Commentary: Hansard, the Abridged Edition?

Lord Solely’s recent Lords of the Blog post on potential reforms included a suggestion of creating a specially edited version of Hansard that might have a broader public appeal: ‘With good editing and with pictures it might sell in the shops and provide people with an alternative to the gossipy and trivial news coverage of Parliament in some of the newspapers.‘

Without reproducing my own comment verbatim, I can safely say that even though I’m about as close to a target demographic as any publisher might wish for this sort of edited version of Hansard, I doubt that I would buy it. Much as I love Hansard as an institution (and would gladly work as a Hansard reporter or editor, if given the chance), I can’t see much of a market for this kind of publication.

What I would love to see, however, is a series of professionally edited Hansard debates on key pieces of historic legislation. The editions would contain the texts of the debates in both the Commons and the Lords, with an editor’s introduction and conclusion, appropriate scholarly footnotes and references for further reading, a dramatis personae of the key figures in the debate, and perhaps the odd photograph or illustration (such as topical political cartoons). Pick six fairly well-known or noteworthy acts to start with — say, the 1911 and 1949 Parliament Acts (a two-part set), the 1944 Education Act, the 1958 Life Peerages Act, the 1967 Abortion Act, and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act — and have that be the first series. All of these acts fall well within the 30-Year Rule, so most of the relevant papers would be available at Kew and in various other archives for consultation. Ideally, the volumes would be edited and written to be well suited for A Level and undergraduate study, or just for the general reading public interested in contemporary history.

I haven’t seen anything of this nature available for sale, but I would absolutely be interested in buying it (or contributing to it, for that matter!) if some enterprising publisher wanted to take a chance on it.

Commentary: Bagehot on the ‘history wars’

A recent article from the Economist’s Bagehot on the history wars among British politicians prompted me to ponder the use of history as a stick with which to beat one’s political opponents.

It’s hard to disagree that hearkening back to past failures is, as Bagehot puts it, ‘a comforting kind of displacement activity….less a way of understanding the future than avoiding it‘. Watching Prime Minister’s Question Time during the Blair years was rather like playing a drinking game, preparing a shot glass in anticipation of the first mention of ‘the shambles we inherited from 18 years of Conservative Government’ or some iteration on that phrase. At some point around 1999 (possibly even earlier), the phrase lost whatever meaning it might have had, and became an almost expected part of Question Time regardless of who was facing the Prime Minister on the Opposition benches. Good for at least one shot in the PMQs drinking game, if nothing else.

I suspect that much of the impetus for the ‘history wars’ comes from New Labour’s own attempts to reinvent itself and distance itself from the problems of the Wilson and Callaghan years, as Anthony Seldon and Kevin Hickson’s collection of articles and essays suggests. Unfortunately, this insistence on disavowing the past seems to have left Labour without much to stand on except its current record, and the Tories aren’t much better when it comes to facing down the demons of the Thatcher and Major years, especially on questions related to Europe. History does make a very good stick for beating one’s opponents, but more often than not it ends up being like the magic cudgel in the Brothers Grimm fairytale that will spring out of its sack and start hitting anyone in sight, indiscriminately, until the right command is found to stop it. At the moment, it seems, no one’s figured out how to make it stop.

The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger

I seem to be on a roll with the Canto imprint reviews, though I think this is the last of the ones in my current queue.

The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger

Traditions, to coin a simile, are rather like onions: if you make a deliberate effort to keep peeling away their numerous layers, you will be left with very little by the time you finish. Fortunately, most people are not overly concerned with peeling away the layers of traditions as long as those traditions seem relatively plausible or promote a favourable history or worldview. As a result, one common means of rapidly strengthening a shaky claim to legitimacy or solidifying a sense of group identity is to actively promote ‘traditions’ that have been developed or invented in the quite recent past. On occasion, these traditions develop into something quite different than their original inventors expected. In The Invention of Tradition, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm and postcolonial African historian Terence Ranger have brought together a collection of essays about how and why different traditions are invented, what purposes these traditions have and continue to serve, and what societies can gain by taking a closer look at the origins of the traditions they cherish so highly.

The contributions in this volume take different approaches to studying the invention of tradition. Some of the essays, like Hugh Trevor-Roper’s history of Scottish Highland traditions or Prys Morgan’s account of the nineteenth-century Welsh nationalist movement, explode the myths of the supposedly ancient origins of certain traditions such as tartan kilts and eisteddfods. Both authors link the Welsh and Scottish traditions with the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, showing how groups of enthusiastic and enterprising individuals all but invented certain ceremonies and trappings out of whole cloth — quite literally, in the case of kilts. Other articles focus more on the process through which certain traditions were invented, describing how cross-cultural misunderstandings about existing traditions (such as the durbar gatherings held by India’s Mughal rulers) led to the creation of entirely new ceremonies designed to provide a sense of continuity between the old ruling classes and the new colonial ruling classes. The books also includes contributions on the effects of invented traditions, such as David Cannadine’s essay describing changing public attitudes towards the British monarchy in response to invented royal traditions like the formal Coronation ceremony and the sale of commemorative objects for royal weddings, births, and jubilees. There is quite a lot to ponder in these essays, and the authors provide plenty of sources for further exploration and follow-up.

The Invention of Tradition, for all its depth, is an undeniably Anglo-centric book. With the exception of Eric Hobsbawm’s contribution on the invention of national traditions in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Europe, all of the essays focus on either domestic (Scotland, Wales) or colonial (India, Africa) traditions of the United Kingdom. It is difficult to say whether the book would have been ‘improved’ with a little more variety in its subject matter, or whether the more narrow focus is preferable because it allows the different essays to overlap and reinforce each other. Regardless, the collected essays in The Invention of Tradition provide an informative and thought-provoking assessment of how traditions are made and perpetuated, and how they often take on lives of their own.

The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot and Left by David Crystal

I have read the Lynne Truss book Eats, Shoots and Leaves, but even though I often agreed with the points she made I found her general tone to be rather obnoxious and off-putting. I enjoyed the following book far more.

The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot and Left by David Crystal

David Crystal is no stranger to the peculiarities of the English language. He has written or collaborated on several books about the history and development of English as a language, including the very comprehensive The Stories of English and the 2005 Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. And as someone who has spent quite a bit of time pondering the English language and charting its evolution, he is both intrigued and deeply disappointed by the popularity of books such as Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, which its author touts as the ‘zero-tolerance approach’ to punctuation. As he remarks, ‘Zero tolerance? That is the language of crime prevention and political extremism. Are we really comfortable with the recommendation that we should all become linguistic fundamentalists?‘ To try to understand the origins of this recent trend in linguistic intolerance, Crystal decided to look into the history of the fight over English usage, the battles that pit the self-proclaimed defenders of ‘proper English’ against those who (for one reason or another) were not exactly prepared to impale themselves upon an upturned semi-colon. The product of that study is The Fight for English, a book that turns an understanding and occasionally sympathetic but nonetheless critical eye on the idea of linguistic fundamentalism.

As Crystal relates, the fight for English is by no means a thing of the recent past; it is almost as old as the language itself. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for example, are peppered with instances of educated people mocking the speech of the uneducated, and vice versa, with both sides claiming that the other has no real understanding of how English works. Over the centuries, various waves of invasion and the steady rise in cross-Channel trade continually brought new words into the English language and sparked arguments over whether these words were proper additions to the language. Revisions in spelling conventions, often carried out by those who wanted to make English words more closely resemble their ancient origins (as in the silent ‘b’ in ‘debt’, to match the Latin debitum), ran into resistance from those who preferred to spell words as they were commonly pronounced — often with regional dialect variations. As a result, the English language was already a confusing jumble by the time the printing press arrived in England, and the rise of print culture, the expansion of literacy, and the sheer amount of printed material produced prompted further calls for standardisation. Various language authorities, including John Hart in the mid-sixteenth century and Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century, pleaded with fellow members of the literary elite to follow particular ‘accepted’ spelling and punctuation styles. Grammar books, mostly based on the Latin grammars that were beaten into English schoolboys’ heads, sought to enforce some sort of order and regularity on a frequently irregular language. As English spread across the Atlantic Ocean, new variations in spelling and punctuation sprang up that continue to cause confusion to this day. And still the language debates continue, with periodic squabbles over comma usage and the best location for quotation marks at the end of sentences…up to the present day, when educators bemoan the rise of netspeak and self-identified language authorities (like Lynne Truss) can find a lucrative audience for their zero-tolerance guides.

Crystal’s linguistic history is lucid, fast-paced, and entertaining, but toward the end of the book The Fight for English starts to dissolve into a rambling authorial attempt to defend himself against the ‘pedants’ who criticise him for having too much of an ‘anything goes’ attitude towards the English language for their liking. One can readily agree that the zero-tolerance mindset is often counterproductive — the very phrase ‘grammar Nazi’ is proof of that, if nothing else. It also tends to breed the sort of tiresome Internet flamewars involving scathing critiques of the original poster’s spelling or grammar in lieu of an actual rebuttal to what the poster wrote. (Is there a Godwin’s Law for grammar Nazis?) Yet it is equally true that attention to the finer points of English grammar, spelling, and punctuation improves the clarity and readability of ideas, reducing ambiguity and suggesting that the writer has taken the time and effort to write well. Arguing over these standards forces us to continuously evaluate the English language and to be conscious of how it is changing — in short, to be more self-critical and aware of what our words and our usage standards convey to others. If, as Crystal claims, the language fundamentalists are useful because they define one end of the tolerance spectrum, then they are also useful because they keep the debate going on some level. At the risk of making an overly Orwellian metaphor, the fight for English will only be truly won when we all use Newspeak — and most any kind of debate would be preferable to that alternative.

Publications: Book Launch Reception

I’ll be in the Washington, DC, area on Tuesday, 15 July, attending the book launch reception for the Encyclopedia of the Cold War at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

I haven’t had a chance to attend many Cold War International History Project events in the past year — the last one I attended was for the launch of Charles Gati’s Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt — so I’m looking forward to this one.

Commentary: Politico’s Great Statesmen Series

I’m sitting on a backlog of not-quite finished reviews at the moment, so in lieu of rushing through the first one in the queue (which is likely to be about Edmund Burke), I’m going to slip in a bit of commentary about Politico’s Great Statesmen book series.

The Great Statesmen series is a line of reissued political memoirs and biographies of various British politicians. I’ve acquired four Great Statesmen titles in the past year, two biography (Francis Beckett on Clement Attlee and D.R. Thorpe on Alec Douglas-Home) and two autobiography (Geoffrey Howe’s Conflict of Loyalty and Denis Healey’s Time of My Life), and I’ve been very satisfied with the series’ production quality and appearance. I do quibble somewhat with the inclusion of Francis Beckett’s biography, which may be one of the more recent Attlee biographies but is by no means the most well-written. (My arguments on this front are set out in a review I wrote for the May 2008 issue of Political Studies Review.) Yet on the whole, it is very good to see a publisher taking the time and effort to put together a quality series of this nature, almost made for collecting by those who are fond of modern political history.

At the time of this writing, the main Politico’s Publishing Web site is not working very well for me. It’s a pity that the Politico’s Web site maintainers haven’t set up a separate section to show off this line, because it’s well worth the Web space. I’ve been able to compile a partial list of the titles currently available in the Great Statesmen line — I may have left out one or two, but these are the ones I have seen offered for sale online and in some bookshops.

Biography
Clem Attlee – Francis Beckett
Anthony Crosland – Kevin Jefferys
Alec Douglas-Home – D.R. Thorpe
Hugh Gaitskell – Brian Brivati

Autobiography/Memoirs
Time and Chance – James Callaghan
Time of My Life – Denis Healey
The Course of My Life – Edward Heath
Conflict of Loyalty – Geoffrey Howe
A Life at the Centre – Roy Jenkins (which I have reviewed here)

Reviews of both the Thorpe and Beckett biographies are in the abovementioned review article, and I’ll be writing a review of Geoffrey Howe’s biography for Political Studies Review in the near future. I’ve yet to start Healey’s memoirs, but when I finish that, I’ll be sure to post a review of it here.

Publications: Encyclopedia of the Cold War

Today I received my author’s copy of Routledge’s new Encyclopedia of the Cold War, for which I wrote two mid-length articles: one on Soviet premier Yuri Andropov, and the other on West German teenager Matthias Rust (famous for landing his hired Cessna in Moscow’s Red Square in May 1987).

Although I’m focusing more on my long-term projects at the moment, it helped to have some shorter pieces such as these to work on. (Even if it does remind me that I have at least three unfinished book reviews waiting in the queue.) As they say, onward and upward.

Politics: A Very Short Introduction by Kenneth Minogue

In 1995, Oxford University Press created a book series called ‘Very Short Introductions’ (which apparently has its very own OUP blog archive for commentary and discussion). Available individually or in aptly named box sets, the intent of the Very Short Introductions is to focus on brief, clearly written surveys of particular topics, eras, events, or individuals.

Politics: A Very Short Introduction by Kenneth Minogue

Politics was one of the earliest publications in the Very Short Introduction series, and was written by Kenneth Minogue, emeritus professor of political science at the London School of Economics. His goal, as stated in the book’s foreword, is to place politics in its ‘historical and disciplinary context’, looking not only at how politics has developed in the Western world since the days of the ancient Greeks, but also how politicians and political theorists have talked about politics and changed both its meaning and its message over the centuries.

A daunting task, for a book to cram a concise overview of this particularly turbulent subject into scarcely more than 100 pages. Minogue does this by stripping out most of the cross-talk that is characteristic of political discourse in favour of focus on a simple, straightforward survey of the development of politics in history, examining how individual citizens respond to the civic life of their societies. Of particular interest is the way in which Minogue explains how Greek and Roman traditions have shaped and continue to shape the vocabulary and terminology on the subject, from the Greek polis (politics, police, policy, polity) and Roman civitas (civil, civics, citizen, civilisation) to their various permutations in different modern languages in the present day. There are a few parts in which the book’s overall clarity seems to become a bit muddled, most notably towards the end of the book when Minogue attempts to define the term ‘ideology’ as distinct from ‘politics’, but that may be more attributable to the generally confusing nature of the overall definition. Even though the rest of the book reads smoothly and quickly, the last few chapters almost demand that readers slow down a bit more and pause for a moment after every paragraph to be sure that they are able to translate the author’s concepts into definitions they can comprehend.

Ideally, the goal of this very short introduction to politics is not to surprise anyone. Most of what Minogue writes is likely to conjure up vague memories of history or civics or politics classes, lectures or speeches or seminars or shouting matches with friends of friends or snippets of ideas from that one book that you know you read ages ago but can’t recall all the pertinent details. Politics: A Very Short Introduction does its best to collect all of these tiny fragments of memory into a single slim volume, to remind readers of things they already know and fill in the fuzzy or missing details that remain. And like all good introductions, it provides a brief reading list of suggested works — both classic texts and modern commentary — for readers to explore further if they wish.

Magic in the Middle Ages by Richard Kieckhefer

More on magic — this topic will probably need its own tag soon enough.

Magic in the Middle Ages by Richard Kieckhefer

Historical and sociological studies of witchcraft and popular belief in magic in pre-Reformation Europe have to consider a very basic question: what exactly counted as ‘magic’ to a person in the Middle Ages? The accounts of witchcraft trials from the period often include macabre descriptions of child murder, crop destruction, and other acts of malevolent magic (maleficium) intended to harm persons or property. Equally, records of murder cases might refer to sinister-sounding methods — an accused poisoner, for instance, might have collected the herbs used for the deed on the night of a full moon, believing that the lunar influence would heighten the plant’s deadly effects. But what about herbalists and folk healers, whose remedies might include special formulaic prayers written on slips of parchment or nonsensical Latin- and Greek-sounding phrases said over a patient? Or the accepted scholarly texts on medicine, philosophy, and history that attributed quasi-magical abilities to notable figures from antiquity, such as Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Pliny the Elder? What of the stories of clerics who dabbled in alchemy or necromancy, or royal advisors who specialised in casting horoscopes, or organisations like the Templars that were accused of practising magic in addition to heresy? How can modern scholars make sense of these different facets of mediaeval magic, where law, religion, science, and folklore all seemed to be jumbled together?

In Magic in the Middle Ages, Richard Kieckhefer examines the complex and often confusing ideas of magic and its uses in the mediaeval world. He draws from a wide array of sources, from court proceedings to household records, to look at the origins of beliefs in magic (most notably in its connections to the writings of the Greeks, Romans, and early Christians) and attempts to differentiate among the various prevailing strands of thought about magic. He sets aside several of the traditional methods of looking at the magic/religion dichotomy — namely the idea that religion focuses on supplication (i.e., prayer) while magic focuses on coercion (i.e., compelling demons to do one’s bidding) — in order to study the places where the two overlap. In doing so, for instance, he describes how Christians beliefs clashed with the existing pagan traditions to produce distinct trends in the magic common to Norse and Celtic literature, such as Scandinavian rune-based magic and Irish tales of saints and secular heroes. The blurry line between magic and early scientific knowledge also features prominently in the text, most notably in his discussion of the influence of scholarly writings from the Arab world and their focus on mathematics and astrology. From popular imagery to persecutions, Kieckhefer provides a basic foundation for approaching the topic as a whole and in parts, and his prose remains readable and lively throughout.

Other reviews I’ve read of Kieckhefer’s book seemed disappointed by what the reviewers seem to regard as his oversimplification of the topic or his inability to produce a comprehensive and rigidly defined account of magical beliefs. It is true that the book relies (quite heavily, at times) on conclusions drawn from anecdotes, even going so far as to include handwritten notes found in the margins of certain books and parchments that indicate a particular reader’s opinion on certain statements in the text. Yet Kieckhefer’s anecdotal evidence and the willingness to be flexible with the evidence seemed to me to better indicate the fluid nature of belief in magic and the often contradictory views that people of the Middle Ages held about what constituted magical power. His scope may be too broad for some people’s liking, but his focus is predominantly on the areas where the boundaries of magic were less than clear and where a more rigid definition might exclude useful but lesser-known sources. For a brief but nonetheless thought-provoking introduction to subject, Magic of the Middle Ages is a sound choice — and for those who may find his work somewhat lacking, Kieckhefer has provided an extensive and excellent list of further reading for curious, dedicated readers to explore.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn and The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue by Michael Frayn and David Burke

Continuing the previous post’s theme of a play by Michael Frayn, here are two books connected to another Frayn play with a similarly historical bent.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (playscript)

The premise of Copenhagen is based on a historical event: in 1941, German physicist Werner Heisenberg travelled to Copenhagen — which at the time was under Nazi occupation — to meet with Danish physicist Niels Bohr. It is recorded that Heisenberg met with Bohr and Bohr’s wife Margrethe, and Bohr and Heisenberg later went out for a walk so they could speak without being overheard by the Gestapo. But when Bohr returned from the walk he was absolutely furious about something, and Heisenberg left shortly afterwards. Though Bohr and Heisenberg had been close friends for many years before that meeting, they barely spoke to each other again after that. The substance of the Bohr-Heisenberg conversation has never been fully explained. Some historians say that Heisenberg was attempting to recruit Bohr to help with the Nazi nuclear energy project (on which Heisenberg was working at the time) in exchange for academic reinstatement and advancement…even though Bohr was half-Jewish. The other, more sympathetic theory is that Heisenberg was trying to give Bohr information about the Nazi nuclear project in the hope that Bohr would be able to pass that information along to the Allies — essentially, that Heisenberg was trying to derail the Nazi attempt to build atomic weapons.

Frayn’s play takes both of these theories and weaves them together, never quite promoting one or the other but (intriguingly) connecting both theories to the principles of physics that both Bohr and Heisenberg were famous for creating: Bohr’s complementarity principle and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. It’s an amazingly complex and multilayered play that only has three characters, Bohr and his wife and Heisenberg, and yet seems to contain many more voices than just those of two men and one woman.

The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue by Michael Frayn and David Burke

The Copenhagen Papers was jointly written by Michael Frayn and by David Burke; the latter played Niels Bohr in the original London run of the play. The subject of the book is an elaborate practical joke that Burke played on Frayn during the run of the play, and the joke is complicated enough to require a short historical background even before I can summarise it. The history hinges on the fact that at the end of World War II, Werner Heisenberg and the other scientists who had been working on the Nazi nuclear energy programme were taken to England and interned at an out-of-the-way requisitioned house called Farm Hall, where they were closely watched and interviewed by British intelligence.

David Burke decided that he wanted to play a joke on Frayn, some kind of joke related to the play that Frayn had written. Burke began by inventing a woman named Celia Rhys-Evans, who had apparently lived in Farm Hall at some point during the 1960s and had discovered a number of documents hidden under the floorboards of the house. These documents were written in cryptic, barely legible German, which nevertheless seemed to hint that the captured scientists had been communicating with each other without the knowledge of their British captors. Burke enlisted the help of some friends to fake 50-year-old German documents, and then (as Celia Rhys-Evans) he sent a number of the faked papers to Frayn, along with a letter that asked if these old papers would be useful to him if he ever wanted to write another play.

Not only did Frayn believe that the documents were genuine, but he also began a correspondence with Mrs Rhys-Evans to see if there were any other documents she might have on hand that dealt with the captured scientists. And thus Frayn and Burke set out on a strange and occasionally journey where one forgery followed another and another. Neither was willing to let go of his side of the story, but as the correspondence continued they both became so immersed in the fiction that the whole thing nearly ended in an exhausted stalemate. In the end, Frayn actually had to be told that the whole thing was a hoax.

The Copenhagen Papers is an account of the whole joke from inception to discovery — the truth was revealed by a sympathetic friend who thought that the joke had gone too far. The book is meant to be an exploration of some of the themes touched on in Copenhagen the play: the uncertainty of history and historical evidence, the ambiguous nature of language, the questions that are raised every time we learn something new about the past and how it may have shaped the future…or in this case, the present. Frayn and Burke clearly seem to have come to an understanding over this incident, enough to write a book about it and treat it fairly dispassionately. And even if my historian side almost can’t help but writhe a little to read about a deliberate forging of historical documents for a joke, The Copenhagen Papers is an intriguing exploration of what it means to be present at the creation of ‘history’.