Gulag by Anne Applebaum

This particular book won the Pulitzer Prize a few years back, which in itself isn’t always enough to make me stop and stare at a book but when combined with the subject matter was enough to make me break my No New Books rule when I happened upon it in the bookstore. And I have to say I’m thankful I did break the rule — Gulag both fascinating and horrifying at the same time, and could not be written more clearly and concisely (the latter being two significant criteria in my assessment of any history book, prize-winning or not).

Gulag by Anne Applebaum

The word gulag is one of those Soviet acronyms that became a word of its own, like Cheka (the predecessor of the NKVD/KGB) or SMERSH (Soviet counter-intelligence during WWII). ‘Gulag’ comes from Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or ‘Main Camp Administration’ — its original meaning only encompassed the actual organ of government that adminstered the camps as a part of the Soviet state. Over time, Applebaum explains, gulag became the general slang term for any prison or labour camp that was part of the system of Soviet corrective labour colonies, including the camps meant for women and children. As the word came into more common use over the years, gulag finally became the term used to refer to the entire Soviet prison system, particularly the aspects of the system which dealt with the sentencing of political prisoners.

In her book, Applebaum traces the origins of the camp system back to the prisons used by the Okhrana, the czar’s secret police, through the early Bolshevik years, into the waves of terror and purges that characterised Stalin’s time, and all the way up to the collapse of the USSR and the end of the gulag as it was known in Soviet times. Along the way, she draws on a huge body of primary and secondary sources, mainly memoirs of those who had survived their time in the camps, as well as interviews with camp survivors, several camp administrators, and those who had lost family to the camps. She explores every aspect of camp life, from the feeding and housing of prisoners and the system of prisoner ‘informers’ to the actual socioeconomic impact that prison camps had on regions of the USSR. The result is a book that reads like a relaxed and friendly history lecture, almost like a story in some ways, and yet manages to convey a very real sense of the terror and suffering inflicted on well over two million individuals by the Soviet Union’s system of ‘justice’.

To go into more detail would be beyond the scope of what’s intended to be a basic review, but two things stand out in my mind. Applebaum never fails to point out how cautious one has to be in dealing with any numerical figures from the Soviet Union. She cites her sources well, but in doing so she deliberately highlights the discrepancies and the problems involved in trying to compare official figures and other amateur estimates. In a way, this careful citation actually keeps the book from being bogged down in nonsensical numbers. (A minor quibble on this point — I did wish at times that she’d give some equivalents for certain numbers. What’s the approximate size of 500 grams of bread, for example? If I want to have some idea of what 500 grams of bread meant to a prisoner in a camp, a visual equivalent would have helped me imagine it in terms of what fits into my hands.) And in addition, Applebaum stresses the importance of learning about the gulag not because of some vague notions that we are doomed to repeat the history we don’t learn about, but rather because without some knowledge of the gulag and the entire system of Soviet-era justice, we have no way of properly understanding the reasons why the gulag and the memory of the gulag still affects Russian and Eastern European society today.

Neither Left Nor Right? The Liberal Democrats and the Electorate by Andrew Russell and Edward Fieldhouse

With the Lib Dem conference going on at the moment, it only makes sense to post a book review about one of the more recent works on the party in question.

Neither Left Nor Right? The Liberal Democrats and the Electorate by Andrew Russell and Edward Fieldhouse

It’s a simple fact that third-party politics tend to be overlooked in a two-party system. The only time anyone really pays attention to a third party is when something happens to draw attention to it — and most of the time, that comes down to either a scandal or a really surprising election result. Finding solid political research and analysis about a third party that doesn’t focus on the scandals or the election surprises isn’t easy. And that, in essence, is the reason for Andrew Russell and Edward Fieldhouse’s book Neither Left Nor Right? The Liberal Democrats and the Electorate.

The book looks at voting patterns and party organisations to determine who votes for the Liberal Democrats and how these voting patterns have changed over the course of past elections. It looks at the various forms of the Liberal Party, including the Social Democractic Party and the SDP/Liberal Alliance of the 1980s. It also compares and contrasts the Liberal Democrats with the Labour and Conservative parties, exploring several key questions. Who votes for the Liberal Democrats, and why? How does the party leadership affect voting patterns? (The book was written and printed before the whole leadership kerfluffle with Charles Kennedy, so the information on that front is really only valid up through the Kennedy leadership.) How do the Liberal Democrats have to adapt their tactics in different constituencies, in a way that neither Labour nor the Tories really have to consider? And what is the importance of the grassroots organisation on a party that — as the authors state nearly ad nauseam in their analysis — tends to believe that for something to be real, it has to be local?

The analysis in Neither Left Nor Right? appears to be good but fairly basic; the authors don’t really make any conclusions that seem to me to be glaringly mistaken or out of step with what I’d already felt to be true about the Lib Dems and their political workings. There were more than a handful of good, succinct pen-portraits of grassroots campaigns and the influences that work on the political situation in different areas of the country. The book on the whole is a bit repetitive, but would likely appeal to those interested in political sociology and the workings of third-party politics in a traditionally two-party system. But there was one particular thing about the book that really annoyed me. Perhaps it’s just the copyeditor in me showing through (though since it’s what I’m doing for a living at the moment, I probably shouldn’t be so surprised when it does), but my edition of the book was very poorly edited. Grammatical inconsistencies, punctuation problems, actual misspellings of fairly simple words…I actually had to put it down once or twice because I was all but reaching for my red and blue pencils. Some editor clearly was asleep (quite possibly catatonic) on the job, and that always makes me wonder about the quality of the information itself.

If this book runs into future editions, I’d like to go back through and look at it again. At the moment, though, the mistakes are distracting enough to make me save this book only for the infrequent times when I need to look at primarily statistical data.

Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt by Charles Gati

A little less than a year ago, I attended a talk organised by the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center. The subject of that talk was a recently published book about the October-November 1956 Hungarian crisis, where the Soviet Union sent troops into Hungary to crush an escalating series of protests by anti-government and anti-Soviet demonstrators. I picked up a copy of the book when I was there, and the review came surprisingly easily for a book on a subject that’s not really in my area of expertise.

Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt by Charles Gati

The violence and brutality of the Soviet action in crushing the 1956 Hungarian rebellion shook the faith of many left-leaning individuals outside of Soviet bloc — but at the same time, Soviet action also punctured the lofty rhetoric of ‘rollback’ and ‘liberation’ that American political leaders had favoured when speaking of Western policy towards the Soviet satellites. With the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian revolt occurring this past year, historians have been looking back at this major incident in the early Cold War in an attempt to figure out what happened to make things go so wrong so quickly. And Charles Gati’s point in his new book is essentially this: in Hungary in the autumn of 1956, everyone screwed up — everyone.

Attempting to summarise the full course of events in October 1956 is a bit beyond me, so I’ll do my best to summarise why things went so catastrophically wrong. There were many illusions in Hungary in late 1956. Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy, the only Hungarian politician who had any real credibility with the people, was under the impression that he could keep hold of the situation even when his version of reformed communism was overtaken by events. The Hungarian demonstrators were under the impression that they could expel Soviet forces from Hungary all in one go — dreams further promoted by irresponsible agit-prop from Hungarian-language broadcasters at Radio Free Europe — and were also under the impression that the Western democracies would not let the Soviet Union get away with murder. The Soviet leadership in Moscow had been feeding their Hungarian comrades mixed messages for ages, but they were under fewer illusions than the other players involved. The only decisive message left for them to send was the one that involved tanks. And in America, President Eisenhower was facing re-election plus troubles in the Suez plus a complete lack of any actual military/intelligence plans to support an anti-Soviet revolution in Central Europe. American illusions that anti-Communist rhetoric would be sufficient to keep the Soviets out of Hungary were quickly destroyed. By the time the smoke cleared and all the illusions vanished, a new Soviet-backed Hungarian government had suppressed all political opposition and reasserted control over the country. Time magazine might have made the Hungarian revolutionary its ‘Man of the Year’ in 1957, but by then the revolutionaries were dead, imprisoned, or in exile. And Imre Nagy, who had fled to the Yugoslavian Embassy in search of sanctuary, would later be tricked out of hiding to face a secret trial and the hangman’s noose.

Failed Illusions is quite a solid history book. Granted, it isn’t always easy to keep the names of the historical figures straight even if you’re familiar with them from other sources, and I would have greatly appreciated a dramatis personae either at the front or the back of the book for quick reference and reminder. But even though Gati writes with the passion of one who is personally involved in the history being written (he had witnessed the turmoil as a young reporter in Budapest and was one of over two hundred thousand Hungarians to flee the country in 1956-57), he is able to keep the standard romanticised account of the rebellion at arm’s length. He examines the crisis from four different perspectives — the Hungarian government, the Hungarian people, the Soviet leaders and the American politicians and broadcasters — and manages to blend the perspectives together while still preserving the distinct motives and reasons behind the differing actions. It might not be the ‘definitive’ history of the failed revolution in Hungary, but the information Gati provides and the wealth of resources he refers to have laid out more than enough for future scholars of this time period to be getting on with.

The King’s English by H.W. and F.G. Fowler

Today’s book is a delightful romp through the fields of English grammar and syntax.

If that hasn’t put you off already, feel free to keep reading.

The King’s English by H.W. and F.G. Fowler

In 1906, Henry Watson Fowler and Francis George Fowler published a book that began with following declaration:

Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.

A simple and sensible-sounding statement, true, and a fitting introduction to the Fowler brothers’ complex and often contentious study of ‘the King’s English’ — perhaps the earliest style guide to good writing practices. And the recent Oxford University Press reprint of the original 1906 edition, with a few notes from later editions and a sparkling introduction by Matthew Parris, is a witty and welcome reminder of where the ever-changing English language has been and a hint of where it is likely to go.

Recent commentaries on the state of the English language have left me rather underwhelmed. I don’t have many good things to say about Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves, for instance, mainly because I found her authorial voice to be snide and more than a little off-putting. By contrast, the Fowler brothers manage to maintain a tone that usually stays on the side of gentle but pointed correction, as they quote example sentences and passages from newspaper articles and the works of popular authors (Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Eliot) and show how certain grammatical mistakes are common but nonetheless avoidable with a little rewriting and careful attention to detail. Along the way, they delve into facets of the English language that have all but fallen out of use today — there’s a lengthy section on the proper placement, conjugation, and uses of shall and will, for instance. And as might be expected from a book that is more than a century old, quite a few of the style choices that the Fowler brothers regarded as ‘vulgarisms’ or other forms of improper grammar in 1906 have become standard and conventional forms in acceptable writing today. Yet the emphasis throughout The King’s English is on the overall improvement of writing style and expression by eliminating or rewriting cliched turns of phrase, malapropisms, misused metaphors or quotations, stilted syntax…in general, the hallmarks of a lazy writer.

Nearly twenty years later, Henry Fowler would write A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, the style guide that would simply be known as Fowler’s and would set the tone for future style guides like the Chicago Manual of Style. In that context, comparing The King’s English to Fowler’s is like comparing a writing textbook to a style guide. Both will likely tell you what you need to know and refresh your memory if you have questions on proper use and usage, but the former is better for study and the latter is better for reference. Regardless, both volumes have a place of honour on this editor’s bookshelf.

The Politico’s Book of the Dead edited by Iain Dale

One of my tags for this blog is ‘dead politicians’. This review’s designed to make full use of it.

The Politico’s Book of the Dead edited by Iain Dale

Despite the morbid-sounding title and the very creepy illustration on the front cover (zombie Alan Clark!), this book is a collection of short biographies — or rather, obituaries — of various British politicians and political figures. Most of the obituaries are recent ones, from within the last twenty years or so, but there are a few from earlier in the twentieth century. The only real criterion for inclusion in Politico’s Book of the Dead seems to be that in one way or another, the individual has made a strong contribution to modern British politics.

It is easy to see the reason for some of the editor’s selections. Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson get fairly long entries, as does John Smith, Tony Blair’s predecessor as Labour Party leader. Sir Oswald Mosley (of British Union of Fascists fame) and Alan Clark (of Diaries fame) also have detailed biographical entries. Some of the deceased are more known for their connections through famous relatives than for their own deeds — Megan Lloyd-George and Violet Bonham-Carter are two such individuals. Quite a few are relatively obscure, often known only for one event or action that gave them the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. But most interestingly, there are obituaries for three fictional political figures: Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby from the television series Yes, Minister/Yes, Prime Minister, and Harry Perkins from the book and later TV mini-series A Very British Coup.

Most of these obituaries were written at the time of the subject’s death, though some were written specifically for this book. The majority given here tend towards the fairly dull and watery, mainly (I imagine) through the wish to not speak ill of the dead. In Alan Clark’s case, for example, his marital infidelities are brushed aside rather blithely (in my opinion). I also would have liked to see obits for at least all the dead prime ministers and party leaders since World War II, and the book doesn’t offer that either. But Politico’s selection is a fairly representative sample of British movers and shakers both past and present, and it’s good for picking up and reading a few at a time to expand your knowledge of the late great and good.

Writing Home and Untold Stories by Alan Bennett

It seems that the playwright and author Alan Bennett has a new novella out: The Uncommon Reader. So before I purchase it, I thought I’d post my reviews of two of his collected prose writings. In a forthcoming review, I’ll post my review of his play (and now film) The History Boys.

Writing Home by Alan Bennett

The writings and reminiscences in Writing Home form a fairly motley collection. The book includes his diaries (which are not so much ‘diaries’ as they are collected thoughts and musings) from the mid-1980s through the 1990s, prefaces to printed editions of his plays (including The Madness of George III and An Englishman Abroad), and various reviews and other writings collected for the first time. One of the most interesting selections in this collection is ‘The Lady in the Van’, a short story based on the life of an somewhat unbalanced elderly lady who lived in a van parked opposite Bennett’s house in Camden Town. But all in all, Writing Home is a book of observations, some of which reflect on the past and some of which dwell on the present…but all of which are a treat to read.

Bennett’s eye for the absurd and his love of the English language make Writing Home a fine book to have in those moments when you’re looking for something to read that’s light and yet satisfying. It isn’t the sort of book that you’d rave about to all of your friends and try to convince complete strangers to buy; it’s the sort of book that you keep with you and pick up occasionally, flipping through it and reading a selection or two before putting it down and puttering off to do something else. Like the other books in this set of reviews, I don’t recommend reading through it all at once. It’s meant to be read in small chunks, and then re-read in different chunks. Or at least, that’s how I found that the book read best.

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett

In Untold Stories, Bennett has pulled together another selection of writings and speeches that pick up where Writing Home left off — the materials in this book cover the years from around 1995 to 2004. Some of the untold stories in the book come from Bennett’s past and family life. There’s a quiet, sympathetic pen-portrait of his extended family, weaving in stories of a grandfather whose suicide was hushed up by his children, and his mother’s sisters and their lives in and out of the dingy Leeds community where they (and he) grew up. He writes about his mother’s struggles with depression and later with dementia, and the patient care and concern that his usually undemonstrative father showed in those dark times. Some of the other stories are about himself as a young man, uncertain of nearly everything including his sexuality and his religious faith. Included in Untold Stories are the diary selections that were printed every year in the London Review of Books, his reflections on the past year. And also included in the book is a lengthy account of his experience undergoing treatment for bowel cancer, which was diagnosed in 1997 and which until now he has been reluctant to discuss.

Not all of the stories in the book are so intimately personal. There is an interesting account of the writing and production of The History Boys, his most recent play (which I had the good fortune to see at the National Theatre, and which was made into an excellent film). There are a number of amusing anecdotes featuring the actors he has known and worked with, including Dame Thora Hird, Sir Alec Guinness, and Dame Maggie Smith. Untold Stories is a pleasing blend of Bennett’s personal and professional life, all written about with the same deft touch and careful feel for language that makes his writing a delight to read.

Lords of Parliament: Manners, Rituals and Politics by Emma Crewe

If I happened to be inventing cute titles for these book review posts, this one would probably be something like ‘Kind Hearts and (Ninety-Two Remaining) Coronets’.

Lords of Parliament: Manners, Rituals and Politics by Emma Crewe

One of the better-known quotations of Walter Bagehot is his assertion that the cure for admiring the British House of Lords is to go and look at it. Even today, after nearly a century’s worth of quite radical constitutional change beginning with the Parliament Act of 1911, the thought of the House of Lords still tends to conjure up an image of doddering old men in fancy dress making rambling speeches to their sleeping (or possibly deceased) peers. But with all the talk of further changes to the House of Lords, possibly even to its abolition and replacement with an elected upper house, it’s increasingly apparent that very few people actually know what the House of Lords is like in this day and age. The cash-for-honours scandal certainly hasn’t helped its image at all in recent years, for one thing. And even though all but 92 of the hereditary peers were removed from the Lords in 1999, doing much to redress the balance of the Lords’ political composition and vastly reduce its inbuilt Conservative majority, for the most part the Lords is still regarded as the last bastion of intolerance, privilege, aristocracy, and tradition-for-tradition’s-sake.

Lords of Parliament seeks to challenge many of these long-standing assumptions. Researcher Emma Crewe spent two years doing an in-depth anthropological study of the House of Lords, both of the institution and its denizens. She was given almost unlimited access to areas of the Lords that are usually never open to anyone save the peers and the Lords staff. She observed debates, ate and drank with peers and staff, sat in on committee meetings, conducted interviews with dukes and doorkeepers, and in general immersed herself in the day-to-day life of the upper house. And over the course of her research, she uncovered any number of subcultures and hierarchies within the Lords, unspoken rules that govern the conduct of those who work within its precincts, and a remarkably deep sense of social and political committment that all too often manages to rise above the party politics of the Commons. If a week is a long time in politics, as the saying goes, then the Lords operates at a much slower pace — which at times can be viewed as foot-dragging, but at other times may well be the necessary pause for reflection that can prevent a too-hasty rush to ill-judged action.

I can’t comment on the soundness of Crewe’s writing as a piece of anthropological research, but from a political-historical perspective, Lords of Parliament is an absolutely fascinating study in the British Constitution as a working document. If I were to teach a course on contemporary British politics, I’d make the book required reading. Crewe delves deeply into the numerous symbols and rituals that are part and parcel of the work of the Lords, from the highly stylised speech patterns used in debates to the symbols of office that are always on display when Parliament is in session. She looks at the role of peers as experts in certain topics, and at the relationships between the political parties and with crossbench peers who have no specific party affiliation. Crewe also explores relationships amongst the peers themselves and between peers and members of staff, pointing out the ways in which subtle but strict checks are kept on those who somehow deviate from established procedures and protocols. These self-governance procedures tend to regulate conduct in the Lords — for instance, a peer’s eccentricities of habit may be tolerated if he or she is unfailingly competent in debate and courteous in the chamber, but rudeness (which can take many forms) or persistent incompetence during debate is met with stern disapproval. Trying to go through and explain all of Crewe’s findings would take a very long time, but her writing style strikes the right balance between academic and anecdotal, making the book a smooth, comprehensive, and eminently readable piece of research.

One final thing to point out: Crewe doesn’t openly say whether she’s for or against the abolition of the Lords and its replacement with a different kind of second chamber, but she does give a few points for further consideration. Symbolism, she argues, is the stuff of which national identity is made — and there’s no getting around that. There’s a difference between a ritual that deliberately creates a sense of social distance or superiority and a ritual that preserves a sense of continuity with the past. Writing off the House of Lords as a complete anachronism is just as problematic as insisting that nothing about it should ever be changed. Further reform to the House of Lords is always going to be a tricky issue on many levels, but if nothing else, Crewe’s book does quite a bit to dispel the worst of the outdated stereotypes about what goes on in the red-carpeted halls in the less well-known half of the Palace of Westminster.

Rulers and Victims: Russians in the Soviet Union by Geoffrey Hosking

When I studied modern Russian history during my undergraduate days, the professor assigned a hefty book by Geoffrey Hosking as the class’s general text. I found it to be quite well-written and a very good general history book all round, so when I heard that Hosking had written a new book about Russian history I thought it worth purchasing. The title alone was enough to intrigue me, because it touched on a thought that I’d had but never truly examined during some of my Cold War history classes: To what extent were ‘Russian’ and ‘Soviet’ truly interchangeable terms?

Rulers and Victims: Russians in the Soviet Union by Geoffrey Hosking

To the outside (read: Western) world, the Soviet Union and Russia were the same thing, QED. But the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was in a sense precisely that — a union of republics, most of which did not actually have a majority of native Russians as a proportion of their populations. It was true that natives of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) had certain advantages that other citizens of the USSR did not. People outside the RSFSR tended to send their children to Russian-language schools to ensure that the children would stand a better chance of finding good jobs or getting higher education. Even quite a few Russians believed that Russia was and had to be the dominant partner, the strong force that had driven back the Nazis and liberated the European continent from the grip of fascism. And yet this sense of mastery went hand-in-hand with a sense of victimisation and near-helplessness — the unpopularity of Russia and Russians in the non-RSFSR republics only increased with each passing year as the republics chafed under the rule from Moscow. Just before the latent conflict between Russians and non-Russians came to a head in the last days of the Cold War, Russian writer Valentin Rasputin lashed out in response to the anger of non-Russian critics during a meeting of the Congress of People’s Deputies in May 1989:

Perhaps it is Russia that should secede from the Union, since you accuse her of all your misfortunes and since our backwardness and awkwardness obstruct your progressive aspirations?…We could then pronounce the word ‘Russian’ without fear of being rebuked for nationalism, we could talk openly about our national idenitity. We could set up at last our own Academy of Sciences….Believe me, we’re fed up with being scapegoats, with being mocked and spat upon.

Russians in the Soviet Union were in an odd predicament: they were both rulers and victims. And Rulers and Victims sets out to pick apart this strange juxtaposition of sentiments, looking at precisely where the splits occurred — and describing how the tensions between Russian mastery and Russian victimhood eventually struck the fatal blow for Soviet Communism and the USSR in the years between 1989 and 1991. Soviet leaders knew full well that Russian nationalism — in other words, the Russian people asserting an identity that distinctly separated Russia from the Soviet Union — was the biggest internal threat that the USSR could face. And while quite a lot of work has been done on the status of Ukranians or Balts or native inhabitants of the Muslim SSRs (the Central Asian republics, nowadays) in the Soviet Union as a whole, Rulers and Victims focuses specifically on the Russian identity separate from the Soviet identity that was supposed to replace it.

To be best enjoyed, Hosking’s book does require some background knowledge of twentieth-century Russian history. It won’t do much good without a general sense of why this topic is often overlooked in terms of nationality studies. The book charts the ways in which the Soviet system attempted to suppress or take over Russian national identity, from severely curtailing the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church to attempting to mush Imperial Russian and Soviet history together into some great grand unified theory of the traditional underpinnings of Soviet power. I do wish Hosking had devoted a little more space to Russian nationalism’s significant contribution the end of the Soviet Union (in the person of Boris Yeltsin, for one, or at least how he used Russian nationalism to further his political ends). The ending felt a little bit rushed in contrast to the rest of the book’s sedate pace. But I’m always fond of a book that gives me a new way of looking at history that is less ‘revisionist’ (if we are to consider it a dirty word) than it is a slight shift in perspective. If Hosking writes another book on Russian history in the near future, I’d definitely be interested in reading it.

A Strange Eventful History: Democratic Socialism in Britain by Edmund Dell

I’d originally thought to link this review with David Marquand’s The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair, but I think I’ll save that one for a review to come. Dell’s book deserves to stand on its own, anyway.

A Strange Eventful History: Democratic Socialism in Britain by Edmund Dell

There’s a saying that’s usually attributed to Labour politician Herbert Morrison — ‘Socialism is what a Labour government does’. I’ve always found it to be a fascinating statement, because simply by shifting the emphasis in that statement, you can say one of two things: 1) a Labour government is, by definition, a government that will implement the classic ideas of socialism; or 2) the definition of socialism depends entirely on the Labour government that claims to be implementing it. This particular book kept me thinking about that old saying, and where the emphasis in that saying really lies. And while I can’t deny that Edmund Dell’s book is in many ways a polemic, 500-plus pages of thinly-veiled bitterness about what the Labour movement has become, it’s a book that really does keep you thinking about that possible change in emphasis all the way through.

Now, the late Edmund Dell wasn’t one who had many kind things to say about the Labour party. His book The Schuman Plan and the Abdication of British Leadership in Europe is positively vituperative in its condemnation of the Labour Party’s fear of Franco-German cooperation and further European union. An unsurprising sentiment, perhaps, since he was one of the Labour MPs who broke with the Party and joined the SDP in 1980…in part because of Labour’s anti-Europe stance, though the party’s general drift to the left also played into Dell’s decision to jump ship. But Dell doesn’t seem to have much sympathy for any aspect of Labour government or democratic socialism — at least, not in the way that it has been defined by various Labour politicians and thinkers over the years. And in some ways that lack of sympathy is the book’s main weakness: it’s not always easy to tell when his criticism of Labour’s interpretation of democratic socialism is fully justified, or when he’s attacking Labour out of sheer spite.

Dell is clever with words, I must admit. There’s a wonderful description of Harold Wilson’s desperate, angry pleading with Lyndon Johnson over the shabby state of Britain’s finances in the 1960s: ‘like a suicide threatening to cut his throat on his neighbour’s doorstep’. And I must admit that he does an excellent job with the historical writings, tracing the threads of democratic socialism from the early socialist thinkers in the trade unions right up through Labour’s victory in 1997 (where his account ends). But A Strange Eventful History has to be read with one eye on the writer, always remembering that this history of democratic socialism was written by a man who sadly fell out with the Labour government that claimed to espouse the very ideals of democratic socialism…back when more people considered it to be a truly viable political movement.

Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, edited by Richard Davenport-Hines

I still agree with the opinion about academic conflicts mentioned below. Very much so.

Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, edited by Richard Davenport-Hines

Let me preface this book review with an opinion I’ve developed recently. In my opinion, conflicts in academia are only enjoyable (let alone interesting) when they’re witnessed thirdhand. They’re awful when you’re part of them, and very unpleasant when you’re dealing with the fallout from them, but seen from a distance (and especially after most of the participants are dead) they can be remarkably fascinating. It’s rather like watching an early nature documentary — only without the voiceover person’s nearly incomprehensible accent.

That said, the Letters from Oxford are a collection of letters written by historian Hugh Trevor-Roper to art historian and critic Bernard Berenson. Trevor-Roper was an Oxford don and former military intelligence officer who had made a pile of money with the publication of his best-selling book The Last Days of Hitler. His work on Hitler was only the prelude to his career as a historian — or rather, his career as a historian who thoroughly enjoyed attacking OTHER historians of his day and age in various published articles and letters. His correspondence with Berenson began shortly after the end of the war and continued until Berenson’s death in 1959, and Trevor-Roper’s letters to his friend and occasional host (Berenson lived in Italy, and opened the doors of his villa to an exclusive array of guests) provided what Berenson wanted most to hear: gossip, and plenty of it.

Setting aside the snippets of gossip that would probably only interest people who like reading about old scandals amongst the literati, Trevor-Roper’s Letters from Oxford contain two remarkable gems of correspondence: his farcical descriptions of Oxford University politics (not the party-political kind, but rather the kind that determines who gets the vacant Regius Professorship or other high-powered post) and a remarkably trenchant real-time analysis of the Suez crisis. It’s in these sections where Trevor-Roper’s skill with words and turns of phrase really comes through, and the art of good letter-writing shows itself most vividly. Reading other people’s letters generally doesn’t tend to be interesting — even the Letters from Oxford have their fair share of syncophantic bread-and-butter notes and an almost nonstop undercurrent of whinging over Trevor-Roper’s latest bete noire — but it’s a treat nonetheless to find a correspondence that manages to capture a vivid and occasionally intriguing picture of the foibles of the past.