An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War by Donald Thomas

I’m a very big fan of Foyle’s War, a mystery series set on the south coast of England during World War II. This book served as source and reference material for many of the stories used in the series, which makes me all the more pleased to see how the creators were aiming for a sense of authenticity that more programmes would do well to emulate.

An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War by Donald Thomas

Most any standard history of the home front during World War II will have a slew of stories and anecdotes about individual acts of heroism and dedication and hard work and self-sacrifice in the face of nightly bombings, food rationing, endless swing shifts in munitions factories, and a general atmosphere of blood, toil, tears, and sweat.

This book isn’t one of them.

Donald Thomas’s An Underworld at War focuses on the less-than-savoury side of life on the home front in Britain during the war. The chaos and confusion of wartime made it that much easier for petty criminals to do a brisk trade in stolen or counterfeited ration books, food and clothing coupons, identity cards, and other papers that could make all the difference between getting by and doing quite well for oneself. Bombing raids were an excellent cover for safebreakers and professional burglars, who could operate without fear that the noise of their work would be overheard by neighbours. Houses that had been abandoned by their owners or bombed out by the Luftwaffe were vulnerable to scavanging and outright looting — to the point where signs were posted to warn potential looters that theft from a bombed-out house was a capital offence. The black market did a brisk trade in everything from eggs to diamond rings and nylons to fur coats, as there were those who were always ready to take advantage of the common wartime situation of too much cash chasing too few goods. Theft from factories, shops, and NAAFI stores was certainly not unknown, as was the rigging of building contracts or the bribery of housing or local government officials to build shelters and prefabricated houses as cheaply as possible. Vice was rife, as soldiers on leave were ready clients for prostitutes, whether the ladies were the kind who worked out of well-kept houses in Belgravia and Mayfair or the kind who stood in darkened doorways during blackouts, shining pencil torches on their faces to attract potential customers. And in a time when people were often on edge and tempers were quick to flare, drunken arguments could easily escalate into fatal stabbings or shootings that kept the already short-staffed police departments constantly busy.

To deal with lawlessness or the threat of lawlessness, the British government instituted layer upon layer of controls and ordinances intended to curtail or stamp out crime and immorality. Undercover officers from the Board of Trade would often go into shops and try to catch shopkeepers and customers in an illegal act — selling rationed goods for cash, for instance, or taking too few coupons in trade for an individual’s potion of tea. (In many cases, the officials who carried out this practice resorted to means that might at best be considered duplicitous and at worst be regarded as little more than deliberate entrapment.) Other restrictions banned citizens from travelling without proper passes, particularly into the ‘exclusion zone’ that was set up in the coastal regions near the Channel. Even honest excuses might not be sufficient to avoid fines or imprisonment, as one man found out when he fell asleep on his southbound train, missed his stop, and ended up at the end of the line in Hastings, well within the forbidden exclusion zone. Sentences ranged from fines to prison sentences to executions (usually in the case of murder), and by the end of the war the number of citizens, soldier and civilian alike, who were now ‘known to the police’ had skyrocketed to a level that seemed to indicate that the war had had a serious undermining effect on traditional British morals and values.

An Underworld at War draws on police and court records of the time, as well as recently released documents from the Public Records Office. It’s quite an engaging read, filled with fascinating little details that really shed light on what it was like to live in the days when, for instance, it would cost half of a person’s yearly allowance of clothing coupons to purchase a not-very-well-made overcoat. The aspect of the book that I found most interesting was the involvement of normally law-abiding civilians the cases that kept coming up before the courts. Men and women with no prior criminal record and years of honest and sober conduct on their jobs and in their lives would end up in front of the magistrates, charged with the theft of a bottle of whiskey, a length of fabric, a extra two ounces of tea, or a packet of cigarettes. And though Thomas is ever ready to point out that incidents like the ones he mentions in his book are only a small part of life on the home front — the great majority of people had no truck with the black market or the shady dealings that went on in grimy flats or in the rubble of ruined buildings — An Underworld at War presents an aspect of wartime that the standard histories tend to be quick to overlook. By no means was there a complete breakdown of law and order, but the petty crimes did add up in their own way, adding to the cost of running the war and affecting the daily lives of the men and women who were doing their best to fight it.

New Labour, Old Labour: The Wilson and Callaghan Governments, 1974-79 edited by Anthony Seldon and Kevin Hickson

Once again balancing out the posts on the Tories, here’s a book on Labour during one of its more difficult periods in power.

New Labour, Old Labour: The Wilson and Callaghan Governments, 1974-79 edited by Anthony Seldon and Kevin Hickson

To make a fairly crude analogy, editing a book about the Labour governments of the 1970s is somewhat akin to performing an autopsy on a corpse that has been dragged about, kicked around, and otherwise mangled almost out of recognition. For the last two-and-a-half decades, politicians on both the left and the right have been pointing to the 1970s as an example of what they DON’T want to see happen again. Militant industrial action, a stagnating economy, rampant inflation, the humiliation of the 1976 IMF loan, and finally the so-called Winter of Discontent in 1978-79 all combined to a no-confidence vote in Jim Callaghan’s leadership and the 1979 General Election that brought Margaret Thatcher into power. In the years that followed, Thatcher and her successors (both John Major and Tony Blair) sought to distance themselves from that particular time in British history. Blair even chose to rebrand the party as ‘New Labour’ specifically to assure the electorate that Labour had shaken off its past failures and flaws and was prepared to be a party capable of governing once again. Yet any number of questions still remain: To what extent is New Labour really a radical departure from the party of Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, and Jim Callaghan? Were the Wilson and Callaghan years really the string of disasters that today’s politicians like to spend their time rabbiting on about? And if not, why have both the new left and the new right found the 1970s to be a surprisingly useful time period to denounce?

The essays and articles in New Labour, Old Labour are on the whole an excellent collection of analyses of different aspects of the Wilson and Callaghan governments. Well-known and respected historians and political scientists delve into the details of government and governing in the latter half of the 1970s, such as industrial and social policy, Scottish and Welsh devolution, the crisis in Northern Ireland, the Labour Party’s near-meltdown over relations with the EEC, and the ups and (mostly) downs of the economic cycle. Other articles take a more personal look at the mechanics of government, specifically with regard to Wilson and Callaghan’s relationships with their Cabinet ministers, the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the Labour Party rank and file.

There were several articles I particularly enjoyed — not surprisingly, they happened to be by authors I’ve read before whose writing styles appeal to me. Philip Norton’s article about the Labour Party’s struggles to keep control of Parliament was a personal favourite, though that might have something to do with the fact that thanks to my master’s dissertation, I can practically cite chapter and verse out of some of Norton’s other books about parliamentary dissent. Dennis Kavanagh also does a fine job looking at why it’s so convenient for politicians today to misread and misinterpret Old Labour, finding in it a useful way to define themselves and their political platforms to the electorate (’this is what we’re not’ rather than ‘this is what we are’). The one article that I wish had not been included was about social inequality under Old Labour, written jointly by Polly Toynbee and David Walker. I’m not overly fond of Polly Toynbee’s writing style to begin with, so perhaps that was a mark against the article to start. However, in the midst of so many well-written scholarly articles on the time period, the work of two journalists simply doesn’t feel like it belongs — it feels lightweight, somehow. I suppose it was added in there to make the book more marketable to a nonscholarly audience, but I think I would’ve rather seen the article written by someone else (who doesn’t set my teeth on edge to read him/her).

I used Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball’s similar book on Edward Heath’s government (1970-1974) extensively when writing my dissertation. I’ve a feeling that this book will be of use to anyone interested in the two governments that followed — and for that matter, it should be required reading for anyone who wants to take a stab at doing some serious analysis and criticism of British politics since 1979.

D.C. Confidential by Christopher Meyer

Today’s book review might well be called ‘Adventures in Diplomacy!’ — if you’ve a mind to be ironic about such things, that is.

D.C. Confidential by Christopher Meyer

D.C. Confidential caused quite a kerfluffle (or two or three) when excerpts from it were printed in the Guardian back in October 2004. Christopher Meyer (or rather, Sir Christopher Meyer) was the British ambassador to the US until fairly recently, and observed the interactions between the US and the UK in the days after 11 September and through the events leading up to the war in Iraq. And while D.C. Confidential isn’t wholly centred on Sir Christopher’s time on Massachusetts Avenue, the portions of it that are have provoked something of a firestorm over ‘breaches of confidence’ and accusations that as a former diplomat Meyer violated the Official Secrets Act in writing this book. While that’s as may be, I think that D.C. Confidential violates the boundaries of good taste more often that it threatens the very fabric of national security.

The real target in D.C. Confidential is not George W. Bush and the White House, but Blair and his Downing Street team. The vitriol almost pours off the pages in places, contempt and scorn evident in his description of Blair putting on a pair of ‘ball-crushingly tight dark-blue corduroys’ in an attempt to look hip and relaxed at Camp David, or when Meyer recalls that Cherie Blair’s hairdresser was left behind (!) on that same trip to Camp David and had to be helicoptered out of there to catch up to the rest of the Blair entourage. But the deeper layer to this bitterness is Meyer’s belief that Blair and the Downing Street courtiers, seduced by the power of the Presidency, shoved the Foreign Office out of the way in order to cuddle up to Bush and the neoconservatives. And naturally, that means that the ambassador-as-FO-functionary loses stature, and in the socio-political whirl inside the Beltway that loss of stature (or even a perceived loss of stature) can be absolutely fatal to an ambassador’s ability to schmooze and socialise freely. Or for that matter, to gain access to the ears of those inside the White House.

Politics aside, Meyer himself doesn’t come across as the most likeable person in general. He spends quite a bit of time rhapsodising about the work his wife Catherine did to promote awareness of international child custody disputes and parental abduction of dual-national children — honourable and decent work, to be sure, but there are places where it seems tossed into the narrative for little or no reason. Meyer’s description of his wife also tends to dwell on her physical attributes in a way that isn’t so much laddish as it is boorish — perhaps I’m being overly sensitive to such things, but several other reviews of this book have also commented on it as well. The diplomatic name-dropping is extensive and perhaps predictable, though in places it’s done to an extent that a better editor would have excised certain sections with a flamethrower. There are places where Meyer writes quite well (the section concerning his time as John Major’s press secretary is enjoyable to read), but they seem to be overshadowed by the bits where he gets far too fond of the sound of his own voice, so to speak.

It’s easy to see why D.C. Confidential has upset so many people. Meyer’s writing style is abrasive, his targets are ambitious, his conclusions are condemning — this book is designed to be confrontational. But the book also has the flavour of one of those angry and abusive letters that you write in the heat of the moment…and, if you’ve any sense, fold up and put aside until the next day when you can read what you’ve written in the cold light of the morning. Sometimes it’s fun to reread those kind of letters, and sometimes what is written is enough to make you cringe. I personally found myself cringing more often than not.

In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War by David Reynolds

I once had the amazing good fortune to meet Cambridge historian David Reynolds, and I think I flummoxed him a little (in the good way) when I told him straight off that I was a great fan of his work. Britannia Overruled is a classic reference text for anyone interested in studying Anglo-American relations, and Rich Relations is an intriguing look at Anglo-American relations during the ‘American occupation of Britain’ in World War II. So perhaps in keeping with his Anglo-American theme, Reynolds’ book focuses on a true Anglo-American output — Winston Churchill — and more specifically, Churchill’s impressive six-volume history of the Second World War.

In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War by David Reynolds

One of the quotations often attributed to Churchill is the pithy and somewhat flippant declaration: ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it’. Brave words from any politician, but in a sense Churchill really did write the history that would later lionise his name. After the Conservative Party’s massive defeat at the polls in 1945, Churchill was left as the Leader of a tiny Opposition and faced with the need to earn some kind of income to offset the extremely high tax rates that the Labour Party had recently imposed. With reams of personal papers at his disposal — as well as a number of highly sensitive government documents that just happened to have come with him when he left Downing Street — he set out to write a detailed history of the war that had just been won.

There’s been so much written about Winston Churchill from just about every possible angle, from admiring hagiographies to damnation with only the faintest of praise. Reynolds’ approach to this study of Churchill after the war is both novel and utterly fascinating. Churchill is as much a larger-than-life figure in this day and age as he was during his lifetime…and so there’s something terribly human about a Churchill who is desperate to cut a good deal with his publishers, hoping to secure an advance on his writing to prevent having to sell his beloved Chartwell, or a Churchill who is worried that he might (A) die or (B) win the next General Election (both of which seemed to be equally unwelcome possibilities) before he can finish the next volume of his book. It’s a side of Churchill that isn’t often seen, even by historians.

Reynolds writes with equally painstaking detail about the writing process, picking through multiple drafts and identifying selections that were cut out to avoid offending living politicians or relationships with Britain’s allies, or even to conceal vital state secrets such as the truth about the codebreakers of Bletchley Park. It’s history at the nitty-gritty level, writing about the history of history being written — and in being written, how that history shapes people’s perceptions of the very immediate past and perpetuates that image into the future. It’s certainly not a surprise that the book won the 2004 Wolfson History Prize, because Reynolds proves that it is indeed possible to write a history book that can appeal to historians and ‘lay readers’ alike. As he says in his introduction, ‘…Churchill the historian has shaped our image of Churchill the Prime Minister’, and In Command of History deftly illustrates how successful Winston Churchill actually was in writing the history that would later be so kind to him.

The American Political Tradition and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter

Doubling up on the reviews again, with two books by American historian and Columbia University professor Richard Hofstadter.

The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It by Richard Hofstadter

Richard Hofstadter published The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It in 1948, combining twelve interlinked essays about the development of American history and politics from the early days of the Republic to the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. He focused on key political figures in the context of their time — and in many ways used the book as an attempt to move away from the standard image of American history as a political tradition based on pure democratic ideals.

Looking over the book for reviewing purposes, I found myself wishing that I’d had this book when I was first examining aspects of American history in school. It is a nice compact introduction to some basic historical themes, ones that tend to be glossed over by standard history textbooks because of lack of space. Hofstadter does manage to avoid the temptation to be overly whiggish in his interpretation of how American politics has changed in the years since 1776. He stresses the effect of pragmatism on decision-making, doing his best to present a more realistic picture of different political climates and the men who came to exemplify their political eras. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover — Hofstadter does his best to put them into the context of their times instead of setting them apart (or ignoring them completely in favour of broader economic-based arguments about history). He doesn’t actively set out to deconstruct or destroy the various myths about the Founding Fathers or Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt. Rather, he carefully picks and teases them apart, separating individual strands of historical argument before setting them out as neatly as he can.

In general, I don’t think that The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It is meant to be read as a be-all, end-all history text. Certainly, it ignores the history of the American public in favour of a far more top-down approach to American political philosophies. But as far as introductory texts go, though it’s well-written and for the most part concise. Quite a lot of American history texts don’t even manage that much. A book worth examining, at any rate, and I’m glad I picked it up when I did.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter

When I first read this book, it took me several weeks to figure out the best way to approach it with reviewing in mind. It’s no secret that Hofstadter’s book is meant to be controversial — it was controversial when it won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction, and many of the statements he makes in it have attracted supporters and detractors ever since. And while the very title might be enough to put some off reading it, I found it intriguing enough to pick it up and see if Hofstadter’s conclusions still hold true thirty years later.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life seeks to uncover the origins of some of the anti-intellectual attitudes that Hofstadter believed were severely damaging American society. He points to McCarthyism, to the Soviet Union’s advances in mathematics and science, to perjorative slang terms like ‘egghead’, and to the presidential victory of Dwight Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson as possible examples of an unconscious, pervasive anti-intellectual sentiment in American life. In searching for the roots of this anti-intellectualism, Hofstadter goes back to the earliest years of the American colonies, and traces a path through the decades — from the evangelical religious movements (the ‘Great Awakenings’, as they tend to be called) in the colonial times through the Jacksonian egalitarianism of the pre-Civil War years, from the rise of the business culture in the end of the 19th century through the progressive attitudes toward public education in the early years of the 20th century. And one of the conclusions he draws in his book is that current (for his day) expressions of intellectualism like the ‘beat’ culture appear to be a kind of twisted, angry response to mainstream America’s attempts to thwart its individual intellectuals at every turn.

This book falls into a category I’ve come to appreciate in the last few years — books whose arguments you might not wholly accept, but which you should read anyway. I’m not so certain I agree with some of Hofstadter’s arguments, but his historical exploration of the roots of anti-intellectualism was rather ground-breaking for his time. It turned quite a lot of conventionally received wisdom on its head, and in many ways the examples and arguments that Hofstadter puts forward are still points of debate in this day and age. I think it bears a second reading to see if my thoughts have changed since I last looked at it a few months ago, but I’ll certainly look forward to reading it over again.

Sketches by Boz by Charles Dickens

A friend and I were discussing Charles Dickens earlier this evening — specifically, the idea of Dickens as a literary sociologist — so I thought it would be a good idea to post this review I wrote of one of his earliest works.

Sketches by Boz by Charles Dickens

Even those who are not fond of Charles Dickens’ writing style would have to admit that he created some of the most memorable characters in English literature. Wackford Squeers, the Artful Dodger, Miss Havisham, Scrooge and Gradgrind and Sydney Carton…and so on and so forth. The plots of some of his books might be on the thin side, but his character sketches have stood up very well over the years. And Sketches by Boz, his very first book, is a collection of Dickens’ early attempts at pen-portraits of the characters and places and scenes he saw every day in the bustling zoo of early Victorian London.

The stories in Sketches by Boz were published in various monthly magazines and periodicals under the pen-name of ‘Boz’ (which apparently came from a family in-joke or nickname). Some are actual tales, usually light-hearted or comical and often with a wicked sense of humour. Dickens enjoyed poking fun at the affected airs of the middle-classes, especially those who strove to portray themselves as being just outside of the highest echelons of society. He also took a number of potshots at the mercenary nature of the marriage-market; several of the stories and sketches revolve around the awkward romantic entanglements of desperate spinsters, befuddled bachelors, and melodramatic young lovers who run off to Gretna Green at the slightest provokation. But the sympathetic side of Dickens also shows through in his collected stories written from real observations — there are sketches about Newgate Prison and the prisoners within, about the poverty and vice that plagued the streets of the city’s slums, and about the quietly desperate poor who were a few shillings away from being on the streets or who (like Dickens’ own family) lived in fear of the debtors’ prisons. Reading the book is like taking a walk, with Dickens as an expert tour guide, through the dirty, noisy, busy streets, past the courts of law and the pawn-shops and the gin-palaces and even through the new little suburbs that eventually would be swallowed up by the London metropolis.

The London that Dickens was writing about was a city in transition, as the rowdy and bawdy years of the late Regency gave way to the smoke-shrouded gentility of the Victorian era. In Sketches by Boz, Dickens was able to capture a glimpse of that time of transition from the perspective of one who was writing about a city — and a people — that he knew well and loved.

The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vols. 1-4

In honour of the National Archives‘ recent release of the Security Service files on Eric Blair — AKA George Orwell — it’s only fitting to post my thoughts on the fine four-volume collected set of Orwell’s journalism, letters, and essays.

The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus

Volume 1 - An Age Like This: 1920-1940

In the essay ‘Why I Write’, which opens this volume, George Orwell analyses the various factors that affected and influenced his choice of subjects in his early years as a journalist. He mentions his time in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma and the cruelties he witnessed there, he hints at the years of extreme poverty he experienced when he first started to take up journalism and fiction writing, he speaks of his decision to go to Spain and join the volunteers who were fighting against Franco. He even includes a little poem that he wrote in 1935 in which he attempted to sort out his conflicted feelings on contemporary life, which ended with the lines:

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn’t born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

And as it stands, ‘An Age Like This’ is a more than apt choice for the title of this first volume of his collected essay, letters, and journalistic writings.

Much of the first volume consists of letters to friends and business associates, along with a number of short freelance pieces in which Orwell explored in great depth the life of the poorer sections of the working class, as well as the outright destitute. It’s in this volume where his diaries and notes for The Road to Wigan Pier can be found, along with several short stories including ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (both of which came from memories of his time with the police in Burma). There are also a number of notable essays on literary topics, particularly a lengthy essay which looks at the works of Charles Dickens and another which examines the political leanings found in the boys’ weekly papers which produced Billy Bunter and the other ’school story’ characters that were popular at the time. In addition to the letters, notes, and essays, ‘An Age Like This’ includes book reviews that Orwell wrote for literary periodicals like Time and Tide and the New English Weekly. The reviews of books which dealt with the Spanish Civil War — of which Orwell, unlike most other reviewers of his day, had first-hand experience — are especially noteworthy, even though the books that Orwell was reviewing have all but faded into obscurity these days.

And yet I think it’s in the letters where Orwell really comes to life. There are enough footnotes to keep the letters from being completely confusing, though some familiarity with the time period does make them easier to read. Letters to T.S. Eliot and Victor Gollancz (founder of the Left Book Club, which published several of Orwell’s early books), letters to family members and close friends, all cover the initial span of time when Orwell was trying to find his footing as an author and a journalist. As with any collection of letters, it’s the development of ideas and opinions that is so interesting to watch unfold…and with Orwell, there is never a shortage of ideas and opinions to keep an eye on.

Volume 2 - My Country Right or Left: 1940-1943

The essay ‘My Country Right or Left’ was actually the very last piece in Volume 1, but since it was written in 1940 it works quite well as the title of the second collection of Orwell’s writings. In that essay, Orwell wrote that the night before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed, he dreamt that war had already been declared and that in the dream he was fully prepared to fight for his country even if doing so seemed diametrically opposed to his distaste for the existing British government under Neville Chamberlain. And as might be expected, the writings from 1940-1943 that are included in this volume are dominated by the war and Orwell’s opinions on how well or badly it was going at the time.

In the early years of the war, Orwell’s wife Eileen worked for the government’s Censorship Department and Orwell himself was anxious to secure some kind of work for the war effort as well. He joined the Home Guard, but his ill health kept him out of the military and the more physically taxing of wartime jobs. Eventually, he found a position in London with the BBC’s Eastern Section, broadcasting to India. His letters reveal his dissatisfaction with his work, which he saw as little more than the production of propaganda (an experience which he later put to good use for the hero of 1984) designed to keep India and the remaining British possessions in East Asia loyal to the British war effort. During and shortly before his time with the BBC, he kept a running wartime diary, the two parts of which are included at the very end of this volume. The wartime diary is an intriguing summary of news reports and general public observation written by someone who had a keen eye for the media’s ability to ’spin’ the truth of the war. Though the diaries themselves were not published in any form until well after his death, it’s possible to compare them to his journalism at the time and see where he drew upon notes he had made from some weeks ago.

This volume ends with Orwell’s resignation from the BBC in 1943 to become literary editor of the Tribune, the left-wing weekly newsmagazine. But within ‘My Country Right or Left’ are some of his most powerful pieces of writing, including three-part polemic ‘The Lion and The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius’ and the retrospective ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’. These years saw Orwell at his most fiery, and his critical analyses of England, Englishness, and English socialism still manage to have resonance well over half a century after they were written.

Volume 3 - As I Please: 1943-1945

‘As I Please’ was the title of the weekly column that Orwell wrote for Tribune from 3 December 1943 until 15 February 1945, so it’s fitting that it should serve as the title of the volume which encompasses those particular years. As the title suggests, most of the columns weren’t centred on any particular topic; instead, they were often collections of observations about everyday life and politics, sometimes on issues related to the war and other times on far more mundane topics.

The majority of the entries in this volume are the ‘As I Please’ columns, but there are other essays and letters as well from the later years of the war. Orwell’s essays touch upon such diverse subjects as the difference between British and American crime novels (epitomised by the ‘Raffles’ stories and the now-forgotten No Orchids for Miss Blandish), anti-Semitism in Britain (written in February 1945), and a defence of author P.G. Wodehouse (who at the time was under fire over his ‘propaganda’ broadcasts from Nazi Germany). All in all, this was one of the busiest periods in Orwell’s writing career, for in the midst of his usual literary responsibilities he was also attempting to find a publisher for Animal Farm. One of the final entries in this volume is a short introduction that was meant for the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, a fascinating little note for anyone who enjoyed reading the original book. There’s definitely a lot to explore in Volume 3, and though it covers a shorter span of time than the two volumes before or the volume after there’s no shortage of material to get through and return to over and over again.

Volume 4 - In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950

‘In Front of Your Nose’ is the title of an essay Orwell wrote in 1946 — it contains the line, ‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.’ And while Orwell could rarely be accused of ignoring what was in front of his nose, the final years of his life were marked by a number of different personal and professional struggles. His wife Eileen died in March 1945, leaving him to care for their adopted son Richard, and in the following years he was increasingly unwell with the tuberculosis that had plagued him for much of his adult life. Though he married his close friend Sonia Brownell in late 1949, and continued to work on ideas for new short stories and essays, by the end of the year he was planning to travel to a sanatorium in Switzerland for further tuberculosis treatments. On 21 January 1950, he died at the age of 46.

The time period covered in Volume 4 saw the publication of both Animal Farm (August 1945) and 1984 (June 1949). Many of the letters in ‘In Front of Your Nose’ were written during the times when he wasn’t well enough to write professionally, so the letters are for the most part the only record we have of what he was thinking about and attempting to work on during his low points. But there are several essays and book reviews in this volume, including another set of ‘As I Please’ columns for the Tribune and several pieces written for the Observer. Some of the more memorable pieces in this volume are the long essay ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, a frankly gruesome account of his time at public school, and the shorter ‘How the Poor Die’, an equally gruesome reminiscence of the time he spent in a charity hospital in France, known only as Hôpital X. (’How the Poor Die’ reads almost like a sequel or companion-piece to Down and Out in Paris and London — Orwell spares no details here.) The final pieces of writing collected here are fragments from a manuscript notebook that Orwell kept by him in the last year of his life, and it’s a little sad to read them and think that some of the fragments might have been turned into another short story or possibly even a book if their author had lived.

The four-volume set contains most all of the written ephemera that any fan of Orwell’s works could ask for. His struggles to publish and eke out a living, his willingness to endure all kinds of squalid conditions for the sake of finding out the ‘real’ side of things in the best traditions of investigative journalism…all the bits and pieces are here in these pages, leaving it up to the reader to piece together the fragments of a writer whose pen-name has (for good or for ill) taken on a life and meaning of its own.

The English and The Political Animal by Jeremy Paxman

Two books in this installment of reposts, both by Jeremy Paxman of Newsnight and University Challenge fame.

The English by Jeremy Paxman

The English brings together a number of essays written by Paxman on the central theme of the English and Englishness, with particular focus on two questions: ‘What does it mean to be English? And why is “Englishness” so damned difficult to define?’ The span of topics covered by the essays range from the insular, in the form of the peculiar institution of the Church of England (’The Parish of the Senses’), to the far-ranging, in a study of the repercussions of empire-building and empire-losing (’The English Empire’). He even dwells on the simple questions regarding Englishness, such as ‘Why does England have no national anthem?’ The Scots have Flower of Scotland, the Welsh have Hen Wlad fy Nhadau…what about the English? God Save the Queen doesn’t really count, in his opinion, and he regards both Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory as embarrassing in their Kipling-esque rejoicing in an Empire that doesn’t really exist anymore. The nearest Paxman can come to an English national anthem is Jerusalem (’And did those feet in ancient time/ Walk upon England’s mountains green?’), but anyone who’s seen Blake’s poem in its entirely might shy away from later phrases like ‘dark Satanic mills’. And in any case, Paxman argues, Jerusalem feeds into what he sees as the Englishman’s unsettling and almost pathological glorification of the countryside at the expense of urban life. (Not that I’m saying that O Canada or The Star-Spangled Banner are any better as far as national anthems go, but at least the U.S. and Canada tend to have a vague idea of what they’re singing about. Most of the time.)

In essence, The English is a book intended to make the reader think about the ways in which a country and a culture can define, or fail to define, what it means to be ‘one of us’ vs. ‘one of them’. And with political rumblings about a new Scottish referendum and various demands for an ‘English’ assembly that would stand on par with the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, Paxman’s thoughts about the definitions of a healthy national identity have a good deal of relevance at the present time.

The Political Animal by Jeremy Paxman

First of all, it bears mentioning that where The English was oddly disheartening in its description of the English as a people without a nation, The Political Animal also happens to be oddly disheartening in a slightly different way. It poses a question for which there is no straightforward or even scientific solution: why does modern political life have such a strong appeal to a certain kind of public citizen, and why do so many of these public citizens seem make a complete cock-up of the whole thing once they actually get what they think they’ve wanted all along? And essentially, what Paxman seems to claim in The Political Animal is that a key prerequisite of being a British politician is being mildly insane, or having at the very least something approaching ‘functional’ (in the sense of still being able to function in day-to-day life) insanity that plays a notable part in driving their political ambitions.

Perhaps I’m being a bit too general or stereotypical here. Paxman does bring up some interesting points in his study of what might make an individual want to go into politics. One intriguing point of discussion is the fact that a majority of the British Prime Ministers of the twentieth century were children who grew up without a father figure — and conversely, of those who did have fathers, there was a definite sense of hero-worship and an overwhelming desire to please that particular parent figure at any cost. For example, Margaret Thatcher’s near-idolisation of her greengrocer father’s ‘Victorian values’ points to some deep inner longing to live up to the expectations of the strong image her father created, or possibly a desire to project that longing onto the voting public. Thatcher’s example is only one example of the many that Paxman recounts, and in the vast majority of the modern political figures he points to, he identifies a drive that when looked at from a certain angle would seem to be not quite mentally balanced. (Ambition, passion, crusader-ing, call it what you will, but politicians seem to have it in spades.) And Paxman hints that while it’s true that oftentimes genius and insanity are barely distinguishable, surely one would hope that we could point to our political leaders and cry ‘Genius!’ rather than ‘Basket-case!’?

Truthfully, if one ever wished to marshall facts for a solid argument against going into politics, The Political Animal would provide no end of quotes and examples to make even the most ardent politico shy away from the local council elections, let alone the House of Commons. Paxman specifically laments the growth of ‘professional’ politicians; that is, people who have had no other thought in their minds from their schooldays but to go into politics and to try and climb the greasy pole. Instead of Parliament attracting people who move into politics from another profession where they have some outside knowledge to draw upon — for example, former Labour Foreign Secretary and SDP co-founder David Owen was a medical doctor, which served him at least tolerably well at the Department of Health and Social Security — many modern politicians have moved steadily from their university debating societies to full-time political life without having had any experience of ‘real’ life. Paxman finds that trend disheartening, remarking that spending a lifetime in politics can all too easily divorce an individual from the reality of the life outside. If something should happen in Government (as it so often does), an MP can find himself or herself out of a job and with next to no marketable skills…having never thought about what exists beyond the Commons. The numerous Tory MPs who were ousted in 1997 would probably agree (if only privately) with that sentiment.

Though The Political Animal is primarily a book about British politics, I’d recommend it to anyone who is at all interested in what makes politicians tick. (If you take the author’s word on it, most of them are little more than barely stable time-bombs, anyway.) It’s a fluid and fluent look at a stormy subject, and I found it to be a very refreshing (if occasionally depressing) read.

Friends and Rivals: Crosland, Jenkins, and Healey by Giles Radice

A slight shift away from the Tories and their troubles to the Labour Party and its internal conflicts.

Friends and Rivals: Crosland, Jenkins, and Healey by Giles Radice

The history of the Labour Party in the post-war period tends to be a study in personality conflicts. From the Bevanites vs. the Gaitskellites in the 1950s to the low-level sniping and griping dutifully recorded by Tony Benn, Richard Crossman, and Barbara Castle in the 1960s and 1970s — not to mention the whole of the 1980s — party politics and personal politics seem to go hand in hand throughout. (Small wonder that Tony Blair looked back in horror at his predecessors’ approach to party management.) In Friends and Rivals, former MP Giles Radice has written a study of three of the biggest Labour personalities of their day: Tony Crosland, Roy Jenkins, and Denis Healey. They were in the limelight of Labour politics for nearly two decades, in and out of various Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet posts. Yet Radice’s book is not merely about the three politicians as people, but rather about the way in which their three-way rivalry gradually weakened the Labour Party’s position in the country and paved the way for the rise of the militant left…and Britain’s swing toward Margaret Thatcher’s particular brand of conservatism.

Tony Crosland is certainly known for his stated desire to destroy ‘every fucking grammar school’ during his time as Education Secretary, but his book The Future of Socialism was the Little Red Book for a generation of centre-left politicians. Roy Jenkins was one of the crown princes of the Labour Party during Harold Wilson’s time, with any number of supporters who would have carried him on their shoulders to Number 10 Downing Street, but his determination to see Britain into Europe cost him his place in British politics for the better part of a decade — only to see him re-enter the political scene at the head of the Social Democratic Party in the early 1980s. Denis Healey had the unenviable position of Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1976, when Britain had to go cap in hand to the IMF for a massive financial bailout. He ran for leader of the Labour Party in 1979, only to be defeated by Michael Foot and the growing hard left movement that took control of Labour during that time period. All three men were brilliant in the ways that work best for politicians — Oxford graduates, devastatingly clever debaters, excellent writers and public speakers. Indeed, it’s easy to see how their similarities contributed significantly to their personal differences as each attempted to outshine and out-manoeuvre the other two.

Radice’s book is a very well done piece of research, thorough without being tedious and chatty without being superficial. The lives of Crosland, Jenkins, and Healey are so intertwined that to write about one without the other two would be a very difficult task, and Radice somehow manages to give all three of them equal attention. (My one criticism, and it is a minor one, is that I have a bit of a problem with Radice’s occasional tendency to say, ‘I was there at the time, and here’s what I thought and look how correct I was’, or something to that effect. It’s a small distraction in what is otherwise an excellent account.) I would say that this book is almost required reading for a deeper understand of 1960s and 1970s British politics, particularly with reference to the British entry into the EEC and the conflicts that plagued Harold Wilson’s various Labour Governments. It’s an intriguing study of the politics of personalities — an aspect of political history which remains extremely important no matter who happens to be occupying the front benches or standing at the despatch boxes.

Link: ‘The Prime Minister and His Trollope’

As I was dredging my hard drive earlier today, I came across a PDF file that I’d downloaded and saved more than three years ago and seem to have completely forgotten about since then. Seeing as how it directly pertains to the title of this blog, I’d be a fool not to post it — so here’s the original file at its original location.

Peter Catterall: ‘The Prime Minister and His Trollope: Reading Harold Macmillan’s Reading’ (Cercles Occasional Papers No. 1)

This is the sort of research that I really enjoy — finding some obscure half-detail on your subject and realising that it might be worth chasing after, and then discovering that you can actually produce a tidy piece of research from it. (In typical Catterall style, the footnotes are well worth reading in their own right.)

- SG