes you think that something similar could be said of the English language. It would seem from Farthest Field’s dust jacket that this is Raghu Karnad’s first book, but if this assured and moving memoir of wartime India is an apprentice piece, then you can only wonder what is coming next. From the very first page it is the brilliance of the writing that stands out. There is a very English control of irony that can suggest Forster — the Forster of A Passage to India — at his best, but there is nothing remotely Bloomsbury or comfortingly English about the imaginative power, intelligence and descriptive richness of a narrative that, again and again, startles by its originality before convincing by its utter fitness.

Murder in the dunes: the ‘26 Martyrs’ of Baku and the making of a Soviet legend

In the pre-dawn hours of 20 September 1918, a train, its headlamp off, heading eastwards out of Kransnovodsk on the Caspian sea, came to an unscheduled standstill among the lonely desert dunes of Transcaspia. From one of the two carriages stumbled a group of bound and blindfolded prisoners, who were pushed and dragged up to the crest of a nearby dune, and there gunned down and their bodies hastily covered with sand. In the context of the times and the area — 15,000 men, women and children had just been slaughtered in Baku on the other side of the Caspian — the political execution of 26 Bolsheviks might not seem a major event, but it was a murder that would resonate down through Soviet history. In the years ahead almost everyone remotely connected with the crime was tracked down and executed, but as the fame and legend of the ‘26 martyrs’ grew and their grubby murders, celebrated in stone and painting in the best tradition of socialist realism, metamorphosed into a tale of communist heroism and imperialist brutality, the one man the Soviet authorities most wanted for the crime — a modest-ranking British Intelligence officer operating in the Transcaucasus and Transcaspian regions — had quietly disappeared back into the evil British empire that had spawned him.

William Marshal: kingmaker — or just king of the joust?

In February 1861 a 21-year-old French medievalist called Paul Meyer walked into Sotheby’s auction house near Covent Garden. He had been sent by the Bibliothèque Imperiale to bid on their behalf at the sale of the Savile collection of rare manuscripts, and though he did not have the funds to compete with the big players at the auction, he did at least manage to see, before it disappeared for the next 20 years into the insatiable collector’s maw of Sir Thomas Phillipps, a rhymed verse chronicle of 19,000-odd lines in Norman French that was to become the great obsession of his life. The rediscovery of the History of William Marshal, as the manuscript was eventually named — Thomas Asbridge’s guess is that it had not been read in 600 years — makes an engaging and nicely told opening to a book that can never quite deliver on its promise.

Narrative history at its best – and bloodiest

Anyone thinking of bringing out a book on Waterloo at the moment must be very confident, very brave or just plain daft. Over the last month there have been at least five new books on the battle, and so unless a writer is in a position to bring the equivalent of whole divisions of loyal Sharpe readers with him, he’d better have some new line to take. Nick Foulkes showed how it might be done with his terrifically entertaining Dancing into Battle, and Paul O’Keeffe has taken it a step further by quite simply giving the battle a miss. From the opening pages one is always aware that something pretty major is happening a mile or two over the next hill. But whether we’re with Thomas Creevey in Brussels, church-goers in Ramsgate, or with Marshal Grouchy near Wavre, the nearest we ever get to the battle until it’s pretty much over is the distant rumble of cannon.

If you want to admire Napoleon, it helps not to have met Gaddafi

Forty-odd years ago, in the early phase of the Gaddafi regime, I had the slightly mixed fortune to attend the new Benghazi University’s first degree ceremony. The university had actually been closed for months and there were no degrees to award, but that did not stop them kitting out their foreigners in a job lot of academic gowns shipped in from Poland and marching us off to sit, ringed with machine-gun-carrying guards, in a huge tent under a broiling sun to wait for the Colonel himself to arrive. Every so often the band would strike up, we’d all stand, a loudspeaker would blare out ‘Mu’ammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi’ and nothing would happen. We must have been there a good five hours while this went on, and were just about giving it up when suddenly he was there, followed in by his whole revolutionary government, dressed in white and looking, in those days, more like a Greek shipping magnate than the raddled madman of his last years.

An old soldier sees through the smoke of Waterloo

There is a very nice story of a dinner for Waterloo veterans at which Alexandre Dumas — ‘Dum-ass,’ as the Antarctic explorer Taff Evans would have him — was for some reason present. I can’t remember now the exact wording of the exchange between them, but Dumas had clearly spent so much of the evening sounding off about the battle as if he knew what he was talking about that a French general at the far end of the table could finally take no more. ‘But my dear Dumas,’ he protested, ‘it wasn’t at all like that! And remember, we were there!’ ‘Precisely, mon général,’ came back the reply. ‘You were there, so how could you possibly know?’ Gordon Corrigan is more than a chip off the old Dumas block. I can’t think of a history of Waterloo that makes so little direct use of quotation from eye-witnesses; but irritating as that might be, both men do have a point.

Patrick Leigh Fermor and the long, daft tradition of Brits trying to save Greece

Twenty-odd years ago, while on holiday in the deep Mani at the foot of the Peloponnese, I got into conversation with an old and only partially reconstructed Greek communist shop-owner. I had been showing him a bit of pottery I had found on the sea bed at Asomati, and he wanted to know what had brought me to the Mani in the first place and was it Patrick Leigh Fermor? I said no — not strictly true — and he seemed pleased. Leigh Fermor, he said — and he was not prepared to elaborate — had not been good for Greece. It came as something of a surprise, as in those days at least Leigh Fermor’s writ seemed to run the length and breadth of the Mani — you could have filled a division with the old men who claimed to have fought alongside him in Crete — but the shop-owner would certainly not have been alone.

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