Category Archives: Books

Arts, Books, History

History Books of the Year

LITERARY REVIEWS

The Siege by Ben Macintyre (published by Viking, 400pp)

FOR six long days in the spring of 1980, the world held its breath after armed dissidents opposed to the Ayatollah Khomeini seized the Iranian embassy in London, holding 26 people hostage, among them a British policeman on duty at the door and two members of the BBC who were there to get visas.

It was a turning point, an event that broke entirely new ground. Not only was it the first time that Middle East terrorism reared its head in the West – an unwelcome chapter that is still far from finished – it was also the premier performance of Britian’s elite military soldiers, who took the embassy, gun-toting figures in black balaclavas storming it on live, prime-time television.

Most of the public had never heard of these Special Forces or Regiment before; afterwards, they were – and still are – a legend.

Ben Macintyre tells the inside story with his customary pace and panache, the tension mounting as the minutes ticked away and the terrorists threatened to murder their hostages, but also not shying away from the moral nuances of the finale in which all but one of the perpetrators died.

Macintyre’s account draws on contemporary diaries and interviews with witnesses. The Ministry of Defence cleared former special forces soldiers to speak to him. He writes: “Most of the source material is secret, pseudonymous, or privately owned.” With some justification, this has been described as “the last word on the subject”.

Queen Victoria and her Prime Ministers by Anne Somerset (Published by William Collins, 576pp)

A MONARCH reigns but does not rule – that is the unique and eccentric nature of the British constitution.

And the restrictions placed on her ability to get her own way frequently enraged Queen Victoria.

In public, her prime ministers queued up to praise her “thorough understanding” (Gladstone’s phrase) of her constitutional position, but they, of all people, knew first hand how indignant she became on being reminded of who really ran the country.

Theoretically, she had immense power – to disband the army, declare war, pardon all convicted offenders, and to dismiss the civil service. Wisely, she chose not to risk a revolution by exercising these rights, but that didn’t mean she was politically inactive. Behind the scenes, she made her presence, her views and, above all, her displeasure known to the various men – ten in all over 64 years – who headed her governments.

Her meddling led to Gladstone to whisper behind her back that she was “an imperious despot”.

The feeling was mutual. She couldn’t stand him and complained he was humourless, and unable to take a joke.

But according to Anne Somerset, Queen Victoria made an important impact through her “uncanny ability to align herself with public opinion, instinctively espousing views that coincided with those of many of her subjects”, even though her day-to-day life in palaces and country houses was far removed from theirs.

The common sense of the stout little widow in a black bonnet – drawing on what she called her “desire to do what is fit and right” – was crucial in steering the nation away from the sort of popular unrest and extremism that after her death would overtake other European countries.

Takeover: Hitler’s Rise to Power by Timothy W. Ryback (Published by Headline, 416pp)

At the back end of 1932, it was common currency among the politically aware in the Weimar Republic that the man they sneered at as the “Bavarian corporal” was a busted flush, along with his Nazi Party and its uniformed stormtroopers.

They’d failed to get anywhere near a majority in recent elections to the Reichstag, with two-thirds of German voters rejecting them and their share of the popular vote falling.

A cartoon on the front page of a national newspaper had Adolf Hitler slouching against a table holding a broken swastika in his hand like a child moping over a broken toy.

And just weeks later, at the end of January 1933, that same Adolf Hitler was all-powerful, reluctantly appointed Chancellor of Germany by the ageing President von Hindenburg.

Twice in the past, Hindenburg had sent Hitler away empty-handed, refusing to elevate the would-be dictator. This time, caught in a constitutional deadlock of rival parties, none of whom had majority backing, he gave in submissively. 

How Hitler combined foot-stamping intransigence with adept political manoeuvring (i.e. lies and broken promises) to reach his objective is forensically examined by US historian Timothy Ryback. What comes across is how close the Führer came to failing and possibly sparing the world all the horrors that followed.

Instead, the complacency of his multiple enemies, pursuing their own interests instead of combining to keep him out, gave Hitler his opportunity.

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Arts, Books, Britain, First World War, History

Book Review: The Unknown Warrior

LITERARY REVIEW

THERE are some things that to all intents and purposes are impossible to reconcile. Nothing illustrates that more perfectly than the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey where war and closure are signified for all to see.

Alongside the graves of several monarchs lies the remains of an unidentified serviceman killed in the First World War.

More than one million British Empire soldiers were killed during the conflict and over half a million of them have no known grave.

The casket of the unknown warrior, lowered in place in the autumn of 1920, held a “somebody who was nobody to represent all the missing”, writes the historian and former RAF officer John Nichol.

Tracing the events of history, Nichol attempts to describe the reality of life in the trenches.

“The place stank of death,” wrote Anthony French, a young soldier in the Civil Service Rifles. Trenches were cleaved through corpses. “From the one side of one there hung a hand and a forearm.” Vivid and graphic literature that explains incisively as things were.

An account of French’s friendship with his comrade Bert Bradley brings home the unbearably touching narrative.

Bradley – a generous, witty, pipe-smoking man with a fine tenor voice – was killed during an offensive. “I saw Bert pause queerly in his stride and fall stiffly on his side and slither helplessly into a hole,” recalled French. Bert’s body was never recovered.

At the heart of this story is the extraordinary figure of a Church of England clergyman from Kent, Reverend David Railton.

At the beginning of the war, Mr Railton left his parish in Folkestone to become a military padre, serving on the Western Front, where he won a Military Cross for saving three men under fire. While attempting to give solace to men about to die, he conceived the idea for the Unknown Warrior.

Former airman Nichol chronicles the warrior’s repatriation like a bank heist in reverse: a crew of crack experts – ministers, clergy, undertakers, army and naval officers – worked together to put the valuables into a vault. Secrecy about the chosen body was paramount in order that, as the Dean of Westminster noted, any mourner “be encouraged to imagine that it is her own sacred dead upon whom this great honour has been bestowed”.

Yet the body also had to be “sufficiently identifiable to ensure that the King and the British people were not interring a blown-up French civilian or, perish the thought, a German, by mistake”. Four unidentified bodies were exhumed from the key battle areas of Aisne, Somme, Arras, and Ypres. One was chosen at random and brought back with barrels of French soil to cover his coffin. Nichol also talks to wives who lost husbands more recently in the Falkland Islands and Afghanistan, and draws on his own experience as a RAF navigator during the Gulf War. He very nearly joined the sombre roll-call himself when his Tornado fighter jet was shot down and he was captured, tortured, and paraded on television around the world by Iraqi forces.

Nichol’s writing style is as engaging as it is erudite. He is forensic in his research but never dispassionate, keeping his interest firmly fixed on the human story.

At the state funeral on November 11, 1920, the second anniversary of the end of the war, the tone was one of unity in grief and sorrow, rather than military pomp. Westminster Abbey filled up with mourners, including relatives of the lost – mothers, fathers, wives, and children. Not everyone could be included: 20,000 applications were received for just 1,600 spaces.

One 12-year-old wrote to the authorities pleading to be let in, declaring: “The man in the coffin might be my daddy.”

In the Abbey, one group stood out in the ranks of the bereaved, notes Nichol: “A pitiful band of 99 mothers distinguished by an almost unfathomable depth of loss. They had been selected for seats of honour because each one had lost her husband and all her sons.”

– The Unknown Warrior by John Nichol is published by Simon & Schuster, 400pp

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Arts, Books, France, History, Scotland

Book Review: The Thistle and The Rose

LITERARY REVIEW

HISTORY has taught us and we have become accustomed to the idea of Henry VIII being so vile and dastardly to his wives that it has been easy to overlook the fact that he was equally cruel and beastly to his sister.

Margaret Tudor was born two years before Henry, and he never seems to have forgiven her for arriving first. Add in the fact that she became Queen of Scotland at the age of just 13 when he was still only Prince of Wales and you have the makings of a sibling rivalry that stretched until Margaret’s death in 1541.

Instead of squabbling over who was better at Latin or who had the nicest pony, the royal brother and sister indulged in vicious politicking which descended into their respective kingdoms taking up arms against each other.

Henry outlived his sister by just over five years, but it was long enough to ensure that he won the PR war. Consequently, Margaret Tudor has gone down in the historical records as a silly woman who spent her time buying clothes she couldn’t afford and of being highly promiscuous.

Repugnant of all, Henry accused his sister of writing him begging letters and whingeing about being short of money. What he didn’t mention was that he had deliberately withheld from her the fortune that she had inherited under the terms of their father’s will. In the circumstances, she had every right to complain.

In this passionate act of rehabilitation, Linda Porter argues that Margaret Tudor was a lot more than an airhead who didn’t know where to stop with the diamonds.

From the moment she arrived north, barely into her teens, to marry James IV of Scotland, she developed a subtle but powerful sense of what needed to be done to prevent Scotland from fracturing into warring clans. You have only to know that the people around her were called things such as Archibald the Grim, James the Gross, and Robert Blackadder to soon realise that this was a wild and wuthering place.

The one saving grace in Margaret’s new life north of the border was her husband, King James. Modern alarm bells will ring when it is known that he was 30 and she 13 years old, but the record documents that he seems to have been a genuinely loving and attentive husband.

He also appreciated the subtle power that came with dressing well, and he showered his young wife with expensive furs, silks, and jewels so that she looked as glamorous as any French princess. Readers will recall that Scotland and France were historically bound together in the “Auld Alliance” which, naturally, gave Henry the jitters.

Of more significance, and from a tactical point of view, was that Margaret produced a string of babies in the first few years of her marriage, ensuring the Stuart dynasty’s security for the next generation and beyond. One of her grandchildren became Mary, Queen of Scots.

It was his sister’s fertility that made Henry especially furious. Despite having been married to Katherine of Aragon for seven years, he was still childless, which meant that, should anything happen to him, Margaret would inherit the English throne, quite possibly with James ruling alongside her. For such a competitive man, the thought was unbearable.

This simmering bad feeling came to a head in 1513 at the Battle of Flodden between the English and Scots, which led to the bloody death of James and most of his nobles.

For the rest of her life Margaret found herself in a tenuous position. Her baby son was now crowned James V and she was installed as his Regent. But this arrangement was never going to please ruthless Scottish clansmen, who now vied to see who could dethrone her.

At this point Henry could have stepped in to help his sister. Instead, he took perverse pleasure in making things difficult.

When she announced her intention to divorce her next husband, a rotter called Archibald Douglas who had siphoned off what remained of her money, Henry delivered a condescending lecture on her low moral standards. This was particularly rich given the way that he was going through wives like a hot knife through butter.

Ironically, in the long term, it was Margaret who won this deadly sibling feud. Despite his multiple marriages, Henry failed to establish a secure Tudor bloodline – none of his children produced an heir.

By contrast, Margaret’s great-grandson, ruled Scotland as James VI and, in 1603, on Queen Elizabeth I’s death, was invited south to become James I of England.

Within a year he decreed that he would be known as the King of Great Britain and insisted that Scotland and England would walk together in unity. But as history clearly shows there have been many subsequent attempts to divide. Certainly, the monarchy in Scotland is seen very differently to how it is perceived in England.

Linda Porter has drawn on the latest scholarship and offers an entertaining book that lights up a shadowy and fascinating corner of Tudor history.

– The Thistle and The Rose by Linda Porter is published by Head of Zeus, 400pp

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