Category Archives: Books

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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Books, China, Government, Politics, Russia, Society, United States

Book Review: Autocracy, Inc

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Standing up to the tyrants in the East

THERE isn’t a more rigorous and engaging analyst of the crimes of the erstwhile Soviet dictatorship than Anne Applebaum, the acclaimed author of the Pulitzer prize-winning history of the Gulag, and also of Red Famine: Stalin’s War On Ukraine.

For her gifts, the historian is also rooted in the present, as a fearsomely active journalist, and the writer’s latest work is an up-to-the moment examination of how modern-day autocracies, not just that of Russia’s President Putin, but also including China, North Korea, and Iran, act as a kind of informal bloc to challenge what they see as the West’s “hegemony”.

It’s unfortunate that the phrase “axis of evil” has already been taken, since that would be a befitting description. Alas, it was inappropriately used by George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to join together Iran, Iraq, and North Korea – which actually had no military or financial links at all.

Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, do, however, connect in this way, accelerated by Moscow’s war on Ukraine.

The only minor criticism of Applebaum’s formidable book is that it never mentions the Iraq War of 2003–2011 or the later Western intervention in Libya. For these were the developments which not only gave fuel to the anti-Western agenda, but also convinced many – including in the West itself – that we had little moral authority to criticise the military escapades launched by the Kremlin.

Applebaum is especially adept, however, in setting out the remarkable success of modern Russian propaganda – beyond the scope that Stalin could ever have dreamed of – using the worldwide web, and of China’s ability both to control its own people through technology and to censor what was thought to be unstoppable.

At the dawn of the millennium the ever-optimistic U.S. President Bill Clinton proclaimed that the internet would liberalise China, by exposing its people to all the possibilities and opportunities the free world had to offer.

When arguing, on similar grounds, for China to be admitted to the World Trade Organisation, he gave an address in which he ridiculed the idea that Beijing could keep a lid on things.

“Now, there’s no question that China’s been trying to crack down on the internet,” he declared. At that point, as Applebaum records, Clinton gave a wry smile, adding: “Good luck!” – and his audience joined in the laughter.

They are not laughing now. The Great Firewall of China, and even more sophisticated tools than that, have allowed Beijing to succeed, keeping billions of its citizens in a form of intellectual slavery.

In a similar vein, the German political establishment had long believed in the doctrine known as Wandel durch Handel – “change through trade” – the idea that making nice with Moscow in terms of market access would inevitably lead to political and cultural liberalisation. This was most notable with pipelines taking Russian gas to Europe. That dream, or self-interest, in terms of the aspirations of German business, has also been shattered. The kleptocracy just got richer and far  more ruthless. 

As the deputy mayor of St Petersburg in 1992, and in his first public role, the former KGB officer Putin argued that “the entrepreneurial class should become the basis for the flourishing of our society as a whole”. That was music to the ears of Western investors, but Putin was then, already, creaming off vast sums for himself and his associates, via his control of local export licences for raw material.

As Applebaum notes, under Putin’s perpetually renewed presidency this ultimately developed into “a full-blown autocratic kleptocracy, a Mafia state built and managed entirely for the purpose of enriching its leadership”. It was for his leading role in exposing this that Alexei Navalny paid with his life.

Despite his apparent personal austerity and regular crackdowns on colossal financial corruption within the Chinese Communist Party – the inescapable consequence of permanent one-party rule – Xi Jinping is only too happy to make common cause with the multibillionaire plutocrat Putin.

Central, this is because they share a primordial terror of a popular uprising against their regimes: in this context, it was striking how in 2022 Xi suddenly abandoned his hitherto iron-cast Covid lockdown measures after a public revolt threatened to spread to the streets of Beijing and Shanghai.

And the “no limits” friendship which Xi entered into with Putin on February 4, 2022, was specifically designed to demonstrate a kind of solidarity among autocracies, against what they both constantly refer to as the West’s “attempts at hegemony”.

Their joint communiqué denounced “the abuse of democratic values and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states”. Weeks later, Putin sent his tanks towards Kyiv.

There was a tantalising glimpse of a possible fracture in the relationship at that moment: it seems likley that Xi was not given a warning by Putin of what was about to happen and, some months later, Beijing made public its grave concern about the Kremlin’s threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Nevertheless, as Anne Applebaum concludes, the challenge to “Autocracy, Inc” must come from within the West itself.

And, yet, if the forecasts are right, the American people seem likely to elect to the White House (again) their own version of Autocracy Inc: Donald J. Trump.

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Arts, Books, Environment, Nature

Book Review: Hedgelands

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Hedges are humble habitats that are a lively host to much wildlife – a secret safari providing a plethora of environmental benefits

THE humble and often-neglected British hedge, is described by author Christopher Hart as “an incredibly porous and self-sustaining feature of our countryside . . . one of the happiest accidents in human history.” It hums with bees and butterflies, is a rich haven for insects, birds, hedgehogs, shrews, voles, and bats, and also acts as a windbreak, stock fence, flood defence system, and an environmental barrier against soil erosion. The RSPB agrees; its research shows that hedges may be supporting up to four-fifths of our woodland birds, half of our wild mammals, and a third of our butterflies.

Hedges have been a feature of the British landscape since the Stone Age. The original ones were “dead hedges”, made from piles of branches and brushwood collected from cleared areas of woodland.

As the wood rotted, it was swiftly colonised by fungi and insects. Passing birds excreted seeds from trees and shrubs – such as hazel, oak, ash, hawthorn, dog rose, blackthorn, and bramble – which soon started sprouting in among the dead wood. From there, a living hedge was born. (A hedgerow, if you were wondering, is a hedge that includes features such as banks, trees, walls, fences, or gates.)

Our ancestors soon learned the best way to deal with an unruly hedge: by cutting half-way through a rising trunk and then to lay it back into the hedge sideways. In time, this creates a barrier so dense and tough that it can even hold back an amorous bull trying to get into a field of cows.

Yet as Hart rightly points out, these ancient hedges are much more than just a physical barrier. They mitigate flooding and soil erosion and give many animals an invaluable source of shelter from precipitous conditions. A hedge will protect smaller birds and mammals from predators like crows, magpies, sparrowhawks, and foxes – a dense hedge is difficult for predators to access and manoeuvre. This “narrow but incredibly complex ecosystem” is also an abundant source of food for wildlife, providing hips, haws, sloes, and blackberries for them to feast on.

Many of the countryside hedges we see today pre-date the Georgian era, some even being Anglo-Saxon. In a county like Devon, where the land is suited to sheep and cattle and less likely to be ploughed, at least a quarter of the hedges date back to Norman times.

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THERE are strong regional variations in Britain’s hedges. In the Midlands, traditionally cattle country, hedges tend to be mainly hawthorn, which is an excellent barrier to bullocks. The high rainfall in Wales and Ireland is just the thing for blackthorn, which happens to be a handy plant for snagging and restraining sheep.

The Somerset Levels typically have hedges made of osier, a small willow tree, while in Kent and Worcestershire you’ll find hedges of beech, poplar, and elder which tend to grow tall to protect prized orchards from the wind.

By 1820, there were 700,000 kilometres of hedges in England (and many more in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland). Today the figure is 400,000 which still sounds impressive, but many of these hedges are so degraded that they have become “little more than a blunt, dwarfish lined of scarred and wind-scoured stumps”, as Hart writes despairingly.

On arable land, hedges are often seen as an obstacle for tractors, while on pastureland, farmers find it easier to put up a barbed wire fence than have a hedge separating livestock. Hart is sympathetic to farmers, who are not “the cartoonish villains of the countryside but, rather, hard-pressed food producers just trying to stay in business”.

But there’s no denying that replacing a bountiful hedge with barbed wire is a disaster for wildlife, which results in “no wild foods, berries, nuts, wild greens, or herbs . . . no shelter or habitat for birds and mammals, [nor] beneficial pollinators and insect predators.”

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MOST of the damage to the country’s hedges was done from the 1960s onwards when, incredibly, government actually offered subsidies for their removal. After 1973, the EU’s damaging Common Agricultural Policy was even more zealous in paying farmers to destroy ancient hedges.

If all this sounds depressing to anyone who cares about the countryside and its wildlife, Hart offers some practical solutions. Many hedges in private gardens are a single variety, like privet or beech; the author suggests that you rewild yours, by weaving honeysuckle and brambles through your hedge, making it far more attractive to insects.

And if you leave a little verge around the bottom of your hedge, all sorts of wildflowers might pop up, from orchids and buttercups to cow parsley and bluebells.

Above all, we are urged to cherish our existing hedges. Instead of spending a fortune on planting millions of new trees, which Hart says are “of low ecological value”, he would like the Government to allocate a fraction of that money to restoring hedgerows.

With better management of hedges, “we might not need to worry so much about insects disappearing, bird numbers falling or our targets for carbon capture. Our lovely native hedgerows would do much of the work for us, if we only look after them.”

Hart has his own 300 yards of “beautiful, unkempt, pullulating hedgerow” at his home in Wiltshire, and he has seen for himself how endangered birds such as redwings and fieldfares will eagerly flock to a hedge which provides nutritious wild berries for them.

Christopher Hart has written an eye-opening and inspiring book which will leave the reader with a deep appreciation of these wonderful habitats – and perhaps a desire to create their very own hedge. As he says: “You don’t need to go to the Serengeti to see amazing animals. You just need a good thick hedge.”

– Hedgelands by Christopher Hart is published by Chelsea Green, 208pp

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