Blood Lines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism by Vamik Volkan

This article in the Guardian today put me in mind of this review I wrote a while ago.

Blood Lines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism by Vamik Volkan

When writing about international relations, it’s often easy (and tempting) to write about countries as if they were people. Germany didn’t like the way France was doing this, China was upset and therefore — the point is clear enough. By extension, there are times when it is convenient to talk about various ethnic groups in a similar fashion, because the single-mind, single-person outlook makes describing behaviours that much easier. There are quite a lot of dangers inherent in this approach, most of which are self-explanatory and usually boil down to the fact that it’s all too easy to oversimplify matters and not take important but subtle outside factors into account. And yet in accepting this caveat, is it still plausible to look at ethnic groups and treat the group as a distinct ‘individual’ for a different reason? Is it possible, even, to take that ‘individual’ and use a very individual technique — psychoanalysis — to try to understand ethnic conflict from a perspective that’s one step removed from classic models of international relations thought?

Psychiatry professor Vamik Volkan has adopted this kind of psychoanalytial approach to ethnic conflict and international relations in his book Blood Lines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism. Volkan has had very personal experience of ethnic conflict, having come from a Turkish Cypriot family who experienced the day-to-day pressures of living side by side with Greek majority on the island of Cyprus. As part of his psychological fieldwork, he has travelled to various places around the world that are caught up in ethnic conflict, attempting to speak to political representatives, smaller group leaders, and ordinary people to understand and interpret different perspectives on ethnic conflict. And on the whole, the addition of a more psychological context provides a different perspective on the standard arguments that tend to be thrown around in international relations studies.

I suppose the most obvious problem with Voltan’s psychological approach (one that I should mention first off, at least) is that you have to accept a lot of Freudian analysis to get through his arguments — and Freud is one of those authors whose writing is either loved or loathed. Even I had to grit my teeth a bit at some of Voltan’s interpretations that seem to veer a little too close to psychobabble for my liking, and there are times when his analysis seems disjointed, if not unconvincing. But some of the sample psychological profiles that Voltan puts together are really quite good and in some cases almost chilling. His analysis of an ideal terrorist leader, for one, provides a sound foundation for understanding the origins and driving forces of human behaviour — the personal factors behind the political violence. While Blood Lines definitely has its good moments and iffy moments, in general I think that the good parts are enough to make it worth reading and possibly going back to for future reference.

Lady Chatterley’s Trial: Regina v. Penguin Books, edited by C.H. Rolph

A little snip of a book today, from the Pocket Penguin series put out to commemorate the publishing company’s 70th birthday.

Lady Chatterley’s Trial: Regina v. Penguin Books, edited by C.H. Rolph (Pocket Penguin #1)

In 1960, Penguin Books Ltd. commemorated the 30th anniversary of D.H. Lawrence’s death by publishing an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover — and promptly found itself in the dock, accused of violating the British laws that forbade the publication of obscene literature. The Chatterley trial has been called a turning-point in the history of book publishing, and so it seems only fitting that the first book in the Pocket Penguins anniversary series should highlight this incident in Penguin’s history.

Lady Chatterley’s Trial contains selections from the trial transcripts of Regina v. Penguin Books, though perhaps it is not surprising that the book mostly focuses on the arguments for the defence. The opening and closing speeches for the prosecution and defence are included at the beginning and end of the book, and sandwiched in between are the testimonies of a number of notable figures who spoke in favour of publication. The writer and journalist Dame Rebecca West, future Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis, the Bishop of Woolwich, and future Conservative MP Norman St John-Stevas were amongst those who took the stand in defence of Lady Chatterley. The defence counsel’s closing speech neatly skewers a telling remark made by the prosecution at the beginning of the trial — ‘Is [Lady Chatterley's Lover] a book which you would wish even your wife or your servants to read?’ — with a few choice words:

I do not want to upset the Prosecution by suggesting that there are a certain number of people nowadays who as a matter of fact don’t have servants. But of course that whole attitude is one which Penguin Books was formed to fight against…the attitude that it is all right to publish a special edition at five or ten guineas so that people who are less well off cannot read what other people read. Isn’t everybody, whether earning £10 a week or £20 a week, equally interested in the society in which we live, in the problems of human relationships including sexual relationships? In view of the reference made to wives, aren’t women equally interested in human relations, including sexual relationships?

In all, Lady Chatterley’s Trial is just over 50 pages long, but it seems to tell a much longer story in a fairly short number of pages. And whether or not sexual intercourse truly began after the ‘end of the Chatterley ban’, as Philip Larkin so succinctly put it, the case of Regina v. Penguin Books certainly seems to herald the changes in social values and mores that were a hallmark of the 1960s.

Supping with the Devils: Political Writing From Thatcher to Blair by Hugo Young

I have a few non-politics books that I’ve been meaning to post, but I need to go back and make a few quick edits for clarity and style before I put them up. For now, though, here’s a nice collection of writings that I’m always willing to recommend.

Supping with the Devils: Political Writing From Thatcher to Blair by Hugo Young

Hugo Young was a prolific political journalist, who wrote for the Sunday Times from 1973 to 1984 and for the Guardian from 1984 until his death from cancer in 2003. His twice-weekly column at the Guardian provides the material for Supping with the Devils, a collection of his writings spanning the better part of two decades. And I would place him firmly in the category of writers I admire — because even if you don’t agree with what he says, you can appreciate the clear, lucid, and penetrating way in which he says it.

Supping with the Devils is a good representative mixture of Young’s writing. Most of his essays deal with current political events, but not all of them are focused solely on the doings and deeds in Westminster and Whitehall. Young writes about serving as a juror (‘we English probably make good jurors partly because of the diet of whodunnits that contributes to so much of our television intake’), about the murder of Stephen Lawrence (‘the larger effect is more to be hoped for: that whites get deeper into their heads the belief that racial justice is something rather more seminal than a branch of political correctness’) and the fatwa against Salman Rushdie (‘Perhaps it would be a different matter if all this was happening to Jeffrey Archer’), amongst other things. But the essay that really struck me most was possibly one of his most famous columns, published in September 2003, where he blasted Tony Blair savagely for squandering all of the political capital and promise he had held in his hands back in 1997. Young died barely a week after that column went to press, and there’s something heart-breaking about reading it now…there’s a sense that Young knew his time was running short, and he had to speak his mind before it was too late.

I’ve seen numerous comparisons made between Hugo Young and George Orwell. Both men wrote until the very end of their lives, writing with almost manic desperation as if writing was the only thing keeping them alive under the onslaught of tuberculosis (Orwell) and cancer (Young). I suppose it’s no surprise that I enjoyed reading this collection of Young’s writings almost as much as I enjoy dipping into a volume of Orwell’s essays and letters.

The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair by David Marquand

Slipping in yet another history of the political (centre) left in twentieth-century Britain.

The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair by David Marquand

Political writer and former Labour (and then SDP, and then Lib Dem, and then New Labour, and then anti-New Labour) politician David Marquand’s book isn’t as much of a polemic as, for instance, Edmund Dell’s strange and eventful history. Nonetheless, the author does have quite a bit of criticism to direct at the politicians he mentions in this book. The Progressive Dilemma is a collection of interconnected essays, beginning with the ‘ghost’ of Liberal Prime Minister H.H. Asquith and continuing through to Tony Blair and New Labour, that presents a historical assessment of why the centre-left was an electoral failure for so much of the twentieth century. It should be noted that this book is a revised edition of Marquand’s earlier book of similar name, which was published in 1991 and therefore only went as far as Neil Kinnock.

Marquand’s main message, it seems, is that the Labour Party’s long-standing insistence on defining itself as the party of the working-class (or rather, the trade unions) severely hampered its ability to re-orient its policies in lines with demographic and societal shifts. The image of Labour as the party of trade unions worked to exclude many Liberals and liberals (note the capitalisation differences) from joining to the party and contributing to its intellectual and political development…which eventually led to stagnation and electoral defeated. The radical redefinition of Labour’s political programme may have made it electable once more, but the lack of a defineable ideology left it crippled, overly prone to drifting with public opinion and, as Marquand worries, less able to govern effectively.

It’s a complicated-sounding summary, and Marquand’s book is fairly complex. I might argue that it’s not very accessible to anyone who doesn’t have a general understanding of twentieth-century British history, particularly in the context of the forces that shape electoral politics. I also would have liked a few more references and citations in the text (more footnotes generally can’t hurt a history book), but that’s my personal preference in such matters. In the end, though, Marquand’s underlying message is a welcome plea for historical context and balance. He points out the flaws with both neoliberal Thatcherite economics and the socialist belief that economies can be micromanaged and engineered precisely to a government’s standards. Yet he also denounces how both sides exaggerate and inflate each other’s faults, creating a falsely persuasive argument against either the ‘bloated bureaucratic socialists’ or the ‘greedy heartless Tories’. That sort of arguing leads nowhere, he claims — and it certainly doesn’t provide an answer to the ‘progressive dilemma’ that continues to pose problems for British politicians in the early years of the twenty-first century.

1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America by Andreas Killen

Sometimes I come across books with attractive and interesting titles that just don’t seem to pan out to my liking. Here’s a review of one of them.

1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America by Andreas Killen

It’s a mildly redundant cliche to talk about any year as an ‘eventful year’, but 1973 had its fair share of noteworthy events, particularly for Americans. From the Roe vs Wade decision (22 January) to the release of the film Deep Throat (ruled ‘irredemably obscene’ by a New York judge on 1 March), and from the start of the televised Watergate hearings (17 May) to the first shots of the Yom Kippur War (6 October) and the subsequent oil embargo by the OPEC members of the Middle East, 1973 was by any account a year of social and political upheaval. The sights and sounds of that year continue to haunt the American consciousness into the present day — President Richard Nixon’s insistence that he wasn’t a crook, prisoners of war returning from Vietnam, even a controversial new ‘reality TV’ show (An American Family, broadcast on PBS). Add to those events the well-publicised increase in the number of religious cults and airplane hijackings, which would culminate a year later in the iconic figure of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst in the fatigues of the Symbionese Liberation Army, and it might not seem so strange that 1973 was also the year in which The Exorcist made film-going audiences sick in theatres across the country. But why was 1973 so seemingly crazy a year?

Andreas Killen takes the title of his book from a review that rock critic Lester Bangs wrote about the Rolling Stones’ album Goat’s Head Soup, in which Bangs essentially said that the Stones had reduced themselves (or been reduced by their long period of rock-stardom) to a band that was merely going through the motions. But Killen uses ‘nervous breakdown’ in another context to points out what he sees as a number of neurotic undercurrents in American society, revealing a country still shaken by the redefinition of the social landscape that happened in the 1960s. If America as a country really was having a nervous breakdown in 1973, what were the causes? Killen points to a belief that American youth were under assault from corrupting moral influences in films and television, with cults and communes as particular symptoms of their fragile grip on reality. Connected to this is a deep sense of paranoia, exemplified by Richard Nixon’s audio tapes but covering a wide range of fears about America’s position in the world and a powerful feeling of self-doubt — a feeling that would continue to have repercussions on American politics and culture through the rest of the 1970s and into the 1980s.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t enjoy 1973 Nervous Breakdown. Other reviews I’ve read have pointed out that trying to shove the ‘end of the 1960s’ into one single year forced Killen to jam together a number of narrative threads in a way that didn’t do proper justice to any of them. But what bothered me most about the book is the fact that Killen’s analysis seemed to just skim the surface of the year and the time period as a whole. It’s terribly U.S.-centric, which might not seem that big of a flaw in a book about post-1960s America — but to me, that line of thought just seems to reinforce why the book didn’t satisfy. There’s very little sense of a deeper connection to other things that were happening in the world, other trends and and other events that had more of an impact on America in the 1970s than Killen describes in the pages of the book. The general destabilisation of American society that led to many of the events in the 1970s was not purely the result of various social changes and political happenings at home. While Killen did a fairly good job of highlighting many of the symptoms of the 1973 nervous breakdown, in my mind he fell more than a little bit short of diagnosing the causes. For all of the talk about how the culture wars of the 1970s are still being fought today, it’s a shame that a book that tries to explain the ‘why’ leaves out more than a few key contributing factors along the way.

The Lord Chamberlain Regrets….:A History of British Theatre Censorship by Dominic Shellard, Steve Nicholson and Miriam Handley

I’ve been pulling together some research notes on various aspects of political censorship in relation to the publication of Richard Crossman’s diaries, and since I’m in a censorship sort of mood, here’s a book all about the power of blue pencils.

The Lord Chamberlain Regrets….:A History of British Theatre Censorship by Dominic Shellard, Steve Nicholson and Miriam Handley

Censorship is a subject that’s guaranteed to stir up passions, and theatre censorship touches a raw nerve at times. When politicians try to determine what the general public should and should not be allowed to see, one might say that the stage is set for a complicated drama — or quite possibly, a farce. From the early nineteenth century until Theatres Act of 1968, the Lord Chamberlain had the power to licence playscripts for performance in the major London theatres and in other theatres across Britain. Any playwright who was serious about having his or her work performed at a ‘quality’ theatre had to submit the play to the Lord Chamberlain’s blue pencil. Numerous British playwrights found that their works were deemed unsuitable for performance unless they made specific changes to the text and/or content, removing reference to major religious figures or important living persons (particularly the royal family), toning down language or violence on stage, or even altering the nature of the relationship between characters (if homosexuality, for example, seemed to be an issue). W.S. Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan fame took pot-shots at the Lord Chamberlain’s power of licencing in one or two of his plays, and the very notion of having a theatre censor prompted criticism and scorn — either for there being too much or too little censorship of performances on stage. But the power (or the perceived power) of the Lord Chamberlain’s office often worked as a self-censoring device, where anxious playwrights would submit their ideas for consideration and approval even before sitting down to write a script.

The complicated relationship between the Lord Chamberlain’s office and the theatre world shaped the nature of British drama for over a century. The authors of The Lord Chamberlain Regrets… have gone back to the archives, digging through the records of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office to find the actual reports that were written about plays and the comments that were made about questionable content in such key dramas as George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (the ‘profession’ in question was fairly obvious to the audience), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (one audience member who wrote to the Lord Chamberlain to complain about the play described how it had given him nothing but two hours of ‘angry boredom’), and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (described as being like looking into ‘the anteroom of hell’). Yet some entries show the difficulty of dealing with other kinds of potentially controversial subject matter. Such was the case of J.W. Brannigan’s The Life of Christ, with which the censors could find no fault other than the fact that ‘Our Lord must not be impersonated on the stage’…and thus was not accepted for licence.

The book is a very good reference work for those interested in the history of censorship and the individual circumstances surrounding the censorship of certain plays and performances. I think that my lack of familiarity with theatre history was what kept me from enjoying the book more. Then again, not knowing anything about the plays themselves does help me to keep a more open mind about why certain plays received such a harsh treatment at the Lord Chamberlain’s hands. Oscar Wilde (who as might be expected features fairly prominently in this history) once quipped that there was no such thing as a moral or an immoral book; only a well-written or a badly-written book. I’m not so sure that the same can be entirely said of drama, but The Lord Chamberlain Regrets… offers the opportunity to examine just how concerns over morality affected the writing and performance of plays in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half (and a little more) of the twentieth.

The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3, 1946–1996 by Humphrey Carpenter

Various BBC anniversaries in the past week prompted me to dredge up this little review I wrote a while ago. When I was doing my initial research for my undergraduate thesis, I came across a history of British satire boom in the 1960s, written by the late Humphrey Carpenter. I thoroughly enjoyed his writing style, and when I heard that he’d written a fiftieth anniversary retrospective about the Third Programme and Radio 3, I managed to dig up a copy with the help of the Internet and settled down to read it.

The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3, 1946–1996 by Humphrey Carpenter

For those who’ve never listened to it, Radio 3 is a BBC radio station dedicated to classical music performances, opera, drama and the visual arts, and similar programmes, with flexible programming times and no real fixed programming schedule. When it was founded in 1946 under the name of the Third Programme (the other two being the Home Service and the Light Programme), the very idea of having a radio programme focusing entirely on such ‘highbrow’ pursuits and programme ideas was met with no small amount of dissent, ranging from general scorn to outright incredulity. The programme was thought by many in the press to be elitist in nature and overly insular, heavily weighted in favour of the Oxbridge universities, full of self-indulgent broadcasts of ‘dons talking to dons’, unintelligible to the general public and not at all the thing that the average Briton would want to listen to. Carpenter’s book chronicles the constant struggle of the Third Programme’s producers and managers to keep it on the air and generally free of outside interference, along with the many upheavals and internal BBC squabblings that at times threatened the programme’s continued existence. And interestingly enough, he manages to write his retrospective with a good historian’s careful impartiality, rather than a biographer’s subtle prejudices.

The Envy of the World clearly shows that the Third Programme and Radio 3 have always been characterised by constant bickering, inside and outside the BBC, about audience listening figures and the proper tone of radio announcers and the overall place of the arts on radio. It certainly puts a dent in the argument of those who like to bemoan the state of ‘culture’ nowadays, or who hearken back to some mythical ‘golden age’ of a Third Programme unsullied by commercialism or free from outside interference. Carpenter’s writing style is as smooth as ever in this book, and his tone falls somewhere in between a newsreader’s calm straightforwardness and a critic’s nosy sense of inquiry. His access to the BBC Archives was essentially unlimited, far from anything that the average researcher could hope to get, so if you’ve any interest in the history of radio, of the art world, and of the BBC in general, then this book is without a doubt one of the best sources you could hope to find.

English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy by Robert Phillipson

Considering that I’ve studied quite a bit of European Union history, it surprised me to look back through the reviews I’ve written and find that I haven’t really posted many reviews for the books I’ve read on that subject. Here’s one of them, at least.

English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy by Robert Phillipson

It is no secret that over the course of the last century, English has gradually replaced French as the international language of diplomacy and business and even general conversation. One might say that the path to English-language dominance began shortly after the end of World War I, when English and French were used as the official languages of the peace negotiations at Versailles. But with about 20 official languages used in the institutions of the European Union — not to mention the scores of other languages commonly spoken in Europe today — the predominance of the English language has caused no small amount of controversy amongst EU member states. Language is an extremely sensitive subject across the board in Europe, intricately tied to national and regional identities and never far out of the forefront of political and social debate. And while many people in Europe can converse or do business in languages that are not their native tongue, language policy in the European Union is far from cohesive…or even, at times, coherent.

Robert Phillipson is a research professor in the English department of one of Denmark’s largest business schools. His book, English-Only Europe?, examines current EU language policies and makes a fairly convincing argument for the EU to take a more active approach to safeguarding a multilingual Europe into the coming century. The book examines the dangers of leaving general language policy up to individual countries, as well as the problems of merely adopting a laissez-faire attitude toward languages and expecting them to look after themselves. By looking at statistics on language use and language learning both inside and outside the EU, Phillipson considers a wide range of options for creating a more forward-looking set of language policies. Granted, I found some of his ideas a little peculiar — one example being his push for the use of Esperanto as a pivot language in intra-EU communications. Yet most of his suggestions make perfect sense to me: do more to promote and encourage the study of foreign languages and foreign study on all educational levels from pre-primary through post-secondary, look more closely at how non-EU countries manage their language policies (Phillipson mentions Canada and South Africa in this context, as countries worthy of closer study), along with other ideas and suggestions that encourage the learning of another language as a key to better understanding one’s native tongue. And as a native English speaker myself, I am very thankful that Phillipson does not make the critical mistake of completely demonising English, or regarding it as some horrible destructive force that should be feared and shunned in favour of a narrow, insular focus on language defence. The prospect of an ‘English-only Europe’ is not a pleasant one, or one that I would ever like to see come to pass, but the blame cannot be placed solely on the English language and its speakers. A more active and positive approach to the study of other languages has the potential to preserve European multilingualism on all levels — and that multilingualism may very well be one of Europe’s greatest assets in this new, information-driven century.

Reading about language policy is not, I will admit, the most thrilling or engrossing means of spending one’s time unless it happens to be your particular field of study. (It’s only tangentially related to mine.) Phillipson nonetheless does an excellent job of keeping his study in plain English, as the saying goes, and not going off on unrelated tangents or throwing in anecdotes that add nothing to the discussion. I’ve looked through books that make points similar to his in language that appears to be twice as complicated and ten times as unreadable. On the whole, anyone who might be interested in the politics of language and how these kind of politics affect international cooperation might find English-Only Europe? worth investigating.

Chief Whip: The Role, History and Black Arts of Parliamentary Whipping by Tim Renton

And now that it’s the Tories’ turn for their party conference, here’s a memoir from someone who’s had firsthand experience herding cats…or rather, Conservative MPs.

Chief Whip: The Role, History and Black Arts of Parliamentary Whipping by Tim Renton

In political terms, a whip is an elected member of a political party who is responsible for keeping party discipline, ensuring that politicians vote in accordance with the dictates of the senior members of their political party. The whipping system generally does its best to make sure that a Government has enough votes to get its legislation passed — not always an easy task for the handful of whips responsible for keeping their often restive colleagues under control. Whips need to be able to soothe and placate, bully and scold, tempt and threaten, and always keep abreast of fast-changing situations. And because whipping is by its very nature a secretive, clandestine task, not much is known about the thankless and yet crucial position of the person who is responsible for having the ‘whip-hand’, as it were, of his or her political party.

Tim Renton was Chief Whip during the final days of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership (I certainly don’t envy him that position), and his book delves into the complicated history of whips and whipping in British politics. There are pros and cons to having an ‘insider’ write a book about politics, particularly when the insider happens to be writing about a position with which he or she is intimately familiar. The temptation to write a tell-all book or to bore the readers with unrelated anecdotes is almost as bad as the temptation to talk around the subject without actually explaining or clarifying anything. Renton’s book, I think, does an excellent job of writing an entertaining, engaging, and (as far as I can tell) erudite book about the history of the office of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury: the actual title given to the Chief Whip, which allows him or her to sit in Cabinet. There are a number of well-crafted pen-portraits of specific Chief Whips from years past — I particularly enjoyed his section on Edward Heath, who by all accounts was a superb Chief Whip (1955-1959) but who found that the very qualities that made him a good whip didn’t necessarily make him a good Prime Minister. Quite the contrary, in fact.

All in all, Chief Whip helps to clarify a rather shadowy aspect of the inner workings of governments, and does so in a light (if occasionally gossipy) way that makes it a fast and amusing read. The term ‘black arts’ in the title isn’t exactly an exaggeration, either — as Renton explains, there are times when a Chief Whip might well have to resort to a bit of skulduggery when the situation calls for it. But those times deserve to be read about rather than explained by yours truly.

The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War by Peter Hennessy

Yesterday, if I remember correctly, was the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik and the true start of the space race. I don’t happen to have any books that are particularly science-centric, but I’ve been meaning to post this review for a while now — and it takes the whole civil defence perspective of the time period into account.

The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War by Peter Hennessy

Peter Hennessy has combed through and analysed a slew of recently declassified documents that centre on the British government’s plans for what would have happen if World War III actually had come to pass during the Cold War. This topic is always a tricky one for historians to tackle, because too many viewings of Dr Strangelove tend to burn a misleading image in the mind: balding men in suits and cigar-chomping generals sitting round a table in the War Room, looking at the Big Board and listening to some scientist with a German accent talk about ‘mineshaft gaps’ and ‘ten women to every man’. The Secret State manages to present the kinds of stories that keep Strangelove in mind, but also manages to keep the nonsatirical and pathetically human element in mind. The stomach wrenches at the mental image of some unfortunate soul who had joined the Civil Service during the war trying to come to terms with the very real possibility that he might have to leave his family behind to face nuclear annihilation while he followed the Prime Minister into the Cabinet bunker tucked deep in the Cotswolds.

The Secret State touches upon a number of fascinating subjects in its 250-odd pages. The Cabinet reaction to the growing atomic rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union is engrossing, particularly the famous statement by Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in 1946 that Britain could not fall behind in the acquisition and development of nuclear weapons: ‘We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.’ Hennessy also includes several copies of actual Civil Service documents about planning for nuclear attack, and a series of photographs of his visit to the real Cold War bunker in the Cotswolds — including a picture of himself going through the turnstile leading down to the shelters. (The plan to evacuate the Prime Minister and the War Cabinet to the bunker was at one point codenamed ‘TURNSTILE’.) The anecdote that got a bitter laugh out of me was the proposed plan to save the Queen from the nuclear devastation by putting her on the royal yacht and having it set out to sea until it was safe for her to return…presumably to what was left of her shattered country.

I’m always fond of Hennessy’s writing, and The Secret State is no exception. Much of the writing that’s out there on Cold War civil defence history tends to be very U.S.-centric, so it’s a welcome treat to have a well-researched, thoroughly enjoyable, and often thought-provoking account of the various plans in place to keep the government running if the missiles started flying.