I recently read David Friedman's latest book, A Future Imperfect, and thoroughly enjoyed it. He has now posted a series of lectures he has given at different venues, touching on many of the subjects in the book, as well some that were not in the book. Subjects, for example, such as encryption, copyright, how technology is changing legal systems, society, our view of family life, and the like. Definitely worth downloading some of these lectures if you have the time. Ideal for playing on the MP3 player on the way to the office. A definite improvement on listening to the BBC's Today programme, that is for sure.

In the meantime, here is a quote from the book that I particularly liked. It is about nanotechnology and some of the fears people have, including the "grey goo" issue:

"Before you conclude that the end of the world is upon us, you consider the other side of the technology. With enough cell repair machines on duty, designer players may not be a problem. Human beings want to live and will pay for the privilege. The resources that will go into designing protections against threats, nanotechnological or otherwise, will be enomously greater than the (private) resources that will go into creating such threats - as they are at present, with the much more limited tools available to us. Unless it turns out that, with this technology, the offense has an overwhelming advantage over the defense, nanotech defenses should almost entirely neutralise the threat from the basement terrorist or careless experimenter. The only serious threat will be from organisations willing and able to spend billions of dollars creating really first-rate molecular killers - almost all of them governments."

(page 272.)

“If spending on munitions really makes a country wealthy, the United States and Japan should do the following: Each should seek to build the most spectacular naval fleet in history, an enormous armada of gigantic, powerful, technologically advanced ships. The two fleets should then meet in the Pacific. Naturally, since they would want to avoid loss of life that accompanies war, all naval personnel would be evacuated from the ships. At that point the US and Japan would sink each other’s fleets. Then they would celebrate how much richer they had made themselves by devoting labor, steel, and countless other inputs to the production of things that would wind up at the bottom of the ocean.”

- Thomas E. Woods Jnr, in Meltdown: A free market look at why the stock market collapsed, the economy tanked, and government bailouts will make things worse. (Page 105).

This is a marvellous, succinct and pretty devastating indictment of bailouts and an excellent little primer on the Austrian school’s analysis of the business cycle and the role of money. I thought I knew quite a lot about the subject but this book explains the idea of money, as a claim on resources, and the importance of understanding the balance of supply and demand for savings, quite beautifully. The book also highlights how the sharp recession of 1920-21 ended with no bailouts and is an episode that seems to baffle Keynesians.

Rather amusingly, this has been a New York Times best seller, much to the chagrin, no doubt, of NYT columnist Paul Krugman. Krugman, needless to say, believes that the sort of massive government spending seen during WW2 helped end depression. To think that he actually won a Nobel. Oh, wait a minute...

Here is a good-looking study of India, a country that, as we occasionally point out, has been and is playing a much bigger role as an economic power. I am pretty upbeat about India's prospects.

By the way, the review of the book (H/T, Stephen Hicks), makes a passing swipe at the Economist magazine that will gladden the heart of that publication's tormentor, our own Paul Marks.

Madsen Pirie has a new book, 101 Great Philosophers. It's an amazingly compact account of the ideas of those who made modern thought. It's a heroic venture, romping through the giants of Western civilization at a cracking pace which allows only 400 words on each of them. The result is a highly condensed overview of philosophy and philosophers, enough to give even a beginner a working grasp of what it's all about, but with enough meat to interest philosophers themselves in his take on the subject.

It takes a cool analytical brain to do this (which Madsen has), and he has produced a book that will lead many into a subject they had previously only wished they knew more about. I rather think that academic philosophers will disparage it, largely because it demystifies their subject. Their careers are made by writing technical papers for each other that bear little on what philosophy can offer to our lives.

In an age when people demand condensed information they can absorb quickly, I think Madsen has produced a book that delivers the goods. Its available from Amazon, and it's a fascinating and highly informative read.

David Gordon, a US writer, has a good review of a book called, unambiguously, The Case for Big Government by Jeff Madrick.

I liked Gordon's final paragraph, which is worth waiting for. Assuming his review is fairly based, it is amazing how lame, or downright thin, are the arguments for big government. It is a sort of backhanded compliment to the efforts of free marketeers that collectivists should still feel the need to write such works defending their views at all. Whenever we get grumpy and depressed about the way the world is going, it is good to remember that the other side cares enough about our views to want to try and deal with them, however shabbily.

Update: thanks to a reader for spotting my error in the name of the reviewer. My bad. Now fixed.

Books that try to convey important philosophical ideas can sometimes be a bit of a struggle to read. Much as I liked Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged for the sheer sweep of the novel and the way it tackled all manner of topics, I'll be the first to concede that some folk out there will find that type of book a daunting read. But a shorter, and highly engaging, example of something rather similar has been out for a few months now: "Old Nick's Guide To Happiness", by Nicholas Dykes.

I will not give the plot away but to say that Mr Dykes' novel is based in the wilds of Scotland, focusing on what happens when a young man, who is shortly to head off for Oxford as an undergraduate, gets lost and hurt during a hiking expedition in the Highlands, and how he falls in with a rather unusual couple living there. There are lots of discussions of philosophy and ideas along the way, but is done in such a charming way that the reader, whatever their views, will not feel they are being lectured at. Admittedly, if you are a religious fundamentalist, deep Green or hardline collectivist, then this book will drive you nuts.

I have known Mr Dykes for several years and he has been a regular writer for the Libertarian Alliance, among other places. I liked this book very much and I hope Mr Dykes tries his hand at another novel. As he realises, abstract treatises are all very well, but if you can convey ideas through the medium of fiction, with strong characters, a good plot and plenty of engaging detail, it can be far more effective. The Left, if I can be permitted to use that term has long understood this - it needs to be understood by those who work in the broadly classical liberal tradition, too. And the same point applies even more, perhaps, to the world of TV drama and films.

I loved Liar's Poker, and Michael Lewis returns to his old stamping ground of Wall Street to write one of the best summations, in my view, of what happened in the markets leading up to the current woes. I do not buy into all of his analysis but as an entertaining version of events, it is pretty good.

Another good, if flawed account of the problems of the debt-driven economy came recently from Niall Ferguson, the historian. He has good things to say on how the understandable desire for home-ownership - encouraged by political leaders such as Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s - tipped into an attitude which stated that owning a home is almost some sort of "right". If you think about it, paying a mortgage where you own only, say, 10 per cent of the equity is not really ownership, but a form of lease agreement. But I think Ferguson under-plays the role of central banks in the 1990s and 'Noughties in getting complacent over the warning signs coming out of the housing and asset markets, such as gold. He had a recent television series on Channel 4 on this whole process - sponsored, I could not help noticing, by the Cayman Islands - and I was impressed by how Ferguson explained the often eye-watering complexities of derivatives and asset-backed products in simple ways without dumbing it down. Doing good-quality television shows on economics, where so much has to be conveyed by mood and picture, is hard. And Mr Ferguson's modulated Scottish accent is a damn sight easier on the ear than the bizarre inflections of Robert Peston.

This book reviewer says the 1930s were, on the whole, a pretty good time to be British. It is a point of view one does not come across very much, that is for sure. The stock image of the 1930s is the era that saw the rise of the Nazis, the Great Famine in the USSR, the Great Depression, Roosevelt, the Royal Abdication Crisis, etc. But was there more to it than that, at least at home? The book says that British society was in some ways in pretty good shape.

In military terms, at least by the end of the 1930s Britain had evolved what ultimately proved to be a very well organised air defence system, with radar and nifty fighters like the Spitfire. The 1930s was stylistically elegant: the cars of that era looked absolutely glorious.

On the other hand, I would argue that the 1930s was a period in which limited government continued to be under siege and apostles of planning and greater government regulation were gathering momentum, to reach fruition - if that is quite the right word - in 1945 with the election of the Attlee Labour government.

Discuss.

Like a critical, if at times exasperated admirer of the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, I am interested to read books by people who are sharply critical of her work because it is a sign, as far as I can see, that she is starting to attract proper, scholarly attention. That is surely better than blind hatred or for that matter, Randroid hero-worship.

Hence I was quite intrigued when I came across the book, entitled "Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature." Unfortunately, as this review of it at Amazon demonstrates, the author of the book mirrors a trait of the woman he criticises in one key respect: he writes in a state of furious anger and sarcasm, whiich rather undermines his own effort to take her arguments apart. Rand, for sure, was an angry writer - she had a lot to be angry about - but she was often guilty of abrupt dismissals of philosophers one might regard as giants or at least want to consider more gently: David Hume, for instance. And some of her judgements on aesthetic matters make me rub my eyes in amazement. For example, she regarded Beethoven as "malevolent", which is a pretty bizarre comment on the creator of "Ode To Joy", about as unmalevolent bit of music you can ever hear.

But the fact is that in my mind, much of what she stood for and argued about is as relevant and useful now as it was half a century ago. Her impact on driving a libertarian movement, even if she spurned the term, cannot be denied. On art, for example, I find a lot of her ideas very fruitful in explaining why I respond to some works of art and cannot abide some others. I like the way that she understood, for example, the appeal of so-called "bootleg romantic" culture such as pulp thrillers and popular action film heroes and heroines. I think she played an important role in invigorating the Aristotelian tradition in philosophy and has encouraged me to follow this up by reading writers such as Henry Veatch and these fellows. Meanwhile, I keep coming across references from people saying that the present credit crisis and the governments' response to it is something out of Atlas Shrugged. So it clearly annoys leftists that she is still cited in this fashion. The fact that Rand is part of the current intellectual conversation is one reason why I am not quite as gloomy about the state of affairs in this world than I might otherwise have been. Let's face it, had one of her former acolytes, Alan Greenspan, stuck to his early disdain for central banking before he became part of the system, we might not be in this mess today.

This blog looks pretty interesting for critical fans of Rand.

Spitfire: Portrait of a Legend
Leo McKinstry
John Murray, 2007 (first published in paperback 2008), 435pp., £8.99 in paperback

On the strength of Leo McKinstry's excellent book about Geoff Boycott, I bought this book about the Supermarine Spitfire. I didn't find it quite so entertaining as that first one, but I kept reading, and I kept learning things that I didn't know about this famous airplane.

The basic problem with the Spitfire story, as a story, is that almost all of the excitement comes at the beginning. How was it designed and by whom? Once designed, will it be ready in time for the world-shaping, civilisation-saving contest which all readers know will soon erupt? Well, we know that it will be ready, but how? In what numbers? Who were the insufficiently sung heroes of this story, and who the insufficiently damned villains? And, in the great battle, how exactly did it do? That's the heart of the story, and McKinstry tells it well, or at least (to an airplane ignoramus like me) convincingly. But the Spitfire carried on being manufactured right through the war, all the while being speeded up, enlarged, having its shape made uglier, its armaments made fiercer, its range improved, its weight greatly increased, and its task list expanded. Had McKinstry ignored all this later stuff it might have made a more entertaining book, but that would not have been the story of the Spitfire. As it is, the Battle of Britain only ends more than half way through the book, after which McKinstry takes us on a tour of all the other dramas and developments as efficaciously as he can.

I can't hope to tell you whether McKinstry has all the technical details of the Spitfire story right. Go elsewhere for that kind of review. What I can tell you is a few of the things that stuck in my mind after reading this book, which counts for something because it was actually a while ago that I finished reading it.

A big point that McKinstry makes is that the Spitfire was not in any straightforward sense a triumph of the private sector or a simple case of the public sector being rescued by the private sector. Free marketeers of my acquaintance have often made much of the fact that the ancestry of the Spitfire is to be found in the privately sponsored Schneider Trophy races of the 1920s and 1930s, and of a donation that was made in 1931 by a certain Dame Fanny Houston which kept Supermarine's participation in this contest on track at a time when the government reckoned the Schneider Trophy to be too frivolous to bother with in such economically straightened times. But the idea was always to build airplanes that would eventually be paid for by the government, to fight battles between states and in the meantime to threaten to fight battles between states, rather than merely to win privately organised sports contests.

Besides which, there is a huge difference between building a airplane that is merely fast, and one that is fast and can fight effectively against other fast airplanes. The Spitfire was a huge advance on anything Supermarine or anyone else had built only a few years earlier, and the reason it was built was that warriors and bureaucrats in the RAF and in Whitehall decided that they wanted such a airplane. It was in the context of these governmentally expressed demands that the legendary chief designer of Supermarine, R. J. Mitchell, went to work making his masterpiece.

Mitchell's first effort at a fighter airplane, the Type 244 – as it never got beyond being called, looked a lot like the Stuka, especially from front on, with its down and up wings and its clumsy fixed undercarriage. It was not a success, but Mitchell learned fast.

R. J. Mitchell was a type who is perhaps more familiar in our culture, dominated as it is now by computers and computer graphics, than he was in his own, namely the quasi-artistically motivated techy driven by the desire for design elegance rather than just money, immersed in the relevant technology but anything but your boring boffin in a white coat saying dourly why this dull thing can be done but that interesting thing cannot. A friend enthusing about his iPhone reminded me recently that Steve Jobs is a similarly visionary and driven type of person to Mitchell. Mitchell's working world was more like a genius artist's studio than most people's idea of a technological powerhouse. Paperwork was in a state of permanent derangement. The management of subordinates was haphazard and instinctive, involving long periods during which Mitchell was not to be disturbed. The one oasis of calm and beauty and efficacy was the design itself that he was working on.

Between R. J. Mitchell's body and the mind at the top of it there was a similarly extreme contrast, by the time he got around to working on the Spitfire. He did live to see his greatest creation take its earliest flights, but did not live long enough to witness its great triumph in 1940. This was because he had a particularly unpleasant form of cancer which killed him in the summer of 1937, at the age of only 42. I don't recall hearing the words "colostomy bag" in The First of the Few, the movie they made after the war about Mitchell and the Spitfire, but in this book you get a medically clearer and even more depressing idea of what his last few years and months were like, which only makes you admire him all the more.

The making of the Spitfire in large numbers was the story of Mitchell's studio, scrawled large. Throughout the early chapters of this book, we oscillate between the chaos of the various efforts to have the Spitfire ready for the war in time and in numbers, and the raptures experienced by the few pilots lucky enough to fly one of them at this early stage in the story.

If at any point in this book McKinstry actually explained the technological ins and outs of why the Spitfire's beautiful shape made it such a beautiful plane to fly, I missed this, but beautiful it was, both to fly and to look at. In particular, the Spitfire's controls were incredibly responsive, which made it an excellent platform from which to fire guns accurately, despite the Spitfire not being able (for some complicated reason which I couldn't follow) to have cannons instead of more feeble machine guns. But its guns could not have been fired at all if a decent number of Spitfires had not been ready by the time the battle began, and that story, at any rate to begin with, was a nightmare of confusion and incompetence. That the Spitfire was so small didn't make manufacturing it quickly any easier. Too many workers at once merely got in each others' way.

A succession of men, many of them with hyphenated names and with what we would now call anger management issues, grappled desperately throughout the late 1930s with Spitfire production problems. Seriously, the aircraft industry at that time seemed to consist to an amazing degree of double barrelled chaps yelling at each other, either face to face, or on the telephone, sometimes even driving themselves or each other to suicide.

There were various villains in this story, villains because of their failure to realise the potential value of the Spitfire, and because of the then widespread idea that the wars of the future would be won by bombers rather than fighters. The Trenchard doctrine loomed over the 1920s and 1930s much as the updated nuclear version of the same notion loomed over the world from the late forties onwards. The bombers would always get through, and once through would wreak frightful havoc and end the war in a few hours. Many reacted to the promise of the Spitfire much as a later generation of war theorists were to react to the idea of using laser guns to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles. It won't work so why bother? The point is to have your own bombers, so that you can frighten the other fellow's bombers into inactivity. But enough people who mattered were convinced for the Spitfire to be designed, and flown by instantly enraptured test pilots of it, like Jeffrey Quill (David Niven in The First of the Few), and for a large order to be placed with Supermarine.

Which was when the trouble really started. The prototype Spitfire was a wonder, but making lots of Spitfires was something else again. It had an elegantly shaped all metal body, which may have been beautiful to behold and wonder to fly, but was the very devil to manufacture until you were thoroughly used to it.

Especially if you were Supermarine, as managed by people like R. J. Mitchell. A succession of duller but more organised organisers wrestled with the paperwork situation, and with factories filled with random piles of Spitfire parts in random places, and with trying to make sure that, just as a for instance, wings made in this small factory in the south of England would fit onto fuselages made in other small factories, regularly, as I say, losing their tempers with one another. In Whitehall, Air Ministry officials and RAF high-ups fretted, as money disappeared month after month, with very little in the way of finished Spitfires to show for it, and of course, as Hitler's airforce grew ever more menacing.

One of the many Spitfire heroes was Neville Chamberlain. It is now clear that Chamberlain was doing a lot more than merely play for time in his negotiations with Hitler, but to his great credit, Chamberlain did at least understand the value of fighter defence. Way back in 1934 when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he had pushed scarce resources at Fighter Command and at the design effort that would bring forth the Spitfire.

Another Spitfire hero was the suitably double barrelled Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Lord Swinton, Air Minister from 1935 to 1938 and the main political driving force behind the Spitfire programme. All of which was no thanks to Spitfire villain, Trenchard doctrine enthusiast, and Chief of the Air Staff Sir Edward Ellington, of whom Spitfire hero Sir Wilfred Freeman said: “he never made the least attempt to do his job or to get to know politicians. He pretended to despise them, but was in fact frightened of them.”

Another Spitfire villain, but of a very different sort, was motor car tycoon Lord Nuffield. Nuffield grandly promised to build an entirely new Spitfire factory at Castle Bromwich, near Birmingham, and he did. How different, he argued, could mass producing Spitfires be to mass producing motor cars? Very different, it turned out, and for a vital year or two, Castle Bromwich produced nothing but bills and obfuscation. Even if he had been suited to mass producing Spitfires, Nuffield was by this time too old for such a task, but too rich and grand to be sacked.

Until, that is, Lord Beaverbrook sacked him. The story I have always been told was that Lord Beaverbrook made a vital difference to Spitfire production, and McKinstry endorses this orthodoxy. Beaverbrook was definitely another big Spitfire hero. Appointed by Churchill as his Minister for Aircraft Production, Beaverbrook at once started shouting down the telephone at everybody in the proper aviation industry style. McKinstry tells how Beaverbrook once rang up the boss of Supermarine, a man called Craven, at a time when Craven was answering the call of nature. I don't care what he's doing, get him, yelled Beaverbrook. Craven replied, when disturbed in the toilet by the wretched secretary in the middle of this shouting match, that he could only deal with one shit at a time.

Beaverbrook also shouted at Nuffield, and Nuffield decided to put this silly little Canadian newspaperman in his place. Perhaps he, Beaverbrook, would prefer it if he, Lord Nuffield, were to stand aside from the Spitfire programme? Yes, good idea, said Beaverbrook. Exit Nuffield.

No Spitfires were allowed to fight in France in 1940, but come the summer, there were just enough, just a Few, you might say. And the ultimate Spitfire heroes, the pilots, duly won their battle, and their place in history.

I found McKinstry's description of the Battle of Britain particularly interesting, because I've always been interested in that big Big Wing row, as publicised in the movie The Battle of Britain, and which has rumbled on ever since the battle. The most persuasive things I had so far read about this argument have come down pretty firmly against the so-called Big Wing tactic, espoused by 12 Group commander Leigh-Mallory, but vehemently opposed by Park, commander of 11 Group, which was the Group that fought most of the battle, between London (rather expansively defined) and the south coast. Len Deighton, in his book Fighter, for instance, says that the sacking of Dowding and sidelining of Park just after they had won their battle was outrageous. Park's objection to Big Wings, eloquently expounded by Trevor Howard, playing Park in The Battle of Britain, was that large numbers of attacking fighters were all very fine, but that such numbers took far too long to assemble, and by the time they had assembled the German bombers had already bombed. Which was all too liable to mean that they had bombed Park's airfields.

McKinstry doesn't seriously dissent from that judgement, but he does say that Dowding, in overall command, could have been a whole lot more decisive in his handling of this dispute, and a whole lot more flexible in his use of the available pilots and squadrons, than he actually was. The picture McKinstry paints of Dowding is of a backroom bureaucrat of genius, but of a somewhat ineffectual battle commander. Dowding supervised the creation of that famous system of command and control that won the Battle of Britain, and he was one of the first senior RAF officers to spot the importance of the Spitfire, and for that alone he deserves all the garlands he has since had bestowed upon him. But as a day to day battle commander, says McKinstry, he was not the real deal. My take on Dowding, having read McKinstry's take on Dowding, is that Dowding wanted his beloved system to do the job all by itself. For him to tinker with the system as it was doing its thing would be, to him, an admission of the system's imperfection. Which was not really the point, was it? Anyway, fair or unfair, I was glad to read McKinstry's reservations about Dowding, because until now, none of the antagonism that surrounded Dowding at the time has has made much sense to me. McKinstry also expresses reservations about Park, calling him vain and territorial. Basically, McKinstry says that the quarrelling between Dowding and Park and Leigh-Mallory reflected little credit on any of them. The methods they each insisted on might have complemented each other, instead of just being the basis of an ongoing quarrell. Clearly Dowding's system was a wonder, but Big Wings, says McKinstry, had their place. On those occasions, the climactic September 15th battles being one such, when Douglas Bader's huge Duxford Wing was able to get seriously stuck into the Germans, it played havoc with their morale, for the German airmen had been assured that the RAF had been all but wiped out. It was around then that a German famously said: "Here come those last fifty Spitfires", and McKinstry makes that one of his chapter headings. Clearly the feuding British commanders had been doing something very right, to say nothing of the people making the Spitfires.

You can't talk Spitfire without also talking Hurricane. McKinstry reasserts the orthodox view, which states that the Spitfire was better. The German pilots certainly feared it more, much preferring to have been shot down by a Spitfire than by a Hurricane. A few Hurricane pilots who had got used to their Hurricanes but then switched to Spitfires and found it hard to adapt to carried on saying that the Hurricane was the equal of the Spitfire, or even superior. But few others now believe this.

However, the Hurricane did have one huge short-term advantage over the Spitfire. Being made in a more primitive way than the Spitfire, with wood and canvas (rather as I remember assembling model airplanes in my childhood with balsa wood and paint-tightened tissue paper), it was cheaper and above all easier to make. While early Spitfire making stuttered frighteningly, Hurricane building proceeded far more smoothly and rapidly. There were thus Hurricanes to waste in France in early 1940, and plenty more in time for the Battle of Britain. The Hurricane could not have won the Battle of Britain on its own, but without it, the battle might well have been lost. Further proof of the Hurricane's inferiority to the Spitfire is that the Hurricanes were mostly given the job of shooting down the incoming bombers, while the Spitfires tackled the far more formidable fighter escorts. This boosted the kill numbers achieved by the Hurricanes, which was then used by some to argue that the Hurricane was as good as the Spitfire, but of course it proves no such thing.

The biggest difference between the Hurricane and the Spitfire was that the Hurricane was a technological dead end, while the early Spitfires were but the first of many versions. By the end of the war, many thousands of Spitfires had been made, and the manufacturing process, although never easy, always rather unwieldy, soon became as smooth and efficient as it had at first been chaotic. A story I knew nothing about until now concerned the original Supermarine Spitfire factory in Southampton. This was bombed towards the end of the Battle of Britain, but rather than rebuild it, perhaps to see it bombed into rubble again, they decided to disperse Spitfire production into the surrounding area, Vietcong style. It worked. What had begun as a nightmare of disorganisation eventually got smoothed out into a miracle of coordinated effort, much as the war effort as a whole went from absurdity to triumph, albeit at huge cost. And of course, the post-Nuffield version of the Castle Bromwich factory likewise got into its productive stride.

The most glorious and important battle fought by the Spitfire after 1940 was the defence of Malta. There were many crucial moments (I recommend googling the word “Ohio” together with “Malta” if you want to learn about another such) which enabled Malta to hold out and continue to serve as a staging post for supplying the allied armies in North Africa and for disrupting the supplies of the Germans fighting against them. But undoubtedly one of the crucial moments in Malta's wartime story was when the first Spitfires arrived.

Not that the high-ups in Fighter Command (the ones who had replaced Dowding and Park) were much help. It took a scandalously long time for any Spitfires to switch from pointless Big Wing forays across France, to meaningful action in Malta. I recall reading in my long ago youth, in Paul Brickhill's Bader biography, about huge Bader-lead expeditions over France. But why did the Germans bother to attack such formations, and thereby allow themselves to be shot down? I mean, what was being attacked, and what defended? According to McKinstry, the Germans mostly didn't attack and these forays were a nonsense.

Meanwhile, it definitely says something about the Spitfire that its most glorious battle after its first and greatest one was also defensive. The basic task of the Spitfire in 1940 was to take to the air, and immediately to start shooting at incoming attackers, helpfully tracked by radar. That the Spitfires couldn't carry very much fuel was not an insuperable problem. Running out of fuel? Okay. Land, refuel, and then take off again and rejoin the battle. Very hard on the pilots, who would find find themselves flying half a dozen sorties in one day, but basically: doable. The same formula was repeated in Malta.

The Spitfire fought just one other particular battle of significance, towards the end of the war, against the V1 rockets. By the time the V1 appeared, Spitfires had become fast enough to chase after them. But rather than shoot a V1 down and perish in the resulting explosion, the Spitfire would put a wing under the V1's wing and shove it upwards, thus sending the V1 off course. I did not know that.

But the biggest and most important thing, from the war winning point of view, that the later versions of the Spitfire did was to support the allied armies as they slowly advanced towards Germany. They helped to supply that extra dimension of misery to the Germans, by shooting up armoured convoys, wrecking trains, and generally making a nuisance of themselves to every manifestation of Germanity they were able to spot.

Not that spotting from a Spitfire was that easy. Did I mention the Spitfire's engine? This was the great Rolls Royce Merlin, and really, getting on for half the credit for the Spitfire design should go to Rolls Royce, for making the Spitfire possible. But this mighty engine did come with a rather odd price attached to it. It was very big, as fighter engines go, and right bang in the middle of what should have been the pilots field of vision. So, spotting from a Spitfire, if the ground is what you are trying to spot, was not that easy. It also made landing a problem. What they did was come in at a curve, thus enabling the pilot to see where he was going to land past the side of the engine.

This huge engine also made the Spitfire no use as a night-fighter, as the inhabitants of London discovered to their cost soon after the Battle of Britain, when the Germans switched from daylight attacks on airfields and radar stations to night-time attacks on London. The problem was that the Spitfire's engine emitted such dramatic flames and sparks that at night the pilot could see nothing else. That Dowding had nothing to offer by way of defending London was all part of why he got the sack, but it was hardly his fault. He simply didn't have the planes for the job.

Despite such limitations, the Spitfire did perform aerial reconnaissance with great distinction. It is fun, although confusing at first, to read a book where the the acronym PR stand not for the superficialities these letters stand for now, but for photo reconnaissance. What the Spitfire could not do with any distinction at all was protect bombers over Germany. It didn't have the range. McKinstry tells of how a Spitfire was forced to make a landing at a US airbase, and then to beg for fuel to get home, and of how the Americans there laughed out loud at the Spitfire's paltry fuel appetite. Drop tanks were attached, but never very satisfactorily, and besides, more petrol meant less in the way of guns and ammunition. Only for PR did the tanks really work properly, because in that case guns were positively discouraged, the point being to get the pictures back rather than to get involved in any shooting.

So, why did the Spitfire continue to be developed? Why did they not develop other planes more suited to the tasks of war winning rather than merely not war losing? Well, they did develop more planes, such as the Typhoon, the Mosquito, and so on. But entirely new airplanes are hard, and very expensive, to get into production, as the story of the Spitfire itself well illustrates. Every time they were about to forget about building more Spitfires, Supermarine would introduce some apparently rather unpromising Spitfire modifications or apparently minor improvements, and, much to the delight of all the pilots concerned, an extra dose of life would be found in her. Meanwhile, some new airplane which on the face of it had seemed a better bet, for whatever it was they wanted it for, would run into difficulties. So it was that the Spitfire carried on, and on, and on. By the end of the war, both the Russians and the Americans each had over a thousand of them, and the RAF had nearly six thousand. Measured by numbers produced, the Spitfire was the most successful British airplane ever. It carried on in active service into the late 1950s, shooting up Communist insurgents or photo-ing similar efforts by others. The Spitfire continues to delight nostalgic crowds at air displays and ceremonial flypasts.

Talking of finding more life in “her”, the pilots did indeed talk of the Spitfire as a she, and in general as a very sexy machine. And the Spitfire was sexy in another way. There is a bit in this book which reminded me of the passage in The Right Stuff where Tom Wolfe explains how some of America's most beautiful girls found their way to top secret airbases for trysts with the early jet pilots. Much the same went on at Spitfire bases. And when away on leave, any young man with the magic of a set of wings on his uniform, and, better still, who was able to say: yes I am as a matter of fact, when asked if he was a fighter pilot, and: yes I do as it happens, when asked if by any chance he flew Spitfires, was usually well taken care of, so to speak. The young men who flew Spitfires were the alpha males of their generation, much as Grand Prix drivers and Rock Stars are now, the technical back-up for a Spitfire being not unlike what goes on now in the pits at Formula 1 races.

Nor were the Spitfire pilots held back from such pleasures by much in the way of poshly educated reticence, because most of them were not from posh schools. The army had and has posh officers, especially in its posh regiments. But the wartime RAF was much more meritocratic. Could you fly, and when flying, could you kill? That was what mattered. It turned out that most couldn't fly and kill well enough, but that those who could were, socially, a very mixed bunch. Many were definite mavericks, to echo Tom Cruise's call sign in Top Gun, and there was a distinct tendency for the RAF's top guns during the war to be from the colonies, such as the New Zealander Al Deere and the South African Sailor Malan, perhaps so-called because "Sailor" presumably worked so much better than his original first name: Adolphe. Poles and Czechs were also heavily involved in the Battle of Britain, and in the Spitfire story in general, fuelled by a ferocious desire for national revenge.

This book abounds with descriptions by the pilots of their many adventures and near things, my favourite being one when a WAAF who had been doing some maintenance on a Spitfire found herself still sitting on it when it took off. They told the pilot to land, and indeed something did seem to him a bit wrong with how the plane was handling, but they didn't want to worry him by telling him exactly why. She lived to tell her tale, as did many, many more, quite a few of them to McKinstry. In general this book is stronger on human interest anecdotage than in technical explication. There is a definite air in this book of "let's get these stories written down before the people who can tell them to us have all died", and quite right too.

Us Brits now feel a whole lot better about how we contrived not to lose World War 2 at its beginning than we do about the fact that we ended up coming a rather distant third, with our last throw as a military superpower being to participate enthusiastically in the mass incineration of German civilians. Few of us minded this much at the time, but most of us are unhappy about all that now and prefer to hark back to 1940. Yet, oddly, Dowding, who commanded the British side in the Battle of Britain, is not now that well remembered. He was no Nelson with his band of brothers, brotherliness being the exact quality that Dowding so crucially failed to instill into his key subordinates, and nor was he much good at schmoozing with superiors, or with politicians. Dowding, whose nickname was "Stuffy", lacked the knack of eliciting a warm and spontaneous human response. Simply, he was not loved.

But there was nothing stuffy or unlovable about the Spitfire. As McKinstry says, it is indeed odd that the principle weapon of the victorious side in the Battle of Britain is now better remembered than the man who actually commanded the victorious side. Yet so it is, and so it probably always will be. The perfection and simplicity, and sublime individuality, of the Spitfire's shape, and the decisive contribution it made to the victory, will always ensure this.

Oh dear, I too am harking back to 1940. But it is that kind of book, I'm afraid. I found the 1940 stuff very intriguing, and the stuff before it, when they were building Spitfires for the first time, downrght fascinating. After 1940, I continued reading more as a duty, to find out if anything more of overwhelming interest was said so that I could pass it on here. The later chapters of this book certainly have their moments, in Malta, and when those V1s were being shoved off course, by hand as it were. But as I said at the beginning of this review, the beginning of this story is where the best bits are.

A few days back, I pointed out what a collection of dishonest, inaccurate drivel was contained within Naomi Klein's recent book, in which she wrongly accused the late Milton Friedman of, among other things, supporting the invasion of Iraq (he opposed it, as a cursory Google search could have shown her). Jonathan Chait, of The New Republic, a left-leaning US publication, also stamps hard on the woman.

Now, I might disagree with the late Professor Friedman about the rights and wrongs of invading Iraq but what interests me is why some people on the left, and the right for that matter, get themselves so confused about what the likes of Milton Friedman were about. And yet his views are hidden in plain sight, or not hidden at all. He was, in the best sense of the word, a liberal. He opposed the War on Drugs. He opposed military conscription. (Does Klein?). He thought sexual relations between adults was no business of government. He opposed censorship. He opposed robbing the poor of their savings via inflation. He opposed trade union closed shops as injurious to the non-unionised worker. He opposed exchange controls and countless other controls on our lives, of all kinds. He supported school vouchers as beneficial for the children of the poor and politically overlooked. Being the son of poor Jewish immigrants, Professor Friedman was a classic example of the American Dream. His influence on American public life, and the wider world of ideas, was and still is immense.

At some gut, non-intellectual level, Ms Klein knows this. So instead of wrestling with such ideas, she has to create this conspiracy-theory: that free market ideas depend on there being brutal shock events to succeed. Really? Now, it may be true that crises such as hit Britain in the late 1970s may sweep pro-market governments to power, but there is nothing pre-ordained about this. Instead of a Maggie, we could quite easily have elected an extreme socialist government dedicated to total state central planning, as has indeed happened before. Wars and recessions are typically no friend of small government, or of the open society in general.

Ms Klein is a moron. The smarter parts of the left are starting to notice.

I must admit I have tended to view Naomi Klein, the author of No Logo, the anti-capitalist book, as a committed socialist but not obviously a downright liar. If this scathing review of her recent book, The Shock Doctrine, is accurate, then she he has appallingly traduced the late Professor Milton Friedman, accusing him of holding attitudes that he did not actually hold, such as over the recent invasion of Iraq (she claims he was for it, in fact he opposed it). The book, according to the review, reveals that she cannot figure out what the difference between a classical liberal and a neo-conservative is, for example. As the reviewer, Johan Norberg makes clear, a lot of "shock" events, like terrorist attacks, wars and hyperinflation do not work in the interests of classical liberals, but quite the opposite. In Weimar Germany, inflation destroyed much the middle class, helping to pave the way for Hitler. Wars have been used by national leaders to justify big increases in government powers that are often not rescinded. And so on. Klein either knows this, or cannot be bothered to mention it as it does not fit into her thesis.

Anyway, read the review. It is superb.

Apologies: I got the woman's surname wrong, now fixed.

Geoff Boycott: A Cricketing Hero
Leo McKinstry
first published by Partridge, 2000, fully revised and updated edition published by Harper Collins, 2005

Sportsmen seem to be arranged along a spectrum. At one end are those who are so naturally gifted that their careers are, to them and to us, a gift. They don't have to think about it, they just do it, with supreme grace and style. You watch them, and marvel. You think: I could never do that. But glory be, homo sapiens can do it. Because look, he just did it, although heaven knows how. At the other end of the spectrum are sportsmen of relatively average talent, who, by supreme effort and constantly applied strength of mind and character, make the most of what they have, often defeating more naturally gifted opponents who haven't learned to fight until too late. These talent maximisers do better than they have any right to, so to speak. You watch them, and you think: If I tried that hard, I could do that do. You probably couldn't, because you are probably as lacking in the necessary mental strength as you are lacking in natural talent (and they actually have rather more natural talent than you do along with their superior mental attitude), but that's what you think while you watch.

When cricket fans like me think of supremely gifted cricketers, we think of players like David Gower. Gower unforgettably (I watched it live on TV!) hit his first ball in test match cricket for four, as if he had already been playing cricket at the top level for half a lifetime. And when we think of cricketing talent maximisers, the men who make the absolute most of what they have, we think of Geoffrey Boycott.

Because they have to think so hard about their game, the talent maximisers tend to make the best coaches and the best commentators. Having made the most of their own talents, by analysing relentlessly what needs to be practiced and applied on the pitch, and having applied their conclusions with total discipline and single-mindedness, they are ideally prepared to bring the best also out of others with similarly imperfect natural gifts. The talent maximisers are likewise well prepared to explain what's happening to us ignorant onlookers, because they have been analysing this relentlessly for the previous twenty years. Thus it is that Geoffrey Boycott, having been for so long such an effective and successful - if often hideously slow-scoring - opening batsman for his beloved Yorkshire and for England, is now a very skilled coach and one of the world's most effective, sought-after and immediately recognisable commentators.

I don't usually read sports biographies. Niagaras of cliché, most of them. But when I saw the names of Geoffrey Boycott and Leo McKinstry on the cover of what was obviously a widely selling paperback (if it wasn't widely selling it wouldn't have been in the sort of shop I saw it in) I didn't hesitate. McKinstry is a writer already known to me, and probably to many other readers of this blog, in particular for his many Spectator pieces over the years. Boycott is Boycott, still a unique figure in English sport. He is still commentating now on international cricket, in his typically trenchant, no-nonsense style, and in that delightfully immitable Yorkshire accent of his. He is also a man who seems to proceed through the world surrounded by a force-field of controversy and confrontation, in both his cricketing and his personal life. Yorkshire cricket has been plunged into such rows in recent decades that no cricket fan however casual could fail to notice, and nor is any cricket fan like me unaware of the black cloud of tabloid coverage concerning Boycott's trial and conviction for assaulting some woman or other, whom he was having a fling with, or something. Many, me included, used at first to suppose that Boycott was gay, but more recently a very different, very un-gay and now not nearly so private Boycott life hit the headlines. What was that all about? I knew that even at new-in-a-real-bookshop full price this book had to be worth a punt, and I was not wrong.

First things first. It's a good read. Whether someone less excited by cricket and less interested in Boycott would enjoy it, I don't know. Maybe not. But I loved it. It was my holiday reading during a recent trip to Brittany. Travel can involve much waiting around, and your usual diversions are mostly absent. A good book is a necessity, and this one did that trick for me splendidly.

As for the story it tells, the word that keeps cropping up again and again is "selfishness". The chances are that any sportsman who, selfishly, concerns himself relentlessly and successfully with the quality of his own personal performances will be a major asset to his team, but Boycott tested this principle to destruction, again and again.

He did this most notably in the matter of his running between the wickets. Do I have to explain what "run out" means, to Americans, women, etc.? It's probably the one cricketing technicality that you just have to grasp if you are to have any proper understanding of the Boycott phenomenon. (For a general description of cricket, try this.) At any one time during a cricket match, there are two batsmen out there, one at each end, rather than just the one at the one spot like in baseball. When one of the batsman hits the ball out into the field, occupied by the fieldsmen of the opposing team, he and his partner at the other end must change ends if the batsman who hit it is to score a run, change ends twice for two (i.e. go to the other end and then back again), three times for three and so on. But if the fielding side gets the ball back to one of the wickets and breaks them with the ball before the batsman in question has got to his ground and touched his bat down, that batsman is "run out", and has to leave, just as if he had been bowled out or caught or out lbw (don't ask). Running between the wickets therefore requires cooperation and mutual trust between the two batsmen, often with one of them saying yes, let's have a run, and the other just having to hope that his mate has got it right, because if his mate hasn't, then as likely as not he could be the one who gets run out.

And Boycott's running between the wickets was, shall we say, famously variable. This was the one major aspect of the art of batting that Boycott simply refused to master. Oh, he mastered the art of not himself getting run out. But time and time again, the other fellow would find himself stranded between the wickets, having responded to an absurd Boycott call whose entire purpose was to enable Boycott to keep the strike, and have to disappear, fuming, to the pavilion. There he might later confront a totally unrepentant Boycott, or he might decide that it just wasn't worth the bother.

For Boycott, the runs scored by his own team were like a fixed sum. Either he got them or those other bastards in his side did. On one occasion, his opening partner contrived the impossible, and actually succeeded in running Boycott out, in a test match in the West Indies, on a plumb batting pitch. Boycott spent the rest of the day telling anyone willing to listen to his griping that "that bastard is scoring my runs". And if the rest of the team were rubbish ("roobish") who weren't going to get those runs if Boycott didn't, well then, all the more reason for Boycott to drop anchor and bat all day at a snail's pace.

Sometimes Boycott would apologise after running somebody out, in the sense of make a great public fuss of how sorry he was. But McKinstry tells a revealing story of how, having run out some other England batsman in his usual blatantly selfish way that the aggrieved batsman is still sore about to this day, Boycott indulged in a great drama, putting his head in his hands like some ham actor, to communicate to everyone how desperately sorry he was. But close examination of the video record reveals the real story. First, Boycott ruthlessly and calculatingly checks that he himself is not going to get out. Then, realising that the other fellow is now getting out and this is going to make Boycott look very bad, the gears in Boycott's head engage, and the regretful performance only then begins. From the boundary's edge you couldn't spot the deceit. On closer-up video, the ruthless incompetence of Boycott's running between the wickets and his indifference to all the misery he caused to his supposed colleagues, again and again, is clear.

This book is crammed with anecdotes concerning Boycott's sheer nastiness to professional colleagues. He really was not a team player. McKinstry relates how David Gower, having resisted the might of the West Indian fast bowlers at their frightening best for an hour or more, then got himself out to the occasional bowling of Viv Richards and returned, seething, to the pavilion. I could see it coming, said a gleeful Boycott to Gower as soon as Gower was back in the dressing room. You were getting casual! Sloppy! I could see you were going to get out! Exclaimed the usually equable Gower: Oh, put a sock in it Geoffrey. There, says McKinstry, you have it all. Both the perfect reading of the game, and the simultaneous doltishness of parading that understanding at exactly the wrong time, in front of the one person in the world who really does not want to be told about it just now thank you.

My favourite, if that's the word, Boycott-is-a-bastard story in this book concerned a little clutch of Pakistani boys who had gathered outside the back of the pavilion to get Boycott autographs for their notebooks. So Boycott arrives in his car, which is covered in the dust of Pakistan. The boys clamour for their autographs. Boycott says not now, but I tell you what, you clean my car and when I get back you can have your autographs. When Boycott returns, he gets into his now immaculately cleaned car and just drives off, leaving the boys stunned and autographless. What a swine.

The frequent imperfections of Boycott's running between the wickets paled into insignificance when set beside the awfulness of his various attempts to be a cricket captain. The problem wasn't Boycott's grasp of cricket. There was nobody better at reading a game and seeing what was needed. The problem was that Boycott cared far more about his own batting, and about himself in general, than about anyone else in his team, even when he was supposed to be captaining it. If, when captaining, he personally got out for a small score, he would do his usual two hour sulk with his head wrapped in a towel, and if any of the other batsman in his team might have benefited from his guidance about the nature of the bowling or the pitch or the state of the game, well, basically, to hell with them. They were on their own, just like Boycott himself.

Yet through it all, the runs piled up. When Boycott started out for them in the early sixties, Yorkshire had a number of great cricketers in their side, such as the great Fred Trueman to name but one. But as Boycott's career developed, the uniquely incompetent managerial style of the Yorkshire committee, who were apparently a sort of collective Boycott in their man-management skills, resulted in a steady drain of top talent away from the club. Throw into the mix the refusal of Yorkshire, for several decades after all the other counties had abandoned such notions, to make use of any cricketer not himself born in Yorkshire, and Boycott rather suddenly became the only thing that your average Yorkshire cricket fan-stroke-fanatic could feel good about. So even as Boycott continued to exasperate his team mates, the mere supporters adored him more and more. Boycott had made the most of what talents and skills he had, damn the world, and most of the fans prided themselves on doing much the same. They identified with him, and worshipped him. When he batted, he was batting for them.

It was a disastrous cocktail of feelings. Boycott's profound understanding of the mere technicalities of cricket convinced him that he ought to be the captain of Yorkshire and of England for as long as he ever played for either. Yet his frequent acts of nastiness to people who were supposed to be on the same side as him, which was not helped by his alcoholic abstemiousness and general refusal to muck in on the social side, caused him again and again to be loathed by the very people whose support he most needed in order first to get and then to make a success of the captaincy of cricket teams.

Boycott the batsman refused to be deflected by Boycott the captain into playing more for the team and less for himself and for his records and averages. Time and again, a Boycott-lead Yorkshire team would need quick runs, to get batting bonus points or to win run chases, yet Boycott the batsman would grind out his usual pile of slow but now ever more irrelevant runs, watched by colleagues torn between lingering admiration and growing contempt. On one amazing occasion when quick runs were needed, Boycott had done his usual slowcoach act, but this time, when he did finally get out, the next two batsmen just said to themselves: fuck it. Instead of accelerating in the way everyone present assumed they would, they carried on scoring with agonisingly Boycottian slowness, in a spontaneous protest. In such an atmosphere, it is little wonder that such a high proportion of the relatively few half decent Yorkshire players still left buggered off to play for other counties, or even emigrated, to get as far away as possible from the mess. Because, by the nineteen seventies and eighties Yorkshire cricket was a truly frightful mess, as McKinstry explains very well. The Committee, having decided to sack Boycott as captain, found itself humiliated by supporter power, and Boycott was effectively handed control of the entire club. Not that he did anything positive with that control. Yorkshire only got back into the swing of winning county cricket after Boycott retired, or rather, was retired. He probably still had two or three more decent years of batting in him, but by then everyone who mattered, even most of his formerly fanatical supporters, were sick of him.

But, there remain all those runs. You win cricket matches, as our current much admired England test captain (and Yorkshireman) Michael Vaughan never tires of saying, by putting lots of runs on the board and putting pressure on the other side. And Boycott was the supreme run-getter. For a brief moment his total of test match runs was the highest there was, by anybody anywhere. Sunil Gavaskar of India, and since him many others - David Gower included, no doubt to his profound satisfaction - have sailed past Boycott's total of 8114. But test matches are far more frequent than they used to be, while the bowling of Boycott's time was as formidable as test match bowling has ever been, and he opened, remember. McKinstry convincingly argues that Boycott, far from shirking it, as was said at the time by some, was actually one of the best batters against super-fast bowling there has ever been. It was his cussedness and social ineptness that got him dropped for a while by England, not any fear of fast bowling on his part. When he returned, he made centuries against Michael Holding and Dennis Lillee, and opposition teams always rated him very highly, celebrating hugely whenever they got him out.

One of the oddest moments in Boycott's career came near its beginning, when he scored a sparkling, Man-of-the-Match-winning 146 against my own Surrey in the Gillette Cup Final of 1965, much to my mortification when as a teenager I heard it described on the radio. Sparkling? Sparkling? Scored by Boycott? Indeed. He began in his usual leaden fashion, despite this being a limited-overs game. But then the legendary Yorkshire captain Brian Close came to the crease and commanded Boycott to pull his finger out. Boycott denies that Close said any such thing, but Close says he did and I know who I believe, as does McKinstry. What other explanation for such an anomalously rapid and entertaining Boycott innings could there possibly be?

I mention this episode, and Boycott's probable mendacity about it, because just when Boycott's commentating career was getting truly into its stride, an episode occurred which damn near finished it, and what you think about this circumstance hinges on whether you think Boycott is in the habit of telling the truth.

Boycott has always, it seems, had an eye for the ladies, especially glamorously self-supporting and professionally self-driven ones (i.e. the sort who won't become dependent upon him), and has also always had the trick of chatting them up successfully. One such lady had an argument with Boycott in a French hotel room during which she fell and received a bump to her head. It was an accident. This lady was, although glamorous, not at all self-supporting. Badly in need of large quantities of cash, actually. And by the time she had finished embroidering the story Boycott was a violent and misogynistic woman-beater. Worse, far worse, Boycott was convicted of such a crime in a French court of law. It was his word against hers, and another lady, the French judge, took her word for it, as did a subsequent French appeal judge. Says McKinstry of this episode:

Boycott was, in my view, a victim of cruel injustice at the hands of the French judicial system. The evidence against him had been absurdly weak, the conduct of the case farcical. His entire career and public repuation had been disastrously undermined by a woman who had indulged in a form of blackmail, and had been described in the British High Court in a separate case as 'fraudulent and dishonourable'.

The British case being her bankruptcy case. McKinstry assembles copious evidence to back up this damning judgement, damning, that is to say, of the dishonest and money-grubbing woman and of the French legal system that backed her word rather than Boycott's. I believe Boycott's version of these events rather than that of his adversary and tormentor, but not because Boycott never lies, which is what McKinstry rather oddly says. It's all the other evidence that McKinstry lays out that I find convincing. This is the one note in McKinstry's book that jarred somewhat.

That Boycott's commentating career survived this horrible episode is largely because of all the countries where his commentating is admired besides prim and proper England, with its stuffy institutions and pious, pompous, humbug-ridden tabloid press, where even the false suspicion of violence towards a woman gets you cast out of polite society. I knew that I liked Boycott's commentating, but I had no idea, until I read this book, how much he is liked in, for example, India. Here the bluff Yorkshireman act results in giving credit where credit is due, without national, ethnic or cultural bias of any kind. Interestingly, while others have denounced Pakistan's great recent pace bowlers for ball tampering, it is Boycott who has insisted that everyone does it on the quiet. He has also defended Muralitharan's controversial bowling action. The white fellows only complain about brown bowlers, Boycott implies, because they can't play them properly, and the further implication is that he, Boycott, if he were only twenty years younger, would have been able to handle them far better. You can see how this would be popular in foreign parts. The Indians also like Boycott's commentaries because they are clear and direct, unlike many of their rather flowery local wordsmiths.

What I do believe is that Boycott plays the part of the blunt truth-to-namby-pamby-southerners Yorkshireman raised by coalminers and pigeons in a cardboard box, etc. etc. Because, at heart, Boycott is one of life's performers. Once you get that, it all snaps into place. Great with audiences and crowds but relatively bad – often disastrous - with individual people face-to-face. Also, great with the right sort of woman, such as a woman who gets all this and who respects it – often because she is some kind of performer herself. The obsessive preparations for each performance, with the kit and the costume all just so, at first for the batting, now for the commentating. Underneath it all, there is the hope that the performance will be understood as a performance, to which the appropriate response is another competing and contrasting performance, rather than just slinking away and sulking or moaning about the rudeness of the Boycott performance. And all stirred into this is the fear that there is only so much limelight to be competed for and that you have to stake your claim for it, or some other bastard, as likely as not some more naturally gifted and less deserving southern consumer of gin-and-tonic, will upstage you. Don't let him, unless he's proved he's earned it.

It is revealing that some of Boycott's staunchest admirers are often people whom he started out being rude to, but who, instead of surrendering meekly and being content to badmouth him to journalists behind his back, instead read Boycott their own version of the riot act, straight to his face. After that things would often be greatly improved. Many are the "after I said all that I had no further trouble with him and we got on fine" stories in this book. And actually, on the quiet, when he felt at ease with people, with people who weren't felt by him as any sort of threat, Boycott could and can be very kind and generous, depending on his mood. Once his playing career ended, he started to show what a brilliant coach he might eventually have become. Trouble was, the money he could make as a commentator was so huge by comparison that no mere cricket teams could ever match it.

Just as that cloud of French legal dirt was clearing away, not least, I daresay, because of McKinstry's own writings about it all, in the first version of this book and elsewhere, and just as his commentating was getting back on track, another terrible enemy stepped forward to challenge Boycott's character and courage and fighting spirit. Cancer is something of an equal opportunities killer, often picking out the very people who have been most fastidious in their personal and dietary habits. Along with smokers and sunbathers, it grabs those who do not in any way deserve to be grabbed by it, and cancer grabbed Boycott by the throat, literally. The doctors were going to operate but then decided that the risk to the Boycott voice, now also Boycott's fortune, was too great. So, chemotherapy. Horrible. But Boycott battled his way through that as he had battled and batted his way through so many other ordeals, and triumphed yet again. As I say, he is, as of now, still commentating away, giving as good as he gets, mellower now since his recent brush with death, but still the same acute observer of the game he loves and would give almost anything still to be playing.

If you are still with me here at almost the end of this long posting, you can surely tell that the length of it is a measure of the pleasure that this book has given me. I enthusiastically recommend it to all who love cricket and the diverting range of people who play it and talk about it. And if you merely would like to understand cricket, here might be a good place to start.

For me, what Boycott's life illustrates, among much else, is that people who are "selfish" are just as likely, in among all the inevitable bumps and bruises and resentments, to do favours for the rest of us as are the more altruistic souls who think only of others all the time, never of themselves, and whose reaction to someone like Boycott is to back away in horror. Life is not a fixed sum game, and selfish people like Boycott can often enrich it mightily, for the rest of us as well as for themselves. A less selfish Boycott could never have ground out all those runs and all those centuries. A less selfish Boycott would now be reluctant to cut to the often painful heart of who just made what dreadful and perhaps career-ending mistake on a cricket pitch. A less selfish Boycott would have been killed by the cancer that he has, for the time being, defeated, and most cricket fans would have counted themselves the losers, not just the man himself. A less selfish Boycott would have been so much less interesting. Long may his fascinating life continue.

Nice item on the writings of this wonderful author. I remember watching the TV series Shogun many years ago and remember how enthralled I was.

Martin Baker, the UK journalist - he worked for several years at the International Herald Tribune in Paris as one of his stints - is someone who has realised that there is an untapped seam out there to be mined: thrillers about the world of finance. I have often myself wondered why, considering how much news is written about financial speculators these days, that there have not been more novels with speculators and the like as the main characters. There are some exceptions: there is Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of The Vanities; there is, of course, Ayn Rand's great celebration of capitalism in Atlas Shrugged, although the book is more about industry than money-lending. The novel Cash McCall is a neglected 1950s classic. Occasionally financiers feature in other novels but that is pretty much it. As for movies, ask anyone about a fictional presentation of a Wall Street speculator or City buyout king, and they will say Wall Street, with the glorious Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas. And he was supposed to be a baddie, remember.

Mr Baker wants to plug a bit of a gap and he has written a thriller called Meltdown, which came out a little while ago. I picked up my signed copy and a few days ago, I read it. I am afraid I have to say the book comes as a bit of disappointment. If a movie is ever made out of it, it could be toe-curlingly embarrassing unless they sort out some of the plot and characters.

Without giving away a rambling plot, the protagonist is a brilliant young Oxford academic called Samuel Spendlove, who is persuaded to be employed by some shady media types to spy on a bank in Paris, to discover the doings of a proprietary trader who makes gazillions of dollars on deals, to report back on his affairs, and presumably, to bring said shady trader to book. What we get is what I might call the "misadventures of Samuel", a story of a once-innocent academic fallen among knaves. There are sex scenes so bad that I fear for Martin Baker's reputation. And they add nothing to the plot. There is a feeling that we need a least a bit of sex in there to clinch a movie deal for the novel. Much of the dialogue between the main characters is clunky and lacks believability. I have worked in finance and the media and can state without qualification that yes, there are some nasty pieces of work in both, but they do not talk as Martin Baker has them talking, at least not all the time.

Also, the plot does not make a lot of sense, and the central premise: that a single proprietary desk dealer and a few buddies can bring down not just a couple of other banks, but wipe out parts of the global economy, simply does not stand up to scrutiny, although it plays to the notion that bankers are "Masters of the Universe" with deep and dark powers. Of course, there can be spectacular blowups and we are witnessing some of that now, as the recent cases of Northern Rock and Bear Stearns prove, and as Barings and Long Term Capital Management did before it. But the idea that one private bank can cause a major recession seems over the top; to do that, they need the assistance, however unintended, of governments and central banks. For sure, in a thriller, a bit of licence is okay, but you need enough believability to carry the reader along. I do not think Mr Baker quite pulls this off.

Perhaps my biggest disappointment is not the credibility of the plot, but that the character of Spendlove is not quite convincing: he seems too gullible. I never quite believe that such a smart guy could let his media puppetmasters treat him like so badly. We never really find out what motivated his media controllers to act as they did. If I were Spendlove, I'd tell his bosses to get lost and go back to doing something more intelligent instead. He lacks depth; we do not really get to grips with what makes him tick as a character beyond a desire to get some excitement away from the academic world and earn pots of money.

There are good things about the novel, to be fair. Mr Baker knows how finance works or at least he knows about the jargon used around it; he has a good feel for what a dealing room looks like, how people in these places act and he sometimes gets the dialogue right. As a journalist, he has an excellent understanding of how markets move on rumours, how news services like Reuters or Dow Jones cover the news and how bankers' hours get elongated by time-zones. Some of the touches are a bit cliched, but the cliches do not grate too much.

Generally speaking, however, I rate this book as a two out of five, with five as the top score and one as poor. There is a great, contemporary novel to be written that has the doings of financiers at its core and which does not pander to the notion that moneymaking is a zero-sum game. Mr Baker does at least understand, to his credit, that there is a yawning gap in the arts world's treatment of finance. It is a bit of a shame that he has not really filled it. Maybe the next one will be better.

My title of this posting is taken from that fine film, "The Right Stuff", based on the book of the same title by Tom Wolfe. The character who uttered those lines in the movie was Werner von Braun. The reference is to the fact that at the end of the Second World War, a group of German scientists working on the V2 and other rocket systems were captured by the Allies and ended up working on the US space programme, while another lot of Germans ended up working for the Soviet Union.

Via the Andy Ross blog, here's a review of a new book on von Braun.

Of course, no reference to von Braun would be complete without the following song from Tom Lehrer.

In Third Way Britain both the bureaucrats and the nosey neighbours get to spy on you sunbathing nude in your garden.

- A line from a gloriously rude review of an absurd book by our soon-to-be former Prime Minister.

What Sport Tells Us About Life: Bradman's Average, Zidane's Kiss and Other Sporting Lessons
Ed Smith
Penguin books, 2008, 190 pp., £14.99

I rarely buy new books in hardback at full price, because I rarely want any particular book. Usually I am just looking for something that is interesting, and prefer to soften the financial blows by taking my chances in the remainder and charity shops. But something about Ed Smith's little book appealed to me, despite its combination of brevity and a high price-tag. Partly it was that the first three people quoted on the cover saying how good it was were Mike Atherton, Christopher Martin-Jenkins and Michael Brearley, all of them big names if you are an England cricket fan like me, and all people whose opinions I greatly respect. Ed Smith himself is also a name, if you follow England cricket, because he is one of those many unfortunates who played a handful of test matches (his were in 2006 against South Africa), but who was then, somewhat unluckily, discarded. He now captains Middlesex. On the other hand, maybe he won't prove to be so unfortunate in the longer run, because England batting places are now up for grabs again, following several batting debacles in recent months, and Ed Smith, who read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, is just the kind of thoughtful, intelligent type – like the aforementioned Michaels, Atherton and Brearley - whom selectors like to have trained-up and ready to take over as England captain, should they be caught short for one. There are a few broad hints in his book to suggest that Ed Smith has not given up on such hopes himself. He certainly still hopes to play for England again. Meanwhile, I was not disappointed by this book, nor did I feel that the fifteen pounds I spent on it was wasted or bestowed upon an unworthy cause. There are basically two big reasons why I liked it.

The first reason is simply that Ed Smith writes not just about sport, but, as his title suggests, about the psychology, sociology and history of sport, and about psychology, sociology and history in general, merely illustrated by sport, in the sort of relaxedly middlebrow way that I particularly enjoy. Recently I have been doing some teaching, having always wanted to, and there is a lot of the teacher in Smith and in his family. You can entirely see why he is now a county captain.

Smith is, for instance, very illuminating on the subject of what makes a champion sportsman, and what does not. What does not, it seems, is an easy ride in the sport when you were young, fueled by pure talent, but unaided by the strength of character that you didn't need when young, because you were so talented. I recall Geoff Boycott making the same point during a cricket commentary. Boycott said that boys who outclassed their school mates often came a cropper when they moved up to professional cricket, because suddenly they were up against people as naturally gifted as themselves, but they hadn't acquired the mental toughness they also needed. Never having had to fight before, they were unable to fight now. Other less gifted boys, on the other hand, having toughened themselves up with defeats and harder-won victories in their youth, often did better later on. Smith confirms all this so eloquently that I rather suspect Boycott of having read this book himself. But maybe Boycott was just thinking of himself, and of how he personally made the maximum possible use of less that supreme talent, and maybe Smith owes the insight partly to Boycott.

Smith also mentions in particular the younger brother syndrome. Many a sporting younger brother, he says, learned to give of his best, and to prevail against formidable and grown-up as opposed to feeble and youthful opposition, by practicing on his stronger elder brother, in a way that required the maximum possible effort and strength of will. Basketball legend Michael Jordan had an elder brother, for instance, of whom Jordan said: "When you see me play, you're watching Larry." In learning to defeat Larry, Jordan learned to beat the world.

I particularly recommend the bit where Smith tells the story of a certain Billy Beane, who oozed sporting talent when young and who sailed into professional baseball like the superstar that all assumed he would inevitably become, but who, six years later, became "the first player ever to say" that he now wanted to be a scout instead. At which he proceeded to excel! Prepared by the bitter disappointments of his own failed playing career, Beane then became supremely good at bossing the very game that he could not himself play successfully. Struggle as a player, then triumph as a manager, is a pattern repeated in sport again and again. Says Smith: "We never think more deeply than about our profoundest failings. They often form the foundations of our clearest analytical insights." You can see how a bumbler like me, who nevertheless now aspires to teaching excellence, would like that, the exact opposite of the those-who-can-do-those-who-can't-teach cliché. I have reproduced this Beane story at my education blog, here. Recommended, if you do not know this story already, and, actually, even if you do.

Smith also summarises the story of how baseball triumphed over cricket in the USA, which I have copied and pasted here, the point being that there was once upon a time actually quite a lot of cricket in the USA to be triumphed over. It was the Civil War that made the difference, Smith says, because baseball was less complicated for relaxing soldiers to set up and play than cricket. Otherwise the USA might just as well have used cricket to get back at the accursed Brits by beating them at it, in the manner of the West Indians and the Indians and Pakistanis - in fact, come to think of it, in pretty much all the countries outside Britain that now play cricket - rather than by shunning it and playing something else.

I like what Smith says about amateurism. Of course all that nonsense with initials behind your name if you were a professional but in front if you were an amateur was indeed fairly ridiculous (Smith recycles the "F. J. Titmus should read Titmus F. J." announcement that greeted the great spin-bowler Fred Titmus when he walked out to the wicket in his first match, as a professional cricketer). But, perhaps a baby has been lost, along with much snobbish and unjust bathwater. Mark Ramprakash, for instance, is another type of sporting failure, the supremely effective county or provincial sportsman who could not "scale up" to the international game, despite appearing to have all it took and much more. Perhaps if Ramprakash had learned not to take it all quite so seriously, says Smith, he might have made the step-up to test cricket work better. Ramprakash apparently really enjoyed all the practicing he did for his Come Dancing triumph, and was struck by how much everyone else involved enjoyed it too. Maybe if he had made a point of enjoying his cricket more, and his test cricket playing in particular, he might have done it even better.

I really enjoy reading such ruminations, and in general, I consider this book to be a fine addition to the clever-stuff-for-the-intelligent-layman-who-can't-spare-too-much-time-for-reading-but-who-wants-to-be-diverted-and-entertained-in-the-train genre, and its appearance soon in paperback is inevitable, especially given that Penguin is already its publisher. It will be a nice little earner for Penguin as a stocking filler next Christmas, is my bet.

There is another reason why I was happy to have parted with my fifteen pounds for this book. It turns out that, ideologically speaking, Ed Smith is one of us.

Chapter 7 is entitled "Is the free market ruining sport?", and Smith's answer is that far from ruining sport, the seriously (i.e. lashings of money with lots of noughts on the end) free market that has recently emerged in many sports in the age of television has actually brought some interesting and formerly neglected facts about sport to light. The oft-observed way that, in cricket, it is the batsmen who get the knighthoods and the plaudits, but that, on the other hand, it is bowlers who more often than not win the actual games, is supported by what the English counties are now prepared to pay. Effective batsman are relatively easy to come by, and thus relatively cheap, but good bowlers are, if not priceless, then the next best thing, very highly priced, more so than almost all the merely good batters. In American football, the now much freer market in players has revealed interesting facts about who the M(ost) V(aluable) P(layer)s really are. Yes, the quarterbacks of course get paid fortunes. But so too do the hitherto undervalued offensive linemen who protect those same quarterbacks. Very good "left tackles" also now earn comparable fortunes, despite many fans still having to struggle to remember what their names are.

Most revealing of all, ideologically, is Smith's final chapter, which is entitled "Cricket, C. L. R. James, and Marxism". James's famous book about West Indian cricket, Beyond a Boundary, tells of the emergence of West Indian cricket into international prominence, thanks to such legends as the great Learie Constantine (the first West Indian cricket superstar), and then that golden generation of the Three Ws (Weekes, Worrell and Walcott), the spin duo of Ramadhin and Valentine, the uniquely brilliant Gary Sobers, and, just a bit later, the founders of that great dynasty of West Indian fast bowlers, Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith. And James does it not just by writing about the cricket, but about the world that the cricketers emerged from.

Smith notes the current malaise of West Indian cricket, but, making use of the story that James tells so memorably, doubts that it can be easily cured, because the circumstances that made that earlier success are no longer present. Post-colonial resentment and lack of other outlets for intense personal ambition caused West Indian cricket to explode. Neither explosive is now present in nearly such an intense or pressurised form. Merely coaching West Indian cricket better won't be any substitute, Smith reckons, noting that most truly great sportsmen are pretty much self-taught, under only the most relaxed and laissez faire of tutelage (that teaching vibe again), if any. Sporting greatness, in other words, is about individual self-expression, as well as about the social circumstances that stir such ambitions.

Smith nails James as a characteristic twentieth century type, namely the believer in and chronicler of human freedom who nevertheless refuses to see that in calling himself a Marxist he is supporting not a means of liberation but one of the great modern sources of tyranny:

James's book is about achieving excellence in cricket despite being outside the ruling establishment and all its privileges. In fact, that is an understatement. It is about achieving excellence because of exclusion from the ruling establishment. It is about being the underdog, and how that can be more inspiring than being governed by the prescriptive rules of conventional wisdom.

So far so "Marxist", in the class-warfare sense. But then Smith offers another quote about what C. L. R. James's leftist assumptions necessarily lead to when they get into power, from George Watson's The Lost Literature of Socialism:

Socialism necessarily means government by a privileged class, as Lenin saw, since only those of privileged education are capable of planning and governing. Shaw and Wells, too, often derided the notion that ordinary people can be trusted with political choice. Hence the aristocratic superiority of the Bolsheviks, who reminded Bertrand Russell, when he visited Lenin soon after the October Revolution, of the British public-school elite that then governed India. Socialism had to be based on privilege, and knew it, since only privilege educates for the due exercise of centralized power in a planned economy.

Writers about cricket with pretensions towards literariness tend these days to divide either into old school traditionalists in the manner of Christopher Martin-Jenkins, whose fogeyishly antiquated solemnity is often mocked even by other Test Match Special commentators, or else left-inclined 'intellectual' types. Ed Smith dodges past these two stereotypes. He certainly is an intellectual, who likes to mention Thackeray and Wagner and Philip Larkin and Milovan Djilas as well as Bradman and Bannister and Mohammed Ali and Billy Beane. Yet he is neither any sort of blindly traditionalist fogey, not any sort of nitwit about the twentieth century's most mercilessly destructive tides of nitwit opinion. He's read Beyond a Boundary and entirely gets the point of it and entirely rejoices at the wonderful story it tells. But he also sees what is wrong with it.

In the acknowledgements at the beginning, we learn that among the people who read and commented on early drafts of the manuscript of Ed Smith's book was a certain John Blundell. I'm not sure, but I rather think that this is the same John Blundell who is the Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs. On the other hand, this particular John Blundell may be a sports psychology professor of the same name. But if it was John Blundell of the IEA, well done him. Put it this way: if it was him, it makes perfect sense.

I came across this temperately argued but brutal demolition of one of those books purporting to claim that we'd all be a jolly sight better off by letting that misunderstood Adolf H. chap do what he wanted in Europe and Russia and that Britain and those other warmongering Anglos should have minded their own business. The book in question is called Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, and written by Nicholson Baker. The reviewer is Andy Ross.

Excerpt from the review:

"Mr. Baker seeks to rehabilitate the interpretation of World War II advanced by isolationists and appeasers in the 1930s. That interpretation was refuted by history itself. If it was necessary for the survival of civilization to stop Nazi Germany from dominating Europe - from replacing freedom with tyranny, suffocating culture and thought, inculcating racism and cruelty in future generations, depopulating Eastern Europe and turning it into German lebensraum, enslaving tens of millions of Poles and Russians, and exterminating European Jewry - then it was necessary to fight the war."

And:

"A book that can adduce Goebbels as an authority in order to vilify Churchill has clearly lost touch with all moral and intellectual bearings. No one who knows about World War II will take Human Smoke at all seriously".

Now, there are good books worth reading that debunk some of the myths of the war, such as that Churchill was a great strategist (he was not and made loads of mistakes), or that Roosevelt was the same (he was not, and unbelievably naive about Stalin), or that things should and could have been handled far better. There might even be a case for selling the "appeasement" line that we should have kept out of the war, at least early on, or bided our time. The trouble is, that most books I have come across selling the isolationist case, such as by John Charmley, for instance, fall down because they fail really to address how America and Britain could have realistically coped with a massive Russo-German fascist empire stretching from Vladivostok to Brest, murdering millions of non-Aryans, dominating international supply routes, and so on. Now of course, we have the benefit of hindsight. Churchill may not have known that Hitler was embarking on mass murder of European Jewry, although he was more alive to this threat than most politicians at the time. But Churchill had a pretty good idea that very ugly developments would accompany a Nazi empire, and of course had no illusions whatever about what would happen to Europe if Stalin's Russia conquered all of it.

It is just about possible, I suppose, that Britain could have struggled on a bit as an independent nation next to such a monstrous empire - assuming we could have lived with an ounce of self-respect by leaving France and the rest in the lurch. As for America, it could, I suppose, have traded on with its southern neighbours, bits of Africa, Australasia and those scattered nations not under communist/fascist rule, but huge parts of the globe would be hostile, poor, nightmarish places. And I very much doubt that we would now be enjoying those fruits of a globalised trading environment that we unashamedly champion today on this blog.

It makes me smile when a grand new book hits the stores proclaiming a supposedly startling new point of view. One of the oldest refrains has been that Britain is run by a clique of super-rich, well connected folk. Robert Peston, a senior BBC journalist who is probably best known to the British viewing public for his jerky speaking voice (how the f**K does someone with such a manner hold down a TV career?), has written a book which, I summarise thus, complains that Britain is ruled by rich people; they are too rich, should not moan about things like high taxes on non-domiciled residents, should therefore pony up their wealth and be a good citizen. So there!

About as original as a BBC drama repeat on a Monday night, in fact. Peston argues that the wealthy, global elite who can supposedly flit around the world seeking the lowest tax regimes, should jolly well stop being so, well, selfish and pay the same taxes as the rest of us. But he gets the argument totally the wrong way round. The vast majority of the population should pay much lower, flatter taxes, so the rich will not need to act in this way. Problem solved, Mr Peston.

It is the existence of great mobility, of the ability by the rich to find the cheapest tax destinations, that acts, however imperfectly, as a check on the ability of socialist and other high-taxing governments from putting up taxes even more. Why do statist organisations like the OECD and others, for instance, bleat about the existence of more than 40 tax havens like the Cayman Islands, the Channel Islands or Monaco? Do you, dear reader, honestly think that they do so out of a fear about criminals stashing away their ill-gotten gains? Of course not. They are worried about "tax leakage". If you are a leftwing politician or some other brand of political looter, you are not obviously very happy if a lot of people prefer to avoid having their wallets lifted.

Peston's books has its interesting features: he writes about the rich businessmen who supported Blair, for example. But to be honest, even this is not terribly original. As long as politicians have the powers they have, control the budget spending that they do, then businessmen will have an incentive to try to carve out what benefits they can for themselves. Back in the 18th Century, the complaints of Peston would have been wearily familiar.

Ultimately, if we worry about the influence of rich people over public affairs, the solution is to shrink the state, so that filthy rich can do what they do best: making shedloads more money by providing others with goods and services that other people want, rather than engaging in political rent-seeking. And Peston need not worry, as he does, about children of the rich making a mess of their lives by inheriting "too much". If governments did not interfere with trust law as they have, then rich parents could stipulate how and when their offspring inherited and spent money, assuming they inherited at all. If some of the children of the rich do mess up, well, so long as the British economy remains dynamic and embraces outsiders with talent, Mr Peston need have nothing to worry about.

For a multiple award winning journalist, this is not a very impressive book. I am afraid I have to give it a "D".

"Smith did believe free markets could better the world. He once said, in a paper delivered to a learned society, that progress required "little else...but peace, easy taxes, and tolerable administration of justice." But those three things were then - and are now - the three hardest things in the world to find. Smith preached against the gravitational load of power and privilege that always will, if it can, fall upon our livelihood. The Wealth of Nations is a sturdy bulwark of a homily on liberty and honest enterprise. It does go on and on. But sermons must last a long time for the same reason that walls must. The wall isn't trying to change the roof's mind about crushing us."

- P.J. O'Rourke, On the Wealth of Nations.

O'Rourke's book - a New York Times best seller, according to the dust jacket - is a terrifically well-written, concise look at Smith, who wrote not just WoN but also on moral philosophy, jurisprudence and many other things. What O'Rourke does is tease out some of the contradictions as well as the great insights of Scotland's most famous thinker apart from David Hume (the men were both great friends). What is particularly good is that although Smith was considered - not always accurately - to be the great-grandaddy of laissez-faire economics (he did not invent that term), he was much more than that. He was no ardent minimal statist although he would certainly have been horrified by the extent of state power in our own time. He supported state-backed funding of education for the poor, for example. He was not particularly fond of businessmen and some of his comments on the latter's tendencies to collude smacked almost of that fear of big business that later spawned the madness known as anti-trust legislation in the US and elsewhere. He supported a version of the labour theory of value that was ultimately taken to its absurd conclusion by Marx; but Smith being Smith, he was the sort of man who also kind of understood that the value of something is what people will pay for it, nothing else. I suspect - although I cannot prove this - that Smith had the open kind of mind to accept the marginal-utility approach to understanding prices that eventually pounded the labour theory into dust (although not quickly enough to prevent the horrors of Communist economics).

O'Rourke does not spend a lot of time on the personal life of Adam Smith; there is not much material to go on. As O'Rourke points out, the 18th Century did not suffer, if that is the right word, from the obsession with knowing every facet of a person's private life. Of course, some writers in that period told a lot about the personal lives, like Rousseau did although as we know from writers such as Paul Johnson, Rousseau was an incorrigible liar as well as a deeply unattractive individual. In the main, though, what counted was a man's character. And Smith comes across as an agreeable professorial type: famously absent-minded, talkative, capable of great friendship and devoted to his students (and no, that is not code for his being gay).

I was impressed that O'Rourke chose to write this book in the first place. He's shifted his tempo since the early, raucous years of hilarious books like The Bachelor Home Companion and essays hailing the joys of driving a car with a half-naked woman in the passenger seat. As he has got older, O'Rourke has tackled politics and economics in great style and it is funny how his one-liners are as much of the lexicon of political vocabulary as H.L. Mencken's were 50 years ago (he is probably the nearest thing in journalism to Mencken today, give or take some nuances). O'Rourke still cracks great gags, but most of his one-liners have a serious point and are not just showing off. Here's an example (page 148):

"In the eighteenth century the poor had not yet been elevated to their present status as a valuable souce of fads, fashions and illegal drugs."

Or another one (page 98):

"Never complain that the people in power are stupid. It is their best trait."

James Buchan has done more to write about Smith the man, and his book is pretty good, overall. Buchan paints a highly sympathetic portrait of Smith. It is marred slightly by Buchan's strenuous effort to play down the extent to which Smith can be seen as a great advocate of capitalism. True, as I have said above, Smith was no rigid minimal statist, let alone an anarcho-capitalist like Murray Rothbard, but it would frankly be a bit disingenuous to claim that Smith was anything other than a champion of the open market, limited, small, government, low taxes and free trade. Buchan comes dangerously close to fudging the broadly classical liberal thrust of Smith. Yes, Smith did accept a customs and excise job and yes, it is possible to parse the sentences of his great books, take a sentence out of context, and try and dragoon Smith into the arms of say, Gordon Brown. But students of economics writing are not fooled. Buchan's book is certainly a good read; his account of Smith's travels around France in his role of tutor is good. He also writes touchingly on Smith's final years (he died in 1790 just before the full horror of the French Revolution kicked into gear).

It is in fact interesting that some on the left feel the need to try and claim Smith for their side (I write this with the obvious admission that the word "left" is problematical). Socialists can only try to claim Smith by picking on his occasional jibes at businessmen, building up his support for some kinds of public works and so forth; but they then have to skim over his large criticisms of the dangers of overweening state power and his admiration for the wonders of the open marketplace and the division of labour. But was Smith a "radical" and an "egalitarian"? He was radical, true, in the sense of trying to get to the root of things in explaining how an economy worked but he was not a narrow system-builder in the manner of the French Physiocrats. It is hard to spot any of the truculent, levelling tendencies we see from Tom Paine, William Cobbett or other 19th Century radicals. Smith felt that the landed aristocracy, for all its faults, provided many of the wisest legislators; he was on good terms with Whig politicians like Edmund Burke, who of course later denounced the French Revolution. Smith was certainly no democrat in terms of crude majoritarianism and as far as my reading is concerned, he had a horror of socialist levelling. It is true that he recognised the large inequalities of wealth that existed in his time and which were intertwined with the institution of private property but there is no sign that I can see that he favoured challenging property rights, and indeed he felt the ability of people to sell their labour and services for whatever price they could command was a "sacred" right.

Why are some leftists trying to claim the Glasgow lecturer for their side? This may, in part, be the ultimate form of flattery. Quite what this remarkable man would have made of Gordon Brown as he spends billions of taxpayer's money on a collapsed bank is alas, something we can only guess at. I strongly suspect he would have damned it.

As an end-note, I strongly recommend Arthur Herman's book, The Scottish Enlightenment, for an overview of Smith and his intellectual companions, as well as for a look at what happened later on.

This has been out a while and is now available in paperback so quite a lot of eminent historians have already gushed, justifiably, about this outstanding account of the religious turmoil that seized much of western, central and southern Europe between 1500 and 1700. Diarmaid MacCulloch, a senior Oxford academic, has written what I would chalk up as one of the best-ever accounts of this period. He is ruthlessly fair-minded and sympathetic, fighting the urge to make simplistic points (although there is a dry sense of humour throughout). He makes it clear that the Reformation should emphatically not be confused with liberalism; Luther, Calvin and Knox may have inadvertently set in train some of the moves that have led to a more individualistic society but that was not their primary purpose. And although he is justifiably scathing about the horrors of the Inquisition in Catholic Spain and elsewhere, he points out, for example, that the mania for witch-burning occured both in Protestant and Catholic lands (in my own native East Anglia, the witch-hunting obsessions of the 17th Century led to a lot of brutality, for example).

This is the sort of book I wished I could have read while reading history as an under-graduate. It goes without saying that it has relevance for our own time in figuring out what to make of Islamic fundamentalism, among other things.

The Great Before, by Ross Clark. Great little satire on a world after the Greens have taken over.

Bad Thoughts, by Jamie Whyte. Whyte is a philosopher and writer from New Zealand, now living in Britain. This book is a gem; he cuts through the fallacies and lazy thinking of the current age like a knife through butter.

Beau Brummell, by Ian Kelly. Wonderful and at times moving account of the greatest dandy who ever lived. The man who told gentlemen how to dress. I am still not sure I should wear a cravat to work, though. But I do believe that white tie and tails should be de rigeur for men who want to be taken seriously by the ladies.

Ray Kurzweill, the Singularity is Near. A challenging book, but one of those works that is essential reading for figuring out the direction that the world is heading along. The message overall is pretty optimistic.

The Not So Wild, Wild West, by Terry L. Anderson. A fascinating account of the American West and how society evolved. The basic point is that the frontier was more peaceful than the usual images from Hollywood suggest.

Die Trying, by Lee Child. The Jack Reacher thrillers are wonderful. I am delighted I came across him, thanks to reading the blog of Bob Bidinotto.

P.J. O'Rourke and his study of Adam Smith. O'Rourke, when he resists the urge to tell a gag every sentence, is surprisingly good on the great Scottish economist and philosopher.

Light this Candle, the story of Alan Shepard, America's first astronaut. Still in print - you may have to wait a bit for Amazon to get you the copy from its stock - this is one of the best accounts of the amazing men who made up the space programme. Shepard was hard as nails and a sometimes difficult man to deal with, but without his determination to be the best, the progress of the space program would have been far slower.

Enzo Ferrari, by Richard Williams. Splendid account of the man who helped create some of the goddam-sexiest, fastest and most desirable motor cars on the planet.

Dynasties: Fortune and Misfortune of the World's Great Family Businesses, by David Landes. Landes is one of the most interesting writers on business and the process of getting wealthy in the world today.

How to Fly a Plane, by Nick Barnard. I want to do flying lessons when I get the time and the cash. This is a great book to introduce important concepts and has plenty of nice photos to whet the appetite. Now, can I buy an English Electric Lightning or P-51 on e-Bay?

I recently finished reading Jonathan Knee's book, The Accidental Investment Banker, chronicling the period of 1994-2003 during which time our slightly jaundiced writer was working for two of the leading practitioners of mega-mergers and initial public offerings (IPOs), Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. As someone who has worked on the fringes of this world here in London, I could relate to quite a lot of Knee's account. At the heart of it is his argument that investment banks have gone from being supposedly impartial providers of advice for long-term clients to mercenary hired guns willing to pump up any stock, sell any junk bond, to the highest bidder. He wishes to see investment banking give up this sordid activity and resemble the ideals (please try not to laugh) of the legal and medical professions.

This is all written with passion and a lot of detail; if you want to know how Philip Purcell, the former head honcho of Morgan Stanley, plotted to remove rivals or vice-versa, or how investment banks can be open to conflicts of interest, this is the book for you. But at the end of this volume I had no real clear answer to the question as to why a self-declared liberal (in the American usage) like Knee soiled himself working for these ghastly banks doing their ghastly IPOs and mergers at all (sorry for my sarcasm). Or maybe those mega-buck salaries eased the pain a bit (now you are being very sarcastic, Ed). Frankly, to be rude, Knee comes across as a bit of a prig; also, I find his naivete about the world of modern finance frankly a bit hard to take. Banks want to make money and this should hardly be a shocker; if you expect Olympian standards of objectivity from an analyst about a stock that the same bank might be underwriting in an IPO, you should not be investing at all and make sure to get a second or third opinion first. And yes, while there was a lot of hubris in the 1990s IT boom, remember that without the entrepreneurial gusto that that "bubble" made possible, I would not now be typing these words on a laptop and putting them onto a blog. It would not have harmed Knee to have mentioned that point. One might as well write about the supposed evils of the 1840s railway boom in Britain while overlooking that it did, after all, make possible loads of fanstastic railways.

In fact, although there are delusional dreamers, shysters and dullards in any walk of life, I tend to find that investment bankers or hedge fund managers or private equity partners tend to be pretty straight folk on the whole; personally, I find such people to be more honest, hard-working and clever than politicians, although just as prone to the error of sometimes believing their own propoganda. I don't think any of the people that Knee writes about could be as guilty of financial crookedness as the Britsh government has been over its shamefully under-priced bid for the London Olympic Games, for example, which have turned into the mother of all money pits. And Gordon Brown's handling of public accounts while he was Chancellor, putting PFI projects' liabilities off balance sheet, would have landed him in disgrace, as happened to Stan O'Neill, former head of Merrill Lynch, who was kicked out after his firm suffered massive write-downs over the US sub-prime mortgages fiasco. When things go wrong in investment banks, people get fired; in politics, they get another cabinet post.

To be fair to Knee, he does not offer any concrete solutions to the ills he claims have gripped investment banks and he also expresses doubt about the need for yet more regulation; in fact, he even concedes that the legislative reaction to the implosion of the 1990s stock bubble and various accounting frauds have arguably made the job of investment banking even worse in ways that are unlikely to benefit clients. On the other hand, he is far too gentle on Eliot Spitzer, who's bout of lawsuits against financial players, while not without some justification, went too far and have played a part in damaging New York as a competitve place to do business, to the benefit of London.

A big hello to any fellow fans of the late Robert A Heinlein enjoying a lazy, low pressure Sunday afternoon. Jim Miller, commenting on a book review by Nisi Shawl, is about to end all that.

Terry Arthur's 1975 work 95% is Crap was a treasure of my youth (current version is simply called... Crap). I found it a library in Lancing, Sussex one summer holiday whilst staying with my grandparents, and it was a source of both amusement and comfort to me.

Finding a pro freedom, anti big-government book was a rare treat and Terry Arthur's work was the first humorous such work I had ever read. The endless nonsense taught by schools and broadcast by the media is very painful to people who know it to be nonsense. And from my early childhood I understood that what the teachers said and what was broadcast via the radio and television was nonsense. Terry Arthur taught me to sometimes smile at it, rather than to always be filled with a mixture of rage and despair (although I would not claim that I did not continue to be filled with rage and despair a lot of the time). With this personal history I was eager to read Terry Arthur's new work - and it did not disappoint.

Mr Arthur examines, normally with total fairness, the speeches and writings of various politicians, journalists and politically connected academics. It should come as no shock to people here that Terry Arthur shows the "reasoning" of these people to be wildly defective - but he also (and here is his true strength) shows their words to be, unintentionally, very funny as well. The ignorance of the "great and the good" (as we say in Britain) is shown in all its glory. But it is not just ignorance of such things as basic economics. The powerful men and women of our time are shown to have no grasp of how to reason. They are shown to contradict themselves, and their "arguments" are shown to be no arguments at all.

What comes over most clearly is the baseless faith in the state that so many of the journalists, politicians and academics have - even when they are claiming to be wary of the ability of government to achieve X, Y, Z. Also the lust for ever more power that lies under the words of these people is exposed. Many of the economic and "social" projects of the powers-that-be (and their supporters in the press and so forth) are also exposed in all their absurdity. So far most people who visit this site will be united in their pleasure at Terry Arthur work - but there are things that may divide us.

For example, Terry Arthur takes a very hostile attitude towards the Iraq war. However, it is at least consistent for someone who (and with good reason) does not believe that government can achieve anything in many fields, to also believe that government will not be much good at "spreading democracy in the Middle East". And although the source of Mr Arthur's knowledge of the Iraq war is the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, he shows none of the desire to claim that the war is an evil plot to spread an "American Empire" that one gets from some people connected with the institute.

Terry Arthur assumes that the people involved in the Iraq enterprise were entirely sincere in their motives. Which, of course, makes what he sees as their utter failure more amusing. One can say Mr Arthur is being unfair to some people involved in the enterprise. For example, Donald Rumsfeld is mocked for saying that the whole military operation would only last a brief period of time (at most five months). However, Mr Rumsfeld was clearly in favour of a very different post war plan than the one that was carried out. The Rumsfeld view of the post war operation was very much like that of former General Jay Garner (the first person to be in charge after the overthrow of Saddam) - go in and overthrow Saddam (for supporting enemies of the United States around the world), then elections within 90 days and hand over power. And if the Iraqis made a muck up of things - well that would be their problem. However, it was decided to go in for "reconstruction" and "nation building" before elections and a hand over of power. This was very different from what Donald Rumsfeld had in mind - and it did not turn out well.

Still Mr Arthur is not writing a history of the Iraq war - and, he could argue, if Mr Rumsfeld really opposed the notion of "nation building" why did he not resign when it was decided that this would be the policy?

However, there are also things that to Americans at least will ring a false note:

Not things like half of high school seniors not knowing that 87% of ten is less than ten. Terry Arthur has always been wary of "statistical crap" and does not claim that exactly half of all seniors in government schools are totally ignorant of basic math - he is just saying that government education is not good, which is true.

However, when Mr Arthur faithfully reproduces the standard Ludwig Von Mises Institute line that the Republican party was founded simply to rob the taxpayers to get money for big business, an American is likely ask "what about slavery?" It is not convenient for pro-Confederacy people to talk about slavery so they tend to down play the anti-slavery motives of the founders of the Republican party - and Terry Arthur's sources are pro-Confederate ones. Of course, these same sources do not like talking about such things as the Confederacy putting on restrictions on overseas trade (for example demanding that ships using certain ports - which, unintentionally, helped the Union blockade) or that the Confederacy followed a policy of higher income tax rates and more fiat money inflation than the Union did - i.e. that the war was not really about resisting Northern big business subsidies.

Still I am being a po faced over serious person again.

However, there is one point in the book where Terry Arthur does the thing he points at so many of the Great and the Good doing - he says something that is unintentionally funny.

This is where Mr Arthur attacks President Bush for being anti immigrant - for example for ordering the building of a fence along the border with Mexico. As Americans will know, President Bush (wisely or unwisely) showed no interest in stopping illegal immigration for years. Also that he had to be dragged kicking and screaming into approving the fence - and that he still has not built it. George Walker Bush may be many things (good and bad) but anti immigrant he is not.

Madsen Pirie has just had two children's stories published. He says that fantasy and science fiction at the children's level is now nearly all fantasy about elves, warlocks, magic swords and supernatural powers. He prefers writers like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, who followed the rules of possible science.

Pirie's books are Children of the Night and Dark Visitor. These are children's stories, and quite exciting ones, too. The thing that strikes you is how much action there is. There are no long-winded asides. Stuff just keeps happening. The other thing is that both are very visual – you can't help visualizing. I wonder if he's after the movie rights.

I read Children of the Night first. Interestingly, it looks like fantasy, set in an alternative earth with barons and bishops. However this one has flying machines (the excellent dragonflies) and blue power globes. It is science fiction dressed as fantasy, and it sweeps you along. I liked the rat. Normally a kid with a pet is the superior partner, but not here; the rat is smarter. There's a great climax as the characters ride out the blast of an anti-matter bomb from a sailing ship. The ending hints at a sequel, which I hope happens because I got to like the characters.

I liked Dark Visitor better. It's hard SF and makes particle physics into child's play. There's a terrific build-up of tension as the mysterious dark ship is probed, and the story rattles along as some of its secrets come out. I liked the kid with attitude, the sleeping stranger who's been on a cycle of deep space missions. This book has some great one-liners, and every chapter ends on a line that makes you turn the page. I found the ending very satisfying.

There's a lot here for adults as well as the target audience of 13 year-olds. I suppose if he turns out books like this regularly, he might build up a following. Children are serial readers of authors they like, and there's enough in these to attract a following.

This guy does not like the Joseph Heller book, Catch 22, one little bit, and gives a decent takedown of the book:

This is by intention a humorous book, a work of social satire. But it consists of basically the same joke over and over again: military people are evil and stupid. They are also stupid and evil. (Did I mention that they are evil? Also stupid?) I found this pretty clever and amusing for about the first twenty pages. But by that time I still had about 450 pages more to go, and the rest of it wasn’t any fun at all.

Absolutely. The problem with such books is that they were written to appeal to folk who no doubt thought that military people were and are inherently ridiculous. In that sense, Heller succeeded: I can think of dozens of lefty acquaintances of mine who have Catch 22 on their bookshelves but they would not be seen dead reading Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, or for that matter, the Sharpe novels of Richard Cornwell.

But as Lester Hunt, the reviewer, goes on to argue, if Heller really wanted to show some guts as a novelist, he should have attacked the whole idea of WW2 rather than target the lunacies of military bureaucracy (admittedly a fair target). But then, he would have to argue that it would have been better to let a certain A. Hitler and Co. tyrannise Europe and Asia, with all that would flow from that. Tricky, no?

Perhaps more generously, Heller and other writers of a similar ilk - Kurt Vonnegut springs to mind - might have had enough of reading about the feats of "The Greatest Generation" and rebelled. Perhaps some of this was necessary and right; Heller's book and others of its type hit a receptive audience. Published in 1961, Catch 22 was bound to gain a more avid following from readers increasingly disenchanted with the Vietnam campaign. Heller caught the mood of the times well.

But it is an over-rated book in my opinion, and it is occasionally reassuring to realise that one is not alone in holding that sort of view.

I enjoy the seafaring fiction of writers like CS Forester, creator of Horatio Hornblower, the Jack Aubrey stories of Patrick O'Brien and similar fare. Over the years of reading such books, I realised of course that much of this fiction was based on the real characters who fought in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic war. There are number of them worth mentioning, such as Edward Pellew, the brilliant west countryman; William Sydney Smith, Philip Broke, and many more. And of course there is Lord Nelson himself, a man who has been much written about, with a fresh flurry of books written in 2005 to mark the 200th anniversary of Trafalgar and his destruction of the Franco-Spanish fleet off Cadiz.

If there is one character, however, who comes close to being the main inspiration for the fiction writers, it has to be Thomas Cochrane. Neglected as a biographical subject for many years, he has become a talking-point again, and Robert Harvey's biography of the man, written a few years ago, is a cracking read. I have finally found the time to read it and have rarely been so enthralled by the brilliance, bravery and sheer daring of a real-life character. The son of a hard-up Scottish aristocrat, Cochrane went to sea at what was then the relatively late age of 17 (it was common for young boys to join much earlier). Within a few years, his promise became apparent and he was promoted. By his early 20s, Cochrane was a commander of flair, commanding his little ship, Speedy, in a series of engagements, frequently taking on much larger vessels and using his skill and trickery to beat them.

A few years after Trafalgar - in which he did not take part - Cochrane, who was not a popular man with his jealous and pompous Admiralty governors, led a fireship raid on the west coast of France. Although the raid was a general success, several ships that could and should have been destroyed were left intact because the admiral in overall charge of the operation, Lord Gambier, was over-cautious to the point, arguably, of cowardice. Cochrane later made harsh comments about Gambier and the whole affair ended up in a very unpleasant courts martial. Cochrane's public career went into freefall; he was framed in a fraud case and sent to jail. He had a political career as a radical MP; and later, in an astonishing revival of his naval career, Cochrane went south to help form the Chilean navy, and played a full part in the overthrow of the old Spanish empire. He lived to a ripe and contented old age.

If Cochrane had his weaknesses to balance his many good points - he was a humane leader and loathed the barbaric naval practice of flogging - they were a large measure of vanity, a hot temper and inability to suffer fools gladly. Harvey's biography of Cochrane very fairly draws out these points, but at no point does Harvey succumb to the tedious modern mania for showing that any extraordinary person has feet of clay. Cochrane was treated appallingly by many people, who were frequently ungrateful and uncomprehending of the skills needed to guide sailing ships in conditions of war. (One of his trademarks was sailing raids at night, often in treacherous condtions without modern navigation aids like radar).

When, back in 2005, I walked about HMS Victory at Portsmouth, and imagined what it must have been like to sail such wooden ships into battle, with all the discomforts, brutal discipline and harshness of such life, it made me feel very humble indeed. The naval men of Nelson and Cochrane's age were a remarkable generation, the likes of whom we will probably never see again.

One of the more interesting additions to the invasion narrative, that school of imagination which dreams a world of Britain conquered, invaded and changed, has been D C Alden's self-published book, Invasion. The interest lies in the confused concoction that forms a fictionalisation of the Eurabian nightmare, the creation of a West Islam. As the blurb indicates, the imagined consequences are radical:

Britain is no more, reduced to a mere satellite state at the far western fringes of the Arabian empire, a vast domain that stretches from the dark borders of Scotland to the Chinese frontier where war still rages. London is a walled city again, its war-damaged historical buildings demolished and replaced with bronze statues, marbled mosques and landscaped memorial gardens, all celebrating the overthrow of western civilization in Europe. The city is a hub of Islamic power, a power that enslaves the British people to a life of servitude and confines them to crumbling, weed-choked suburbs outside the city.

The author acknowledges in his foreword that the script was originally written for film, and the novelisation is kitted out for adaptation to the screen. We have all of the props of the disaster novel but not of the disaster movie: an ensemble caste, cut and paste following different characters, and no protagonist to focus upon. The rag-bag conceptualisation, the overwhelming infodumps, the lack of an editor (weighing in at 641 pages) detract from the interesting kernel of a better novel. Alden can write and he can probably write better than this.

The major problem of the novel is the lack of plausibility. Whereas the invasion narrative is described as the juxtaposition of an ideologically unified Islam, politically united in a militarised and jihadist Arabia following its imperialist path, invading a supine, decadent and pacifistic Europe, the development of such a power would have caused some geopolitical concern, and downplays the Shi'a Sunni division. The United States gains energy security through the use of alien technology from Roswell. Hence, the thriller enters the realm of the unreal.

Such implausibility may reflect the sources of this cultural anxiety, of which Eurabia is a political extension. If we consider the stories told about Islamic invasion, the two most recent examples stem from chiliastic Christian fundamentalism or representations of other prophecies such as Nostradamus. These have often pictured a united Islam invading Europe with the final Pope dying in France, fulfilling Malachy's prophecy, another fateful addition to the brew.

In the wake of Pakistan going nuclear in May, 1998, Muslim countries have, now, an easy access to the "Islamic Bomb". And the communist China’s support to Pakistan is no secret. Could it, therefore, be that China, and a group of Muslim countries would pact up to launch an attack on Europe the next year, some time before the month of July? According to quatrain 72, Century X, "the war shall reign before and after that month".

Mercifully, however, there is no mention of India to be involved in the nuclear conflagration, as per the prophecies of Nostradamus.

The political, the cultural and the prophetic representations of the Islamic invasion narrative all play a part in Alden's novel. No doubt, this will eventually become a more fruitful vein of fictional endeavour, as thriller writers respond to the changes taking place around them in Europe. Thankfully, the future is more complex, more fractured and more optimistic than Alden's take portrays.

The other day I pulled a couple of quotations from this book, which I mostly liked although it has some annoying parts too. What got me wondering is why so-called US "liberal" academics are capable of writing penetrating and thoughtful pieces on certain areas of life but also clearly dumb as stumps on economics. Take this passage from Professor Hanley on page 72 and 73 of the book, where he defends racial quotas in universities:

"Suppose that a white male applicant loses out on a college place to a black male applicant, even though his SAT score was higher... I think the sense of unfairness here springs instead from the intuition that since the white student didn't do anything wrong, and since his score was higher, he deserves the place ahead of the black student."

"To which I say, bullcrap."

This professor has a nice line in reasoned argument. Let's go on.

"This is once again simply ignoring structural discrimination, if it's not just plainly racist."

Define "structural discrimination", Professor. What is it? How can a person be discriminated against where no actual conscious human being has decided that Fred is going to get a fairer deal in a college admission than John? Structurual discrimination is a sort of catch-all expression that in fact simply says that over a long period of time, certain racial groups have underperformed in certain ways and that there might be factors that should be corrected. But for how long does the impact of this "structural discrimination" last? 10 years? 20? 100? What sort of empirical evidence does Prof. Hanley think will be needed to show that this is over and we can revert to the idea of treating people equally before the law, like those fuddy-duddies such as James Madison said should be the case? The Professor does not say, although he swears a lot and thinks that people who disagree with him are idiots. I guess he is so struck by his own moral grandeur that he cannot imagine anyone decent disagreeing. What a jerk.

He goes on:

"If we're granting that the white student is a beneficiary of structural discrimination, then we can't say that he is more deserving (of a college place). Desert is a matter of what you've done with what you've got. We have no prior reason to think that the white applicant has done more - so we have no reason to think that he has been unfairly done by."

So presumably the honest thing for such a professor would be to give up the pretence of holding SAT or other education tests at all. Why not say this: "White folk are beneficiaries of former discrimination in their favour, even if the folk today are not to be blamed for what their ancestors did. As a result, no matter whether the white college applicant is a clever, conscientious person, he or she should be wiling to let people from racial groups we think are the victims of ancestral discrimination take first place in the queue. And if you disagree with that judgement, then you are an evil person and quite possibly a Republican."

I take back what I said about this book and its author a day or so ago. He is not as smart or as funny as he first appeared (well, we all make mistakes). He is, in fact, a thug with a fancy academic title. Sadly, there are a lot of them.

Like a lot of people, I am a big fan of the cartoon show South Park, in which a group of characters send up the hypocrisies and stupidity of the world around them. The makers of the show seem to have a fairly strong libertarian streak although they themselves seem desperate - perhaps wisely - to avoid any explicit label. There is a good interview with them here. And the other day, on a pure whim, I bought this entertaining book, "South Park and Philosophy," a collection of essays mostly by Richard Hanley, who is a professor of philosophy in Delaware. Most of his essays are pretty smart and funny and I can recommend the book, although religiously inclined people would be appalled, I think, by Hanley's assumption that religious people are, by definition, crazy.

Hanley understands the bit about how South Park is often seen by its fans, and possibly even by its enemies, as pretty liberal in the old-fashioned, non-US usage of that word. He is quite nice to libertarians, actually, and even gives an accurate summary of the views of Robert Nozick, which is refreshing. No straw men here. However, Hanley goes on to attack libertarianism on the grounds that, such liberties as are defended are in fact a sort of nuisance. "Too much" choice is confusing and takes up a lot of time, time better spent having fun. Hanley, with the unusual and refreshing candour that is the mark of the book, argues that libertarianism is unappealing to people because many people want to remain like children and have the parents do the annoying and time-consuming decisions for them. Excerpt:

"A sure way to make your small child miserable is to put them in charge of the mintiae of life. Make them decide not just what to have for breakfast, or what to wear, but also what brand of toothpaste or underwear to buy, what to cook for dinner, and so on. Make them pay the bills for their stuff. They do not want to do all that crap. They just want to be kids, for Christ's sake. And part of being a kid is having someone else sweat the small stuff for you. Then you can go play, or play with yourself, or what it is that you want to do."

And in this respect, I want to be treated like a kid. I want universal health care, so I don't have to worry about falling ill, and being shit out of luck or coverage. I want gun control, so that I don't have to worry about protecting myself from a fucking nut job like Jimbo or Ned (whoever they are, Ed) when they want to shoot up the joint. I want social security,so that I don't have to know all the ins and outs of the fucking stock market....I want consumer protection, so I don't have to investigate every fucking product like I want to buy, the "sea monkeys" Cartman buys in "Simpsons Already Did It". I want state utilities, so I don't have to be constantly figuring out the best deal".....

He concludes, "What I am proposing is not so very radical."

No, it is not. What this academic with a foul mouth - presumably trying to show how hip and totally kewl he is - is a statist who has admitted that statists want life to be like childhood. They want the state to take care of the supposedly terrifying idea that we should make provision for our own old age rather than vote for high taxes and steal the money from other people and future, as yet unborn, generations. He finds it a shock that consumers' best defence is to read the label rather than have state officials regulate consumer products on our behalf (and how well has that worked?). He positively wets his pants in terror about investing in a fund on the stock market, despite the fact that millions of people, who are not even university professors with fancy letters after their names, find this to be a perfectly normal activity. In Victorian Britain, remember, millions of factory workers saved their precious spare money in mutual aid groups called Friendly Societies and even set them up themselves. Amazing. And his comment about guns wins the prize for most cretinous comment of the lot, since he presumably has not been reading up about the appalling spate of shootings of young British kids in London and elsewhere in a country that has tried the sort of gun control he favours.

Many years ago, I recall that the late Keith Joseph, the Conservative politician and confidente of Margaret Thatcher, likened the position of a person under socialism to that of an infant receiving pocket money from his mother. The state would take care of all the pesky stuff like pensions, education, health, housing, transport - pretty much anything serious - and leave a bit of spare cash so that the benighted citizen could gamble around, bet on the horses, take the odd holiday, but otherwise have the freedom of a child in a kindergarten. Joseph put the finger on the long-term cost of this paternalism: by infantilising people, it makes them vulnerable to problems in the long run. It means that people start to forget what it was ever like to have such choices and decisions in the first place.

There is another issue. When people moan that we are overwhelmed by "too many" choices - a question-begging notion if there ever was one - they assume that their own fear of choice must be shared by everyone else. I suppose there are some people who would rather not bother about providing for retirement, or worry about consumer safety. Well, in an open society with a division of labour, people with a dislike of risk can work in corporations for a fixed salary and have a lot of benefits given as part of the package. Other people, meanwhile, prefer to work as entrepreneurs with an uneven income and take more decisions for themselves. There are consumer magazines that check products out on our behalf as a commercial service, and in shopaholic nations like Britain, shopping itself seems to have become a sort of business in its own right. There are endless programmes and magazine articles about it. If a lot of people find certain choices difficult or frightening, then that is a business opportunity for someone else. And so on.

What Hanley wants, and what all such devotees of paternalism want, is for a lot of the messiness and complexity of modern life to be taken away by Big Government. Well, we have had more than a century of experimenting with such a notion, and such paternalism has been tested to destruction. The fraying state of civil society, with problems of rising crime, the "victim" culture, is much of the consequence. Professor Hanley does not want to grow up, and neither do many other people. At least he has had the honesty to admit that Big Government is the dream of toddlers.

Lastly, when thinking about paternalism, remember PJ O'Rourke's wise words: giving money and power to politicians is like giving whisky and a Porsche 911 to a 15-year-old.

I recommend the Institute of Economic Affairs latest publication, Patricia Morgan's 'The war between the State and the Family: How government divides and impoverishes'.

This is a work in the tradition of such writers as Charles Murray showing how the combination of various government benefits and schemes (rather than any one benefit) have helped undermine the traditional family and increased welfare dependency and poverty, both in Britain and in other countries.

One of the important elements of this little work is that it shows that many of the very people who denounce the increase in inequality (for whilst there has been no great increase in absolute poverty, as the income of a person on benefits today is at least as high as that of many working people in the 1940's, there has been an increase in inequality) in various Western nations have supported the policies that have undermined families and increased inequality.

Also the work shows how the targeting of the 'truly needy', something done by Conservative governments from the start of the 1980's onwards by, contrary to media reports, increasing government support for such people, had very bad consequences.

Many libertarians may be wary of someone like Patricia Morgan who clearly supports the old style family of wife looking after the children and husband bringing home the money: the dream of the Victorian working class which, by the end of the century, they had largely achieved, and this suspicion may be increased by Dr Morgan's support for favourable treatment of the traditional family by the tax system; which was something that was only important in a few decades after the World War II - as before the war the majority of families did not pay income tax. But her arguments should not be dismissed out of hand simply because she is a "reactionary".

Patricia Morgan argues that what has happened over the last few decades in Britain and some other nations (the vast increased in the percentage of births out of wedlock, the growth in one parent households, and the vast growth of dependency on money from the government) is not some 'natural' example of 'social evolution', but has been driven by government policies - policies of governments of parties of both "left" and "right".

Certainly Dr Morgan may be attacked for implying that everything was O.K. with the family before the state became involved (as I have stated above the situation where the vast majority of families earned a decent income and were free of government support and abject poverty was an achievement of economic and social development over the Victorian period, it was not always so).

Also Patricia Morgan can be attacked for a Chicago school style 'economic man' approach where human beings react to monetary incentives almost (although not quite) to the exclusion of other factors.

However, one does not have to believe that the growth in government support has caused all the negative developments, in Britain and other lands, over the last few decades to believe that it has helped cause them.

With the advance of technology and economic development over the last few decades families should be stronger and poverty should be much less. Just as family life was vastly better in 1901 than it had been in, for example, 1837. Yet who would argue that families are stronger now than they were in say 1960?

Also the changes in behaviour (not just in Britain, but in such nations as the United States, Australia and New Zealand) can often be dated back to the specific years in which there were changes in the benefit structure, and (in the case of the United States) certain changes in benefit structure can be argued to have achieved the 'impossible' task of, in certain respects, turning the clock back.

Whilst this does not prove Patricia Morgan's case beyond all doubt, it does mean that the case of this lady is worth a look.

Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West
Tom Holland
First published in the UK by Little Brown 2005 – Abacus paperback 2006

I first encountered Tom Holland by reading his previous non-fiction work, Rubicon, about the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, which I wrote about here enthusiastically in June of this year. About Persian Fire - which is about the titanic struggle between the Greeks and the Persian Empire of Darius and then of his son Xerxes (Thermopylae, Marathon, Salamis etc.) - I am, if possible, even more enthusiastic. The same virtues are present in this book as in Rubicon: narrative grip, convincing analysis, and a story of overwhelming importance to anyone who wants to understand the world he lives in and how it got to be that way. This is a story I desperately wanted to learn about much more thoroughly than my patchy reading in ancient history had previously told me, and Persian Fire made it extremely easy for me to do just that.

A standard rave review meme is that this superb book screwed up the reviewer's everyday life, sleep patterns, holiday plans, etc., and if my experience is anything to go by Persian Fire triumphantly passes this test. I had all kinds of plans for this autumn, and they were severely deranged, given what a slow reader I am. The reading of other very good books was set aside. Big writing plans were postponed yet again. My living room remains the mess it was four months ago. And then even when I had finished reading Persian Fire I found that I did not then want to do, read or even think about anything much else, because I wanted to make sure that I had done my Samizdata review of it before it began to fade from the memory. So, if you read no further of this, read that this is one splendid book.

What people like Paul Marks or Sean Gabb would make of it, people who know this story inside out already, I do not know. I suspect that they would be impressed if slightly bored, and that they would nitpick details of interpretation but have no big complaints. But I am, I surmise, a more typical sort of educated person than those two luminaries, the sort who knows lots of bits and pieces about stories like this but nothing like as much as I'd like to. And I absolutely loved it.

One of the many things I like about this book is that you get both the story from the Persian end, and the same story as experienced by the Greeks. Holland starts in Persia, with the formation of the Persian Empire by Cyrus, followed by confusion involving his sons Cambyses and Bardiya, confusion ended by the upwardly mobile Darius in 522BC.

During the very early pages of this book I did wonder how much of what I was reading was true and how much mere speculation, but in defence of Holland, he writes in a way that makes clear how sketchy the historical record is of those places and times. Great Kings like Cyrus and Darius lived in a place and at a time when (a) history was the history of the Great King, not of any distinct thoughts or actions of the riff raff they ruled, and (b) in which a routine method of celebrating a military victory was not just completely to massacre your defeated opponents but also to expunge everything they had ever said or done from the record of history, to make them as if they had never been. Which makes things hard for later historians.

Nevertheless, a convincing picture does emerge. I particularly liked the regular references to "Ahura Mazda" - the Persian version of God Almighty - and of the intimate relationship between Ahura Mazda and the Great King, their wishes and plans for the world being pretty much the same thing.

The "King of Kings" title is interesting. The point was that the Great Kings, Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes and the rest of them, although they would sometimes expunge entire cultures and peoples, would more typically install themselves at the top of traditional local hierarchies, rather as if a future conqueror of Europe were to announce that he was the President of France, Germany, Italy etc., the King of England, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and so on. The jobs and their associated hierarchies remained in place. It was just that the top jobs were now held by the new man, the President of Presidents, as it were.

Philosophically, if it makes any sense to use such a word about such crushingly simple arrangements, groveling obedience to the King of Kings was not just a matter of political correctness, for without such obedience the very fabric of the universe was in jeopardy. Nature, the world, the very stars in their tracks, all depended upon the smooth running of the Empire, and on everyone doing as they were told, by Ahura Mazda as interpreted by the King of Kings. So, if thousands of wretched innocents had to be massacred, or if a hitherto trusted subordinate had to be sacrificed, this was not mere political expediency; it was doing the necessary to keep Heaven and Earth all in its proper place and correct alignment. No distinction could be made, in such a world, between What Is True, and What The King of Kings Says, argument with which is impossible. Doubt it and die. All else is The Lie. All were slaves of Ahura Mazda, and of the King of Kings.

Not that there were not rebellions of course . . . and there goes another minor quibble I have about this book, which is the somewhat excessive use of the "Not that . . .", often followed by a further negative, to begin a paragraph that corrects an implied absolute offered in the previous paragraph. This gets a bit annoying.

Not that . . . I want to criticise too strongly, because this verbal tick is but an offshoot of the fact that Holland is so determined to keep his narrative thread in one piece. As I say, Holland held my attention throughout this book, and if that means the occasional rather obtrusive verbal knotting of the thread, then that is a price I am happy to pay.

As for his general writing style, well, let's just say that although Holland turns out to be the same age as me, he goes out of his way to sound as if he is a bit younger, and about the same age as Tony Blair. Again, I am happy to pay this price, and greatly prefer this manner of writing to that of an earlier age of classical popularisers, whose assumptions, preoccupations and stylistic quirks were very different to what works best now. I think the difference between the way we now think about potentates, and the way they were thought about in, say, 1950, is that now, we are all rather more cynical, and less inclined to accept the elevated position of these people as a simple given. We are thus more intrigued by their . . . intrigues. How did they get their power? How did they keep it? How did they finance it? We also want to know more of the gruesome details of how battles were fought, perhaps because most of us have fought fewer actual battles ourselves, and don't need as much of a rest from that kind of thing as our fathers and grandfathers did. But those are guesses, and maybe say more about how different I am from the tot I was in the 1950s than how educated people thought in those days compared to now.

Anyway, having got it established, Darius expands his empire in all directions, including in a westerly direction, and . . . enter the Greeks!

Persian Fire provides the best short account of the ancient Greeks – who they were, how they lived, what they valued and how they fought – that I have ever read. In particular, it provided me with a much clearer grip on the chronology of it all.

Most of the accounts of these times that I have read in the past have concentrated only on this or that aspect of the story, such as the emergence of Athenian democracy, how the Greeks fought, what happened when the Persians attacked, and in particular, this or that battle (notably Salamis). Holland, for me, tied it all together.

The emergence of Athenian democracy coincided precisely with the moment when the Athenians (a) united themselves, and (b) became a military force to be reckoned with. The phalanx that won so amazingly for them at Marathon was the direct result of the esprit de corps that their newly emancipated political status had given birth to. We're all part of this! Even the Spartans, who did nothing but fight, and who famously presided (this I did know) over a brutally downtrodden slave class who did all the mere work, had their own elaborate rules about citizenship and kingship, etc., and your average Spartan warrior felt very much part of things. He was an engaged citizen, pumped full of ideological enthusiasm, rather than a mere serf. As for the Athenians, they all now had rights - well, every male citizen did - to property, to political participation and voting, to say what the hell they liked and to live however they liked. These were new ideas, never before seen in the world. And it turned out that people animated by these rights and liberties were better at fighting than the kind who were merely ordered into battle like cattle. The newly emerging Athenian democracy was quickly tested in battle in a typical local spat between them and the Thebans. Were Athenian farmer/hoplites willing to fight shoulder to shoulder for what they might feel, in the heat of battle, to be mere abstractions? Yes they were! The Thebans were smashed! (506BC)

Heavily dependent as Holland is on the few writers of that time, he only very rarely indulges in chunks of the especially important Herodotus, in great big typographically distinct gobs. But, following the Athenian triumph over Thebes, he does thus indulge, and so will I:

And so it was that the Athenians found themselves suddenly a great power. Not just in one field, but in everything that they set their minds to, they gave vivid proof of what equality and freedom of speech might achieve. As the subjects of a tyrant, what had they accomplished? Nothing exceptional, to be sure. With the tyrant gone, however, they had suddenly become the best fighters in the world. Held down like slaves, they had shirked and slacked; once they had won their freedom, not a citizen but he could feel that he was labouring for himself. [pp. 138-9]

In our present world, the kind of people who obsess about human rights tend also to be very concerned about what makes for peace, or in my case, for peace and trade, rather than effectiveness and honour on the battlefield, and this is especially the case in Europe. Accordingly, the way that political emancipation and military effectiveness went hand in hand in ancient Greece, although of course fundamental to the emergence of freedom-and-democracy (because battlefield prowess ensured that these institutions were able to survive), is not much talked about these days. In our time, freedom-and-democracy have enabled great wealth, in contrast to the Persian methods of our time, which have lead only to mass impoverishment, and as a result the greatest recent military confrontation of our time, the Cold War, was won by the side with the deepest pockets and the fattest cheque books. Oh, there was military spirit aplenty on our side, but central to the victory of civilisation against our Persians was that we could pay for scary hi-tech weapons and eventually, they couldn't. Civilisation won the Cold War in the same spirit that it simultaneously equipped itself with colour TVs and microwave ovens. It paid the relevant specialists and gave them the tools they needed. But the Greeks didn't outsource their fighting, even if the Spartans outsourced all their mere work. They themselves fought, and got to be very good at it, what with all that practicing they did on each other. They brought the same inventiveness and cooperative spirit to fighting that our civilisation applies to such things as the making of computer chips and writing of computer software.

And the Persians only began to work out what had hit them when it was too late.

As far as they were concerned, the Greeks were an insignificant mob of quarrelling anarchists, clearly rotten with The Lie. The western coast of what is now Turkey was conquered, and a small expeditionary force was sent to crush what remained of these tiresome people, in places like Athens and Sparta. And, at the Battle of Marathon (490 BC) the Athenians give this relatively small force, but still a huge force compared to them, an amazing thrashing.

Because of the detailed way in which the Greeks had worked out how to fight in large and heavily armed teams rather than as just a mob of lightly armed individual warriors, they were, man for man, just plain better than the Persians. But the Persians, especially once Xerxes had, a decade after the Marathon setback, decided to take the expunging of these annoying little places seriously, had enormous - mind-bogglingly enormous - numerical superiority.

Two things took the force out of the sheer weight of numbers that the Persians then, under Xerxes, brought to bear on the Greeks. First, their huge army had to be fed. Even slaves have to eat. And this turned out to mean that any more than mild delays, even if concluded victoriously, could be very serious. As soon as the Greeks proved themselves to be more than a pushover, Xerxes was always fighting not only the Greeks, but time. Thus it was that Thermopylae (480 BC), where a mere three hundred Spartans famously impeded the Great King's army for about a week, cost Xerxes not only untold thousands of dead, whom he could easily spare, but time that he could not. Pressed for time, Xerxes found himself obliged to attack, just as at Thermopylae, in places chosen by the Greeks, which basically meant narrow fronts where Persian numbers wouldn't count, and where Greek man-for-man superiority did.

Soon after, at Salamis, the Athenians, having abandoned Athens to their enemy, defended, with the fleet that they had hastily constructed, a narrow straight against a vastly more numerous Persian fleet. Could the Athenians demonstrate the same front line - this time ship-for-ship - superiority that they had already achieved at Marathon and that the Spartans had so heroically displayed at Thermopylae? Yes they could! In what remains the biggest sea battle ever fought in all of human history, forty thousand of King Xerxes's slaves perished, mostly by drowning.

Which, of course, was everyone's fault except the Great King's. Heads rolled, literally.

He abandoned Greece, leaving a relatively small force behind to do the necessary, under the command of Mardonius, upon which the Greeks inflicted yet another spectacular defeat, at Plataea (479 BC). It was one of those battles that was settled with one blow, the blow being from a rock that somebody chucked at Mardonius. It hit him on the head, and, the Persian soldiers being slaves who were utterly dependent upon their leader, with Mardonius died a huge number of Persian soldiers, and what turned out to be the the last Persian hope of subjugating what we now call Ancient Greece. Thus were the Ancient Greeks able to press on with constructing the political and cultural foundations upon which we still live. By the time they did what victorious coalitions so often do, namely descend into ruinous civil war, thereby doing to themselves what the Persians had failed to do to them, the opposite of the damage, so to speak, had been done. Western Civilisation was well and truly on its way.

I have offered a severely truncated summary of the story that Holland tells, in all its gore and glory, for two reasons. First, sadly, not everybody who reads this review will now buy this book and read it right through, even though almost everybody should (if they have not done so already). To all those busy workers, peasants and intellectuals, who, by way of classical learning, only ever read bleeding chunks of this story, such as I have just told, well, at least you have learned something.

But second, when you review a really good work of history about which you are extremely enthusiastic, you automatically find yourself summarising the story yourself. You cannot help yourself. And about this book I am very enthusiastic indeed.

Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic
Tom Holland
Little, Brown, 2003

One of the great joys of my teenage years was hearing, with titles and composers attached, the very same classical music core repertoire that I had first been exposed to in my infancy. So that's what that is, I would cry out with joy, as yet another familiar tune would finally identify itself as whichever overture or symphony or concerto it was. Lost chord after lost chord, found.

Reading Tom Holland's Rubicon has been a similarly joyous experience.

After my infancy of listening to the BBC Third Programme, there followed an expensive education during which I absorbed only bits and pieces of what was being said. I emerged from this education with a fairly thorough understanding of the Bible and its various contents, even as I became ever more unconvinced by its claims. Geography and post-1066 English history were a solid enough basis for further reading and learning. But when it came to the ancient world, the pieces of the puzzle were too few to join up, the fragments of the picture too closely associated with the grind of being made to learn Latin and Greek, which for me never really got beyond word games. I recall being awarded ninety eight percent for a "Latin verse" exam. Even then, I knew that my achievement, such as it was, had nothing to do with poetry. As far as ancient Roman history was concerned, most of what I emerged with from my Latin lessons was a jumble of mysterious names, such as Labienus, Cotta, Vercingetorix, Jugurtha, Mithridates. Much was made in my Latin lessons of Rome's subjugation of Britain, but only a vague version even of that really stuck.

At some point I acquainted myself with an approximation of the Hannibal story, with its epic crossing of the Alps, its equally amazing massacres of various legions at Lake Trasimene and at Cannae (216BC), and later Hannibal's defeat, in 202BC at Zama, which was the one where Scipio Africanus left gaps in his line for Hannibal's elephants to charge uselessly through.

Later on, further pieces of the puzzle landed on the still largely empty table. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, for instance, and then Anthony and Cleopatra. I devoured Robert Graves's I Claudius and Claudius The God, but mostly because of the evil Messalina's exploits and because of all the gladiatorial gore. Not that long ago, I finally watched the movie Spartacus all the way through. More recently, I got hooked on Rome, the recent TV soap opera. But I missed the beginning of that, and was never really sure where the boundary was there between fact and fiction. (Verenius? Pullo? Still don't know about them.) But it was still only bits and pieces. More big names had piled up in my head, like Crassus (Laurence Olivier in Spartacus), and I now knew rather more about Pompey (Kenneth Cranham in Rome). But I only caught these personages in the middles and ends of their careers. Given that Pompey's career ended in defeat at the hands of Caesar, how did he get to be called Pompey Magnus, Pompey the Great?

For me, the joy of reading Rubicon is that the blanks have at last been filled in. Joy may seem an odd word to describe reading about events which involved so much suffering and disaster, both to Romans and to their enemies. But now that it has all happened, we might as well enjoy it. It would have been no fun to have been in a legion at Carrhae (53BC), say, where the career of Crassus came to its abrupt and appalling end, but me having a grand old time learning about it all isn't going to make things any worse for anybody. And I really did enjoy this story. At no point while reading it was I ever bored or tempted to skip things. Seriously, it has been a long time since I have read a book with such rapt attention to what it was saying, with so little attention to what page number I had reached, and with such genuine disappointment when it stopped.

After an approximate history of Rome from the year dot (dot for the Romans being 753BC by our reckoning), Holland gets seriously stuck into the story at around the time of the final destruction of Carthage (146 BC). He ends with the triumph of Octavian, who became Augustus in 27BC and consolidated his power in the few years after then. So, not much about Hannibal, and nothing at all about lost legions in Germany.

Holland uses our Christian dating system rather than the Roman one of the time, which makes sense, for us. But I would have liked occasional references to what date the Romans thought it was, given that they could not themselves prophecy the date of Christ's birth and work backwards, fond though they were of prophecies. There are occasional references to decades like the "fifties". But since presumably the Romans talked about their own recent decades with their own dates, much as we talk about our recent decades, I would have liked occasional references to the Roman way with dates, even if it might have confused me.

I could probably think of other quibbles if I really worked at it, but the truth is that I come not to bury this book but to praise it, and judging by all the adulatory reviews attached to the beginning of it I'm not the only one, which reassures me that it is probably good history as well as just good writing.

A lot of the fun of this book is that Tom Holland uses the skills of a novelist to get you inside the heads of his many characters. He continually switches point of view, at one moment telling you how things seemed to whichever big shot he is talking about, and the next moment telling you how it all seemed to that big shot's contemporaries. In manner he is almost identical to another fine historian and populariser of recent years, Simon Schama. Indeed, I quite often found myself reading this book with Schama's voice in my head, what with Schama having done lots of history on the telly, but Holland's voice being, for me, unknown. I shouldn't be surprised to encounter Holland on the telivision in the future.

Holland says that if Schama hadn't already taken the title Citizens (for his book about the French Revolution), he would have called his book that.

There are all sorts of things about ancient Rome which I now understand a whole lot better.

I understand Roman marriage customs better. I knew, or maybe I just assumed, that Roman grandees married for reasons of political calculation, to firm up a political alliance. But what I had not appreciated was that they would divorce for similar reasons. When one alliance had served its purpose, and another one was required with someone different, the old wife would be dispensed with and a new one acquired. In such a world, a woman was liable to remain a lot closer to her father, and to her original family generally. Marriage was liable to be temporary but a blood tie was permanent. The great love of Cicero's life, for instance, apart from the Roman Republic itself, was his daughter Tullia, who died, from the complications of childbirth (the female equivalent of dying in battle), just before he himself was assassinated (43BC).

Cicero had been just a name to me, until now. "Did Cicero speak?" "Aye Cicero spoke. Greek." (Julius Caesar). But who was he? Why did he matter? Holland's description of the immense importance of legal proceedings, and of the people who could sway them with their oratory, made this a lot clearer. Law court proceedings were as vitally important and as unpredictable and fraught with duplicity as was warfare itself, and Cicero was, simply, the finest law court stroke political orator of his generation. When he talked, people listened. This was a man who could ruin your entire career with one well aimed speech.

Another similarly elusive figure for me, until now, was Cato. Obviously an important and worthy chap, or why would these guys name themselves after him? But again, who was he, and why did he matter? Well, I won't bore you with my summary of the answer. Suffice it to say that Holland did not bore me at all with his.

The bit of the Roman story that I learned most about that was new to me was happenings in what we now called the Middle East. Mithridates was for many years a huge thorn in that particular Roman side, until one of those admirable but lesser known Romans, the sort who was better at doing things than at getting the credit for it, by the name of Lucullus, got stuck into Mithridates. With an army that a smug opponent said was "too big to be an embassy but too small to be an army", Lucullus nevertheless won a great victory over Mithridates, at Tigranocerta (69BC). Maybe you've heard of that one, but it was completely new to me.

Then Pompey showed up in the East, doing something his contemporaries apparently often accused him of doing, which was to skim off the credit after another Roman had done most of the serious hard work, what Americans now call the "heavy lifting". Pompey subjugated the Far East for Rome, or at any rates persuaded Rome that he was responsible for this. Hence the Magnus in his name.

Pompey apparently did the same to Crassus, after Crassus had all but destroyed the great slave revolt lead by Spartacus. A few of the slaves fled north, nearer to Rome, from defeat in the South of Italy by Crassus (71BC). These survivors did not, by the way, include Spartacus himself. He, unlike Kirk Douglas in the movie, died in that last big battle. But Pompey mopped up the last survivors of the revolt and cleaned up on the credit.

What I got from reading Holland's book was a sense, at last, of how these mighty potentates – Pompey, Crassus, Julius Caesar of course – got started out as potentates. In Republican Rome there was really no line to be drawn between politics and entrepreneurship, a state of affairs captured beautifully by something Crassus apparently said, that you couldn't be considered rich until you could afford to support an army out of your income. You got started by being born into one of those aristocratic clans. You ran for high political office, and won. And then you speculated, and accumulated. You financed military adventures, and then, if all went well, you profited from them.

Julius Caesar did very well in Gaul, but it is interesting how the story played out. Caesar conquered Gaul. Hurrah! Gaul then united, and rose up in revolt. It was a quagmire! But, the Romans rather liked quagmires, because they were a chance to slaughter more foreigners and win more glory, which Caesar duly did. Which I sort of knew. What I did not know was the importance of drugs to the Gallic War. Wine, to be exact. The Romans made it. The Gauls loved it. And the Gauls used to sell one another into Roman slavery to finance their habit. I'm guessing that the Gauls were well aware of the strategic importance of their weakness, and of how it may even have cost them their liberty. Is it too fanciful to see in this story the origins of the modern French fascination with wine? Whatever the truth of that speculation, Caesar did very nicely for himself in Gaul. If, on the other hand, things went badly . . .

Crassus, the great nearly man of those times, although fabulously rich, never quite made it. He lunged for glory in the East, and got himself and his army destroyed at Carrhae. Before he died that day, he had to endure seeing his own son's head paraded in front of him and his doomed army.

The Romans, until Augustus took command, prided themselves on never being ruled by one unchallengeable tyrant, this having been precisely the sentiment that the triumphant Julius Caesar had fallen foul of . (Caesar was killed 44BC.) The moment in their history, way back, when their King had been sent packing was a major part of their history and their self-image. And here lies another fascinating insight not just into Roman history but into history as such. The Romans, bossy and bloodthirsty though they were, spent a long, long time lording it over the lesser breeds while telling them that the difference between Rome and them was that Rome had no king. The Romans were citizens.

So, if you wanted to wind the Romans up, what did you do? That's right, you called yourself a king. Mithridates, who became king of Pontus in 112BC, did it on a grand scale, and was the man who really got this idea going. Even pirate leaders called themselves kings. (Pompey flushed all the pirates out of the Mediterranean in 67BC.) Monarchy as revolution! This is not a notion that makes much sense to us, and until I read this book, such an idea had never even occurred to me. The Middle East being what it is, the political fantasies of that part of the world became suffused with ideas concerning this or that Great King, who would deliver the downtrodden from their downtroddenness, and generally give the Romans a good sorting out. This makes sense of much concerning Christianity that had hitherto not done so. King of the Jews? What was that about? Well, that was the kind of notion you naturally resorted to, if you were up against the Romans.

Meanwhile, the Romans in due course found themselves being ruled by an "Emperor", a king in all but title.

While Rome was a small state in central Italy, the system of competitive political entrepreneurship served them well, extraordinarily well. The various players of the Great Game all knew that, ultimately, they were all on the same side. They all, in the end, pulled together. But once Rome started to rule Spain, and North Africa, and then the East, things flew apart and the centre couldn't hold. Unless, they finally found themselves being told, the centre was all run by the one big boss.

Rome had no natural boundary between itself and its various colonial possessions, the way the Britain later did. For Rome, there were only such lines on the map as the Rubicon, the little river which was so small that nobody now knows where it is, which Caesar crossed with his army (49BC). This was breaking all the rules of Republican Rome, and it brought colonial power into the heart of the Roman political system. It was as if the Indian Army had entered Britain by nipping across the Channel.

I could go on, and on. I haven't even mentioned, for instance, Queen Cleopatra (died 30BC). I hope I have made it clear that whereas I am in a position to enthuse about this book, I am in no position to judge its accuracy, to judge whether the lines dividing the established and proven, the plausible, and the merely speculative, are ever crossed without these boundaries being properly flagged up. I am, as already stated above, no classical scholar, and it was a relief to me that I was not expected to know any Latin. After reading this book, I immediately tried to read also that classic work of an earlier time, dealing with similar events, Ronald Syme's The Roman Revolution. But with that book, written just before World War Two and published just after it, you are expected to know Latin. Worse, Syme's book exudes the clear implication that all educated people already know most of this stuff, and that any book about such things was adding knowledge and subtleties of judgement to a mass of things that the reader already knew. So instead, I have been keeping my remainder shop eyes open (I bought Rubicon itself in such a shop for £3.99) for other more modern, post-Beatles, post-Latin-in-schools books about the Roman Empire, to learn more. The whole point of a work of popularisation like Rubicon is to make you want to dig deeper. That was certainly the effect it had on me.

So, although it probably wouldn't do for Paul Marks: highly recommended.

I could, however, find no mention of Labienus, so about him I am still none the wiser. Was he perhaps one of Caesar's lieutenants. Paul?

Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero
Adam Nicolson
HarperCollins, 2005

The Campaign of Trafalgar
Julian S. Corbett
Trafalgar Square Publishing, 2005

Admiral Collingwood, Nelson's own hero
Max Adams
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005

Wellington's Navy: Sea Power and the Peninsular War, 1807-1814
Christopher D. Hall
Chatham Publishing, 2004

Start with a howler

It must be rare for a reader on opening a book to encounter a howler in line one, page one (to be pedantic, of the first Preface page, p. xiii), of a historical work, but Adam Nicolson has managed it: "More Catholics were burned at the stake in 16th century England than in any other country in Europe." After wondering where on earth such data could have come from, I realised, as every schoolboy used to know, that it was Protestants that got burned at the stake in England, whereas this never happened to Catholics anywhere in Europe at any time. Foxe, in his Book of Martyrs, gives 300 Protestants as suffering this fate mostly under Mary Tudor, while J.A. Froude in his classic work The Reign of Mary Tudor , estimates the numbers as between 270 and 290.

Continue with some errors...

But worse is to come. To continue this criticism: Nicolson gives this as an instance of the unusual "scale of aggression" manifested by the English from that time to the Napoleonic Wars, aggression which Nelson could call upon to win at Trafalgar. But here the facts contradict this claim. Mary Tudor was entirely responsible for this persecution, though she found enough fanatics to carry it out. Her advisers - even her husband, who became Philip II of Spain, and the ambassador of his father, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V - were against it. In many cases, sympathetic crowds came to witness the steadfastness of the victims. To complete the picture, Mary steadily ran down England's defences, spending her income on refurbishing churches and restoring monasteries, a policy culminating in the loss of Calais, England's last foothold on the European continent.

This particular error is all the more deplorable in a historian who has written a very competent account of the genesis of the Authorised Version of the Bible, Power and Glory, Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible which was completed in 1611, hardly far from the period of Mary's reign, 1553-1558.

The same misinterpretation of events occurs in the author's throwaway and sourceless line, "A higher percentage of the population died in the English Civil War than in the French Revolution." Though the English Civil War can be dated as 1642-1649, no termination date is given for the French Revolution, which after 1792 continued seamlessly for nearly the next quarter century in a series of European wars which cost France itself, according to La Fayette, in his impassioned address to the French Assembly, convened after Waterloo, three million lives and many more in the rest of Europe. Nor does Nicolson take into account the reluctance with which the English Civil War was inaugurated, with the parliamentarians, all from the same class, formerly united in their resistance to the King, now forced to pick sides when he decided to enforce his will to become an absolute monarch, like others across the Channel. Nor was the general population in any way inflamed - far from it.

Even after the war was well under way, a parliamentary general could write to his opposite number:

Certainly my affections are so unchangeable, that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person... The God of peace in his own good time send us peace, and in the mean time fit us to receive it. We are both upon the stage, and must act those parts that are assigned to us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour and without personal animosities.

The start and finish of a letter from Sir William Waller (Parliamentarian) to Sir Ralph Hopton (Royalist), quoted by Richard Ollard in This War Without an Enemy, a phrase he takes from the same letter.

Nicolson's citing of the subjugation of the Highlands after the Fortyfive is also inappropriate. By this time England had not experienced any military activity on its soil for nearly a century, its citizenry were effectively disarmed and its reaction to the incursion of Charles Edward Stuart was essentially passive and very few English Jacobites joined him.

Thus the case for some sort of latent English aggressiveness falls apart on examination. Even the tactic of "breaking the enemy's line" and provoking a melee with close ship to ship encounters became a Royal Navy tactic only in the second half of the eighteenth century. It was not invented by Nelson, but, as Nicolson states, initiated by Rodney and developed by Howe.

This policy can hardly be attributed to aggressiveness but rather to the fact that Royal Navy ships had become superior to the French in manoeuvrability and gunnery. Once engaged, a higher rate of broadside firing inevitably told and by Trafalgar they could deliver between two to three broadsides for every one of the French or Spanish. Aware of this, the British seamen sailed confidently to the attack.

Why was the battle fought?

It was emphatically not fought to save Britain from imminent invasion. Before proceeding any further with a discussion of the battle, it may be helpful to make it clear why it was fought where it was. Napoleon had cancelled the whole project nearly two months before and on the very day of Trafalgar was receiving the surrender of 27,000 Austrians at Ulm, deep in Germany, in Bavaria. Having abandoned the invasion, his instructions to Villaneuve, now in Cadiz, and commander of the Franco-Spanish fleet, were to proceed into the Mediterranean. Villeneuve started to do so, but, becoming aware of a British fleet intent on forcing a battle, reversed course, so that he could return to Cadiz, whether victor or loser. This manoeuvre, which took time and caused some disorder in his line of battle, brought him as far as Cape Trafalgar, some 30 miles south-west of Cadiz.

Collingwood, in Royal Sovereign, was the first to breach the somewhat disorderly enemy line and, though by the end of the action his ship was reduced to a dismasted, unsteerable near wreck by the attentions of five enemy ships before his support could come up and deal with them, suffered only 47 killed. Victory, left in much the same state, had 57, the highest in the whole fleet, including, of course, Nelson himself. Other ships had lower - mostly much lower - numbers killed. The total killed in the British fleet is given as 449; by contrast, those killed in the Franco-Spanish was over 5,000, over ten times as many.

Nicolson gives no figures: for these we must go to Max Adams' Admiral Collingwood. Likewise, we must go to Navies of the Napoleonic Era by Otto von Pivka (or some other source) to discover as well the manning levels of these ships. The largest, such as Royal Sovereign and Victory, with 100 guns, should have had between 850 and 875 men on board. Thus, in Victory, less than 7 in every hundred were actually killed, a fact not made clear in Nicolson's sanguinary account.

Readers must be warned that a description of the battle itself does not begin until page 209, with perhaps an overemphasis on the carnage involved. Following it, Nicolson gives a superb account of its aftermath, when Collingwood struggled to bring his own damaged fleet, together with seventeen French and Spanish captures, to safety in Gibraltar against the fearsome gale that blew straight towards the shore. He had to abandon most of the captured French and Spanish ships (valuable as prizes). This meant he had not only to take off the British prize crews, but also chose to evacuate as many of the enemy survivors as he could, including the wounded. The heroic attempts, largely successful, to rescue these last, are graphically described. But Nicolson does not explain how these compassionate activities are compatible with his hypothesis of "English aggressiveness".

Naval hierarchy, the "Honour" system and ambition;

Nicolson is on firmer ground as he analyses the ethos of the Royal Navy at the time, a mixture of rigid hierarchy, influence (in contemporary parlance "interest", a sort of super-old-boys' network), and opportunity: there was a ladder in place from bottom to top, from midshipman to admiral. The most difficult step was the middle one, from lieutenant to captain and here a favoured lieutenant could be greatly helped by his captain, especially on a station with a heavy mortality. Both Nelson and Collingwood gained their promotion this way, at the same time, in the West Indies, a notoriously disease-ridden environment.

All officers were "gentlemen" and bound together by a common code of "Honour", of which courage was of course an indispensable component, but supplemented by others, such as the etiquette of the hierarchy, deviation from which was fatal. St Vincent compared it "to the chastity of a woman and when once wounded may never be recovered." In the obverse of patronage, a captain could ruin a lieutenant after very little provocation. The French and Spanish also had their code of Honour, but it was more resigned and fatalistic (as they had cause to be). A heroic defeat was personally as creditable as a victory, not at all the right attitude to take when going into battle.

Coexisting with this system and to a large extent dependant on it was ambition, and its practical manifestation, the attainment of riches. The source for these was captured enemy ships, prizes. Such ships would be bought by the Admiralty, repaired and incorporated into the Royal Navy, often retaining the same name as a taunt to the enemy, who did it as well. Many French ships were, by common consent, better designed and built than Royal Navy ones. For some reason Pivka (op.cit.) gives the captures by the Royal Navy from 1792-99 only: 345, of which 60 were "ships of the line" of 74 guns or over, regarded as capable of participating with their equals in a set-piece battle.

Prize money distribution was greatly skewed towards the officer class and at the top end even more so. A captain could, after a few cruises to pick up merchantmen and privateers, buy a country house and move into the gentry class, if he wasn't in it already. To get such a plum job needed, apart from enterprise and energy, assignment by the Admiral on station, who would get his share, and influence back home could help a lot. Captain Fremantle is given as an extended example of this process, a rather unpleasant character, whose letter to his wife after Trafalgar expressed his sorrow for the death of Nelson, as a patron rather than as a friend.

All the above, of course, Nicolson applies to officers only: his attitude to the seamen who comprised the majority on board is confused. Rather sweepingly he states they could not be "gentlemen" and "Honour" was a concept unknown to them. The social gap was enormous, and almost unbridgeable, authority above them at best paternalistic. What of the heroism? What of the eagerness of going into battle (prize money would be minuscule)? These are insufficiently explained by the premises above.

Some omissions

What else does Nicolson leave out of this interesting but rambling book? He gives an adequate account on how difficult it was for the French to obtain materials to build their ships and how the revolutionary ethos after 1792 played havoc with their manning, but omits what was probably their greatest disadvantage, their inability to train their officers and seamen in the tasks that must be performed out at sea. The blockade kept up by the Royal Navy made it difficult for a fleet to emerge from their ports, the more so as these were subjected to the prevailing, often stormy southwest wind which incidentally made it easier for British ships to leave the ports on the south coast of England. The French commander, Villeneuve made the point himself: "They [i.e., the Royal Navy] have kept the seas without intermission since 1793, while most of [our] fleet have scarcely weighed anchor for eight years."

Nicolson's casual reference to our blockade as being carried out by "scurvy-ridden" ships must also be corrected. The anti-scorbutic properties of citrus fruits in particular were at last becoming well-known (if not understood) and, as Kenneth J. Carpenter states in his History of Scurvy and Vitamin C:

There seems no doubt that the issue of lemon juice, perhaps combined with other improvements in victualling, resulted in the elimination of scurvy from the British navy and, by increasing the time which ships could remain at sea, greatly increased its efficiency during the Napoleonic Wars... so the problem of scurvy in the British navy was solved just in time to maintain the resistance to Napoleon through the continental blockade, whereas the French Services were less fortunate.

Indeed they were "less fortunate". It was the French fleet that was "scurvy-ridden". A French Admiral who visited a Royal Navy establishment after the American War of Independence was introduced to the lemon or lime juice cure for scurvy, but did nothing about investigating it for use. By contrast, Carpenter tells us that "Over the period from 1795 to 1814, the Admiralty records show a total issue of 1.6 million gallons of lemon juice."

Nicolson might also have spared a few pages examining other strands of British society. In his Reminiscences, Captain Gronow gives us a picture of a section of it which, to put it bluntly, most felt no responsibility, or even interest, whatever in the war (though Gronow himself fought at Waterloo). And what of the Army and its ethos? It is easy to see which, soldier or sailor, entailed the greater battle-risk. At the battle of Salamanca in 1812, about one in ten of Wellington's army (British, Portuguese and Spanish) was killed. Figures of the total manning the British fleet at Trafalgar are hard to come by - Nicolson speaks of 47,000 participating in the battle, and the Franco-Spanish fleet seem to have had slightly superior numbers. Taking all ships of the line (74 guns or more) into account, the chances of British participants being killed were about one in fifty. For something lower: the chance of an American soldier being killed in Iraq has been about one in two hundred and fifty. The chances for a British soldier are much the same.

Nicolson ignores upper-class "Napoleonists", such as the Hollands, Fox, Whitbread, Byron et al, but makes much of ineffective proletarian unrest, to some extent fuelled by millenarian fantasies. Unmentioned are the Christian Evangelicals, more middle and upper class, a far more sober lot, the founders of what became Victorian morality, concerned rather with individual than mass behaviour, their social goals piecemeal, such as the abolition of the slave trade and boy chimney-sweeps and other ameliorations, rather than utopian. But religion seems to be rather marginalized in historical studies, perhaps as an unacknowledged, or even unconscious legacy of Marxism, whose believers could not credit that people meant what they said, but were "really" motivated by other, economic reasons.

Let a soldier - James Douglas, a corporal - speak:

But show me a man who knows he has an immortal soul, and advancing under the destructive fire of the enemy, but will in his inmost soul offer up the prayer of the publican ["God be merciful unto me a sinner": Luke 18, 13]. To bear me out in this, let 20, 30 nay as many thousands as ever mixed in battle, be advancing to the deadly strife and not one word can be heard in that number, but move on silent as the grave. I now ask the reason for this awful silence. The reason is that each man is employed as he ought to be with his maker. But when the fire is opened all is forgotten save king and country.

Swearing was also strongly disapproved of by the rank and file.

The biographies of Nelson (1758-1805) are legion; this study seems to have been well-reviewed and the back of the jacket is well-covered with laudatory remarks, making my dissent about it badly needed and almost to suggest that this book is an unnecessary one. We all know Nelson was charismatic, fascinated his "band of brothers" and was a hero to the British public ever since the Battle of the Nile. Tears by all ranks of the navy are well-authenticated. Faults recorded by Nicolson are the ones we condemn today, such as his grim enthusiasm for hanging deserters and Neapolitan Jacobins. His infatuation with Emma Hamilton (who seems to have made an unfavourable impression on all the women who met her) might be forgivable if they had conducted their affair with more discretion. A male friend of Nelson observed, "She goes on cramming Nelson with trowelfuls of flattery, which he goes on taking as quietly as a child does pap."

Perhaps this constant diet was responsible for his mixed behaviour on his only meeting with Wellington just before Trafalgar, when they were both waiting to see the Secretary of State, Lord Castlereigh, as related by the Duke to W.J. Croker, nearly 30 years later:

He entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was all on his side, and all about himself, and, really, in a style as to surprise and almost disgust me. I suppose something I happened to say may have made him guess that I was somebody, and he went out of the room for a moment, I have no doubt to ask the office-keeper who I was, for when he came back he was altogether a different man, both in manner and matter. All I had thought was a charlatan style had vanished, and he talked of the state of this country and of the aspect and probabilities of affairs on the Continent with a good sense, and a knowledge of subjects both at home and abroad, that surprised me equally and more agreeably than the first part of our interview had done; in fact he talked like an officer and a statesman. The Secretary of State kept us long waiting, and certainly, for the last half or three quarters of an hour I don't know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more. Now if the Secretary of State had been punctual & admitted Lord Nelson in the first quarter of an hour, I should have had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other people have had, but luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he was really a very superior man; but certainly a more sudden and complete metamorphosis I never saw.

Note that this first impression of Nelson's behaviour as a "light and trivial character" was something that "other people had had." Probably this was why Barham, the aged (eighty plus) but exceptionally efficient First Lord of the Admiralty, who had never met Nelson was doubtful about him until after he had sent for and read his Naval Journals of his latest activities.

It is a great pity that Nelson did not survive Trafalgar to have more conferences with Wellington (Arthur Wellesley, as he then was), for if he had, he might have impressed on him the difficulty of combined army-navy operations, which, as we shall see, Wellington took for granted and never really quite understood. Napoleon was much worse in this respect, changing his plans almost daily, baffling the British Admiralty, which had plans to counter them all, almost as much as his subordinates who could not convince him that moving his ships over the sea was a far more complex business that moving his troops over the land.

The result of the battle

In 1919, Julian S. Corbett, doyen of naval historians, published his The Campaign of Trafalgar (in the reprint of 1976, the two volumes are bound as one and are still obtainable at a reasonable price). The bewildering preliminaries to the battle and the battle itself are given in exhaustive detail. In his Conclusion to Volume II he writes:

By universal assent Trafalgar is ranked as one of the decisive battles of the world, and yet of all great victories there is not one which to all appearance was so barren of immediate result... It gave England finally the dominion of the seas, but it left Napoleon dictator of the Continent. So incomprehensible was its apparent sterility that to fill the void a legend grew up that it saved England from invasion... unsupported as it was by the plain succession of events.

What events? In 1805 William Pitt, the British Prime Minister, had built up what must have seemed a strong Coalition (the Third) with Austria and Russia - Prussia dithered until it was too late. Cancelling his invasion plans (which he may have done anyway, since his naval support failed to materialize), Napoleon headed straight for Austria, captured part of its army at Ulm, occupied Vienna and inflicted a crushing defeat on the combined Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz on December 2nd. Austria sued for peace and the Third Coalition was dead. A British army, which had landed on the coast of West Germany to support the Austrians had to be withdrawn.

The next year, Prussia, after fruitless negotiations with Napoleon, foolishly declared war and was soundly defeated at Jena and Uerstadt in October. Napoleon then pursued the Russians to East Prussia. Eylau (Feb. 8th, 1807) was a bloody, drawn battle, but Friedland (June 14th) was a decisive victory, and at Tilsit (June 25th), the Russian Czar Alexander changed sides and became Napoleon's not very reliable ally.

Britain could do little but maintain its blockade as it watched the development of these appalling events. Pitt died in 1806 and the King had to call on the Whig opposition to form a government, headed by the pacifist Fox, who opened peace negotiations which came to nothing. Napoleon turned his attention to the only continental country not under his sway - Portugal. An army sent there met with no resistance, and the Royal Navy came just in time to persuade its Regent (its Queen was mad) to be transported to Brazil (Nov. 29th, 1807), a day before the French arrived in Lisbon.

Napoleon now obliged Britain by making an enormous political error. Spain was almost completely useless as an ally, but at least it was quiescent. Its monarchy was in the last stages of decadence, the King a near-idiot, the Queen, ignorant and wilful, who ruled him, with her favourite Godoy, and the Crown Prince uneducated and cowardly, at odds with his parents - but all obsequiously obedient to Napoleon. The whole top tier of society, the Army, the Church and the bureaucracy was irremediably corrupt and when Napoleon poured troops into Spain on the pretext of reinforcing his Army in Portugal, no one protested, even when they occupied key fortresses in the north and Madrid itself.

Then Napoleon went one step too far. He lured the Royal family to Bayonne, forced both King and Crown Prince to abdicate and announced that his brother Joseph was to be King of Spain. Then, at last, when those who should have been their leaders still remained passive, the common people, the mob, rose and rioted in French-occupied Madrid (May 2nd, 1808). Slowly. ill-organized and poorly led, all the provinces followed suit. A deputation from Asturias, on the northern coast came to Britain, now back under a pro-war Tory government, with a request for help (May 30th). This was forthcoming and the long story of the British part in the Peninsular War had begun.

The long aftermath: 1805-1814

Trafalgar may have established the dominance of the Royal Navy at sea, but it still had work to do, though of a more routine, less spectacular kind. The blockade had to be maintained for economic as well as military reasons. It might as well be pointed out here that wreckings were responsible for by far the greatest number of Royal Navy ship losses - not because of bad navigation, but because of the need to keep an eye on the enemy, even in bad weather, off treacherous coasts. Convoys still had to protected from privateers, which could not always be prevented from slipping out of beleaguered ports or small fortified inlets. It was also a necessity to inhibit traffic carrying supplies and reinforcements to isolated coastal garrisons in Spain, where transport by land was next to impossible.

Collingwood

Old Barham had been dismissed without thanks during the government shake-ups following Pitt's death. The Admiralty, under new management, though doubtless dismayed at the loss of Nelson, could be confident that the Navy was operating as efficiently as it did before. The immediate burden fell on Cuthbert Collingwood (1748-1810) who, no Watson to Nelson's Holmes, was, according to his biographer "a better seaman than Nelson, a subtler diplomat, and despite his conservative politics, a naval reformer at least fifty years ahead of his time. What Collingwood lacked and admired above all in his friend, was "the irresistible Nelsonian impetuosity that allowed his enemy no time to recover once he had made a mistake." In a letter praising Nelson, Collingwood wrote: "Everything seemed as if by enchantment, to prosper under his direction - but it was the effect of system - and nice combination, not of chance..."

The two had in fact been friends for thirty two years when Nelson fell at Trafalgar, having met in the West Indies during the American War of Independence. Not the slightest trace of jealousy tainted their relationship, though in his last letter to Colllingwood (Oct. 9th) Nelson seems to express a little guilt at possibly having aroused it. Collingwood repudiated any as far as he was concerned: with others it would far more likely, (especially if his behaviour was as Wellington had described it - not mentioned by Collingwood.)

Adams states that, as a prelude to Trafalgar, on 20th August "Collingwood pulled off one of the most extraordinary tactical victories of the war. It is barely mentioned by the majority of historians." Cruising with a small force off Cadiz he was confronted by Villaneuve's fleet of 26 returning from the West Indies. They were almost certain to be hoping to pass into the Mediterranean where they could do much damage. First he pretended to chase them, then, using one of the oldest ruses in the book, started signalling to non-existent support over the horizon. Villaneuve fell for this, and made for Cadiz instead - just where Collingwood wanted him to be. "Trafalgar would otherwise not have happened."

Collingwood had his own grievances: his distinguished service at the Battle of the First of June (1794) was not reported, almost certainly becuse of the ill-will of the drafter of Lord Howe's dispatch, and the patent for his elevation to a barony did not include descent through the female line - and Collingwood had only two daughters. Unlike Nelson, Collingwood was a devoted family man, but was unable to see any of them - wife or daughters - which he longed to do, during the last five years of his life.

An inclusion in the "family" was the dog Bounce, though his breed, or even size, is unknown to us, apart from the fact that he had grown as high as Collingwood's desk. For a lonely Admiral he was the perfect confidant and in other ways the ideal Navy dog, though he could never stand the sound of gunfire, immediately going below. He routinely swam behind the Admiral's barge when he went ashore, until he was too tired to do so, thereby missing an opportunity of having his portrait painted. Back in Britain, he accompanied Collinwood in his long walks when the Admiral, his pockets full of acorns, went in search of suitable sites to plant them.

After his elevation to the peerage, Collingwood humourously depicts Bounce's behaviour - maybe a gentle hint to his wife and daughters, who were enjoying their new status perhaps too much and too expensively:

I am out of all patience with Bounce. The consequential airs he gives himself since he became the right honourable dog are insufferable. He considers beneath his dignity to play with commoners' dogs, and truly thinks that he does them grace when he condescends to lift up his leg against them. This, I think, is carrying the insolence of rank to the extreme, but he is a dog does it.

Sad to say, Bounce, now 18 years old and as crippled by arthritis as his master, fell overboard one night in August 1809 and drowned. Collingwood grieved greatly at his death.

Collingwood was the Admiral in change of Mediterranean matters, which did not merely mean keeping an eye on any French fleet manoeuvres from Toulon but the whole diplomacy, from Turkey in the east, to the Barbary corsairs in the west, whom he had to indicate that piracy on British shipping was a no-go pursuit, while depending on them for fresh water, fresh vegetables and beef, which they could count on being paid for. His dealings with the troublesome Bourbons of Naples, now confined to Sicily, showed that he was far from feeling the fascination Nelson had for that unstable monarchy.

Collingwood died on 7th March 1810, a day after his ship set sail for home. Though a post-mortem revealed a growth in his stomach he had, in reality, worn himself out in the service of his country. He was buried beside Nelson in St. Paul's Cathedral.

The Navy and Spain 1807-1814

Christopher Ball's Wellington' Navy fills, as they used to say, a long-felt want, though not wanted, apparently, as much as it deserves to be. The author points out that Paul Kennedy in his "seminal work" The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery merely remarks that the Navy provided "logistical support and added mobility". The fact is that without it the British role in the peninsula would have been a failure. Unfortunately naval and military historians seem never to have communicated. To take just one example: even Oman, in his seven-volume history makes little mention of the Navy's part in the long defence of Cadiz which was more of a naval than a military one. Added to this neglect must be the lack of any large set-piece battle in the area Hall deals with.

How much trouble Wellington gave the Admiralty can be judged from their (all but) final rebuke by its clearly exasperated First Lord, Lord Melville:

I will take your opinion in preference to any other person's as to the most effectual mode of beating a French army, but I have no confidence in your seamanship or nautical skill. Neither will I defer to the opinions upon such matters of the gentlemen under your command who are employed in the siege of St. Sebastian, and which happen to be at variance with those of every naval officer in His Majesty's service.

We can be thankful that Wellington was not in the same position as Napoleon, Britain's long-evolved Constitution having prevented anything of the sort.

This a book which, without any lengthy analysis, I can recommend to those who wish to know more of this subject: Just read it!

Other activities of the Royal Navy

The Command of the Seas enabled Britain to found its second Empire, picking up the Cape of Good Hope, Mauritius, Ceylon and the Dutch East Indies (the last of which was returned to Holland), as well as taking as much of the West Indies as it really wanted. During the War of 1812 against the Americans, it, by the end, righted the balance of the early defeats by powerful American frigates.

But these acquisitions did not really hurt Napoleon. Only the Peninsular War, fought on continental soil could really make a difference - which it did, Napoleon contributed with his errors: not going himself there after his initial incursion, which sent Sir John Moore racing for Corunna - a task left to Soult. He left a divided command and attempted to dictate strategy when his information and implementation took months, and was totally impracticable.

Other books consulted

Froude: The Reign of Mary Tudor
Mahan: Life of Nelson - for Croker
Robert Gardiner, Ed.: The Campaign of Trafalgar 1803-1805
Robert Gardiner &al: Winning theNapoleonic War 1806-1814

The Latham Diaries
Mark Latham
Melbourne University Press, 2005

Mark Latham was a young idealistic figure when he joined the Australian Labour Party in 1979; within a decade he had become a Mayor of the Sydney suburb of Liverpool. In 1994, he became a federal MP, and in 2004 as leader of the Australian Labor Party, he lead the party to defeat in an Australian federal election. In January 2005, he retired from public life, and late last month, his 'diaries' were published.

The dairies are almost wholly political, covering his political career from his entry to Federal Parliament, although the published portions of the diary deal mostly with the period when Latham was a major figure in Australian public life, from 2002 to early 2005.

One has to wonder at the exact veracity of the material published; as Latham's career grows and he climbs the 'greasy pole', he becomes more and more assidious in keeping his journal. In addition, the diaries deal almost wholly with matters within his own party; of events pertaining to the government he is trying to defeat, Latham has nothing to say; events outside political life have no place whatsover in this book. One suspects these are as much memoirs as diaries, although at any rate we can accept this book as the author's account of the events he describes.

The diaries reveal a man whose worldview is rather unusual. Latham has no time for the old socialist homilies. He's opposed to the rent-seeking elements that live in harmony with the Australian Labor Party, and instead chose to identify himself with the 'aspirational' voters, ambitious working-class people who have done well for themselves. A perceptive friend remarked to me that "Australia is the place where the English and Irish lower classes went and found paradise". That is as good a description of the country as any; and these people and their descendants have no time for socialist daydreamers, but they do have a healthy appetite for government services paid for by someone else. Latham looked to make himself the champion of these people.

Latham is, to say the least, a mercurial personality. While he was a smart enough guy, compared to his colleagues, he was a divided soul. While his head was forward looking, trying his hand at the eternal social-democratic dream of 'reinventing government', and placing great stress in dispersing power away from government and corporate elites, Latham had the heart and soul of an old fashioned class warrior. He always calls his Liberal opponents 'Tories' and hates them; he displays a fair degree of disdain for anyone that is not of his cultural and political type. A rare day at the cricket reveals the truth of the man- he's a working class yobbo, happiest on the Hill with his rugby-league mates.

To sum up the actual contents, it is basically an account of how Latham's pure policy driven agenda is constantly thwarted by the 'Old-Guard' of the ALP, and the terrible tactics that they, and their mates in the media, employ against him. Despite all this, after many battles, Latham becomes leader, despite many misgivings on the part of his colleagues. At first, all goes well; Latham certainly is different to the regular run of the mill politician, and he has long serving Prime Minister John Howard caught on the hop. But as time goes by, doubts start to emerge about Latham, his character, policies, and his lack of drive for the job. A nasty ex-wife emerges from the past, allegations of sexual misconduct and a mysterious 'videotape' emerge, and Latham loses his way. He leads the party to defeat in the election, amid private health worries, and then all hell breaks loose as his internal party enemies plot against him, aided by the media. Latham, sick, disenchanted, decides that the game is not worth the candle, picks up his bat and ball, and goes home.

Any work of an autobiographical nature is revealing, because it is a written self-portrait. It is often amazing the gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us. The first thing that should be said is that Latham is a guy that is deeply devoted to his family. Apart from that, it is not clear what is true or false about this guy. Certainly few people have ever been less charitable about others. He revels in an entry running down a rival, or making a joke at someone else's expense.

Of course, Latham is writing about his party colleagues, and from what can be discerned from other sources, it is quite possible that when Latham describes them as backstabbing, anti-intellectual corrupt cowards, he is stating nothing more then the truth. The ruthless, machine-style nature of Australian Labor Party internal politics has been obvious to the general public for fifty years or more.

So one is obliged to ask how a man could rise to the top of this party after less then ten years in the Federal Parliament. A rise that rapid seems rather unlikely by itself; that such a rapid rise could occur with the man in question having squeaky-clean hands himself seems impossible to credit. But the diaries have no 'confessions' of any great intrigues by Latham, only against him.

It must be said that part of Latham's rapid rise was that he was a talented politician in a deeply untalented party. Latham clearly did care deeply about policy solutions to the problems of people; the diaries themselves suggest that most of his colleagues could not look past their own entitlements as MPs. As a candidate for the office of Prime Minister, though, Latham is caught out by the narrowness of his vision; for Latham, local issues are everything, his policy concerns are about community, society and better services. To be fair, he knows the importance of fiscal discipline, and I personally enjoyed his derision of his left-wing colleagues the most in this book. But on foreign policy and security he's a non-starter; Bush is a greater menace to Australians then terrorists, people that join the defence forces are dismissed as 'meatheads' with attitude problems. There has been a general consensus that 'Australia dodged a bullet' when Latham missed out on being Prime Minister; after reading these diaries I agree with this more then ever.

Since the diaries were released, Latham has come in for intense ridicule from the media and his political enemies, which is to say, nearly everyone in Australian public life. This is not surprising; Latham has tipped a bucket of manure over nearly everyone. His predecessor and successor as ALP leader, Kim Beazley, comes out worse, and to be honest Latham does raise some good questions about him. The media come off just as bad. For example, Deborah Snow is depicted as 'The Abominable Snow woman' (Latham has a bad habit of nicknaming everyone) mostly for this feature. Reading about the intensity of the coverage he faces, I found it possible to feel sympathy for Latham, who is mostly worried about protecting his family. And Australian journalists certainly do deserve a bucketing.

Despite the ridicule Latham has received in turn, some of it deserved, the book is selling like hot cakes. And deservedly so, because Latham's style is entertaining. It is certainly revealing enough about the chronic dysfunction in the Australian Labor Party, and Latham himself is pessimistic about it. There are the usual warts one must expect of a polemic volume that is a self-justifying political figure. With that health warning in mind, for serious students of Australian politics, or social-democratic parties, or political junkies of any sort, this book is a fine read.

The Assassins
Bernard Lewis
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1967
(reissued 2001, with new preface)

Who they were and who they were not: their long lineage

Perhaps it would be best to start by saying what the Assassins were not. In his preface to the 2001 edition, Lewis states clearly:

According to a view widespread in the western world since mediaval times, the anger and the weapons of the Assassins were directed primarily against the Crusaders. This simply is not true. In the long list of their victims, there were very few Crusaders... The vast majority of their victims were Muslims and their attacks were directed not against the outsider, seen as basically irrelevant, but against the dominant elites and prevailing ideas of the Muslim world of their time.

Their Muslim opponents and potential victims responded in kind:

To kill them [preached one menaced cleric] is more lawful than rainwater. It is the duty of Sultans and kings to conquer and kill them, and cleanse the surface of the earth from their pollution. It is not right to associate or form friendships with them, nor to eat meat butchered by them, nor to enter into marriage with them. To shed the blood of a heretic is more meritorious that to kill seventy Greek infidels, [i.e., the Byzantines, their centuries-old enemies].

Lewis also rejects the tales (though current in the early 13th Century, and included in Marco Polo's Travels) of "earthly paradises" in which drugged disciples woke to experience the promised pleasures of the world to come, after they had accomplished their suicidal mission. Furthermore, Lewis even rejects the hypothesis of a direct connexion with hashish, the effects of which were known long before the sect began its activities in Syria, where the name became attached to them, he suggests, as a term of abuse.

The religious provenance of the Assassins is a long one, and impatient readers might care to skip to the section below titled 1090: The Story Really starts.

Islam's leadership (Caliph) problem

Then who were the Assassins? Although their first assassination took place in 1092, the Muslim sect that took this up as a matter of policy had a long lineage going back almost the origins of Islam. Muhammad, Islam's charismatic founder, had left no intructions as to the succession, which, if he had attended to the matter, might have solved the problem that plagued almost every Muslim dynasty ever after.

Legitimists versus Opportunists: Shi'a versus Sunni

The first three Successors (caliphs), Abu Bakr, Omar and Othman, were associates and early supporters of Muhammad himself. The first had deputised for the prophet during his last illness, so his position seemed a natural continuation of that status; he in turn designated Omar as his successor, while Omar, who was mortally stabbed by a Christian (he was greatly relieved it was not a Muslim) appointed six electors to decide on his. Othman's caliphate (644-656) ended with his murder by mutineers and this was the opportunity for Ali, son-in-law of Muhammad to assert his claim by heredity. He defeated and killed two claimants but was tricked into negotiating with a third opponent and betrayed by his own advocate. Ali was murdered in 661 for a reason that seems more personal than political, and became the first Muslim martyr, to be followed by his two sons, al-Hasan, who died at the age of 45, possibly of poison (669), and al-Husayn, who was killed, together with all but one of his sons, in what was more a massacre than a battle, at Karbala (680). But the party of Ali, the Shi'atu Ali, survived as the Shi'a, and Ali left plenty of descendants.

The Sunni: The Ummayad and Abbasid Caliphates

The winning side, the Sunni (the orthodox, as far as such a translation means anything) seem never to have been troubled by how the succession to the caliphate was established, accepting in a pragmatic way whatever came about. Mu'awiyah I (661-680), the first caliph to die a natural death since No 2, was proclaimed caliph on the death of Ali, with no other qualifications than that he was a competent governor and distantly related to the prophet Muhammad. As was now becoming normal, he had to eliminate some rivals.

Nominating his son Yezid as successor, he declared the succession hereditary and founded the Ummayad Caliphate (661-750). A rebellion established the Abbasids, who massacred all the Ummayads, with one exception, who fled to Spain and established a continuation of the dynasty there. The actual power of the Abbasid caliphs was brief, about a hundred years, but they continued, under Turkish control, until the caliphate was extinguished by the Mongols in 1258. It would be tedious to enumerate the caliphs, puppets or otherwise, that got murdered during this period. It is sufficient to say that there seems to have been no inhibition against it.

765: The Shi'a: The emergence of the Ismaili Sect

Meanwhile the Shi'a, also known as Alids and later Fatimids (after Muhammad's daughter Fatima, wife of Ali), continued to survive, giving rise to some unsuccessful rebellions and splitting into two sects. They were led by Imams, descendants of Ali and Fatima, all "moderate, pliant, yet resolute - who preserved and enriched the Shi ite faith." There were twelve of these; the last "disappeared", Lewis says, about 873, and is still "the awaited one". Mainstream Shi'as, from which other sects defected, are known as "Twelvers".

The first split among the Shi'a occurred in 765, when Ismail, the eldest son of the previous Imam, was passed over in favour of a younger one, whom most Shi'a accepted. Those who did not formed a sect known as the Ismailis. For some 150 years the Ismaili Imams "remained hidden". At the end of the ninth century, the Abbaside caliphate was falling apart, and the caliphs themselves were mere puppets, initially of a Persian Shi'ite dynasty. Their sultans decided it was easier to keep the Sunni caliphate, rather than instal a Shi'ite one.

909: The Shi'a: The establishment of the Fatimid Caliphate

This did no good to either the Sunnis or the moderate Shi'ites and left the field open to the Ismailis, who, with the establishment of a power base in the Yemen, sent missionaries all over the Muslim world, from India to North Africa. In the latter "they achieved their most spectacular success", and there in 909 their "hidden Imam" emerged to proclaim himself caliph, founding a new dynasty, the Fatimids (909-1171). Their greatest achievement was their capture of Egypt, but they failed to conquer the Sunni heartland, and like the Abbasids, became, for their last hundred years, puppets of a military elite originally called in to prop them up.

1094: The Ismailis split: Mustalis and Nizaris

A split among the Ismailis, possibly engineered by the Fatimid military pupper master, came in 1094 on the death of the caliph. The caliph's elder son, Nizar, was excluded in favour of a much younger one, al-Mustali, "a youth without allies and supporters, who would consequently be entirely dependent on his powerful patron" who also arranged to become his father-in-law. Nizar led a rebellion, and was killed, but his followers remained, refusing any allegiance to the Fatimid caliph. In 1130, after the murder of the caliph al-Amir, the son and successor of al-Mustali by Nizaris or the Syrian Assassins, with whom they had come to terms, the remaining Ismailis also defected from the Fatimid caliphate, claiming that a lost infant son of al-Amir, called Tayyib, was the hidden and awaited Iman. The tottering Fatimids, now nominally even confined to Egypt, were put an end to by their final patron, Saladin, in 1171, and the population restored to the Sunni fold of the Abassid caliphate.

The Seljuk Turks and the Ismaili "New Preaching"

The Ismaili split remained, but while the "Mustalis" stagnated in Islam's backwaters, the "Nizaris" who had, for reasons not stated, been responsible for the murder of al-Amir, became the mainstream Ismaili movement and flourished. One reason why it did was the unusually chaotic state of the Middle East, into which the Seljuk Turks (luckily for Islam, Sunni converts) had been extending their Central Asian empire since the beginning of the 11th century. As the newcomers displaced the old Arab and Persian aristocracy, discontent was expressed and exploited, inevitably in a religious guise, by the Ismaili "new preaching" and by the charismatic Hassani Sabbah, initiator of assassination as political instrument and policy, whose activities began before the Ismaili split in 1094.

1090: The story really starts: Hassani Sabbah, founder of "The Assassins"

Hassani Sabbah (1050?-1124) was born in Qum, then as now a centre of Shi'a orthodoxy in Iran, experienced a traumatic conversion to the Ismaili sect and then travelled widely to propagate its doctrines, usually getting into trouble wherever he went (Lewis gives much information of these wanderings, both in his text and in his notes). Finally he found the ideal area to set up a power base, in the Elburz mountains in Northern Iran, bordering the Caspian, where the local tribe, the Daylamis, notorious for their independence, had been the last Persians to convert to Islam (peacefully, at that) and were well-infiltrated by Ismaili believers. A fortress in this region would be desirable, and there were plenty of them.

His choice finally fell on the castle of Alamut, built on a narrow ridge on the top of a high rock in the heart of the Elburz mountains and dominating an enclosed and cultivated valley about thirty miles long and three miles wide at the broadest point. More than 6000 feet above sea level, the castle was several hundred feet above the base of the rock and could be reached only by a steep and winding path. The approach to the rock was through the narrow gorge of the Alamut river, between perpendicular and sometimes overhanging cliffs.

So Alamut was impregnable other than to starvation or subversion and Hassani, in 1090, chose the latter course, by converting the inhabitants of the castle (or enough of them) using his missionaries from the surrounding countryside, and then arriving unobtrusively there himself. It was a bloodless takeover and the helpless governor was, according to one account, sent off with a draft of 3000 gold dinars in compensation. Hassani never left the castle and ruled his growing domain in the surrounding mountains and valleys from there, capturing or building castles, while like-minded Ismailis dominated the province of Quhistan, some five hundred miles away and missionaries sowed the seed in distant Syria (see below).

1092: Assassination No. 1; rationale and technique

Three important events took place in 1092. In July the Seljuk Sultan Malikshah sent an army to capture Alamut, which failed to do so On 16th October, the Sultan's Vizier, Nizam-al-Mulk, was the victim of the first assassination by a volunteer dispatched by Hassani, and in November the Sultan died. The next Sultan was so busy (as normal) securing the succession that he made overtures to Hassani about assassinating his competitor. This just made things worse, Ismailis, sufficiently strong in numbers to make suggestive threats, infiltrated his court and everybody who was anybody went around in body-armour.

For assassinations were, it must be emphasised, carried out on particular individuals for particular reasons and also at close quarters, where the victim must be stabbed to death. The assassins could not hope to survive; indeed, if by some chance they did, this was regarded as some sort of dereliction.

When his hands were free, the Sultan set about campaigning against the Ismailis, but without success, though the next (his erst-while rival) did the Ismailis some damage. There could be little continuity in such efforts, when they ground to a halt on the death of each Sultan. During all this period assassinations went steadily on. One significant one was the murder of the Egyptian Vizier/puppet-master in 1121, which liberated the Fatimid caliph from tutelage and who invited the Nizaris to renounce their claims. However this came to nothing and negotiations with Hassani also ceased when it became apparent that he had plans to assassinate the caliph and his Vizier. The caliph was murdered anyway by the Nizaris in 1130, as recorded above, though the Syrian Assassins were also suspected.

When Hassani died, any hopes by his enemies of a normal succession crisis were dashed; his deputy, Buzurgimid, a castle-taker on his own account and appointed by Hassani to succeed him, took his place at Alamut without any dissension. He ruled from 1124 to 1138 and assassinations dropped of - "The list... is comparatively short, though not undistinguished", as Lewis puts it. The murder of the Abbasid caliph al-Mustarshid must be regarded as a sort of bonus, caused by perhaps deliberate inattention (vigorously denied, of course) to his safekeeping by his kidnapper, the Seljuk Sultan Mas'ud.

Buzurgumid's son, Muhammad (1138-1162) succeeded, again without trouble, so again disappointing the many enemies of the Ismailis. Fourteen assassinations, "a meagre haul compared with the great days of Hassani Sabbah" are recorded for his 24 year reign, "the great struggle to overthrow the old order... had dwindled into border squabbles and cattle-raids. The castle strongholds... had become the centres of local sectarian dynasties, of a type not uncommon in Islamic history," especially during this period. There is some evidence that the Ismailis and the Seljuk Overlord Sultan Sanjay often went into alliance against common enemies. Some Ismailis, however, yearned for the more activist days of Hassani Sabbah, including the heir apparent, Hasan, who immersed himself in the teaching of the Founder, and, despite the suspicions and misgivings of his father, behaved with sufficient discretion to succeed, again without trouble, on his death.

1165-1210: Anti-nomianism in Islam

Hasan (1163-1166) inaugurated a very radical policy for Ismaili Islam, nothing other than the abolition of Shari'a Law. Such antinomianism ("against law") has manifested itself several times within Christianity, justified in its case that since a sinner is saved by faith, any subsequent behaviour is irrelevant. Islamic antinomianism, which Lewis speaks of as "recurrent", and gives an example from the early 8th Century, though its manifestations were most likely a relic of pre-Islamic practices, has different causes but much the same result.

Two and a half years after his accession, Hasan staged a dramatic ceremony in the courtyard of Alamut, to which Ismaili representative had been summoned from all over the Muslim world. It was in the middle of Ramadan, the pulpit so arranged that the audience had their backs to Mecca, that he announced the arrival of the Millennium; the "hidden" Nizari Imam had been resurrected, and he was his deputy (da'i); later he changed his mind and claimed to be his grandson. Consequent to this happening, Shari'a Law must be abandoned "because in this period of of the Resurrection [men] must turn in every sense towards God and abandon the rites of religious law and established habits of worship." This proclamation was followed by a banquet, complete with wine, and delegates sped away with the good news, which was joyfully received in Quhistan and Syria, who put the injunctions into practice. In a total turn-around, those who adhered to the Shari a were punished as severely as those who formerly had broken it.

Although Hasan was murdered by his brother-in-law, strictly on religious grounds, his nineteen year old son Muhammad II (1166-1210) succeeded smoothly and continued with his father's policies and elaborated his theology. However, Lewis remarks that the whole extraordinary interlude seems to have had little influence of the rest of the Islamic world - at least if contemporary Sunni historians are anything to go by. Their attention was only drawn to it after the destruction of Alamut in 1256 by the Mongols when Ismaili writings on the subject became available. Again, assassinations seem to have dropped off, though in the case of at least one anti-Ismaili cleric, intimidation seems to have been enough. However, the threat of assassination seems to have continued right to the end, with an emissary to the Mongol Khan Hulegu explaining that he had to wear a mail shirt for fear of it. When Muhammad II died his son, Jalal al-Din (1210-1221) reversed his father's religious policy, an about-turn accepted by the wider Ismaili community, though some suspected his sincerity.

1194: The end of the Seljuk Era

The Seljuk Great Sultanate, which had conquered the Middle East in the early 11th century, was disintegrating. It was never an empire proper and though Seljuk Turks formed the aristocracy of the region, there was no cohesion among them prepared to face the challenge that was coming - the Mongols. One region that was now completely independent was Khorasm, between the Oxus and the Caspian, whose ruler, styling himself Khorasmshah, was now moving south into Persia. In the battle of Rayy, the last Seljuk Sultan was defeated and killed and the Khorasmshah assumed that he would now become the protector of the Abbasid caliph, as Sultan of Baghdad. In this he was mistaken; during the breakup of the Great Sultanate, the caliph al-Nasir (1180-1225) had achieved independence himself and was in no mood to surrender it. In fact the Abbaside Caliphate achieved a brief, and final, flowering. The Khorasmians anyway had enough to do, trying to resist the Mongols, who ultimately obliterated them; they also incurred the enmity of the Ismailis, conducting massacres, to which the Ismailis retaliated with assassinations.

The Ismaili lord of Alamut (no longer claiming the Imamate), Jalal-al-Din was succeeded by his only son, aged nine, Ala al-Din (1221-1255), who seems from quite an early age to have shown signs of madness. Business seems to have effectively carried out by his vizier and subordinates, who ensured that Alamut continued to be a center of learning, respected even by Sunni scholars. They also kept up the time-honoured tradition of assassination and intimidation, though the intricacies of feuds and alliances would take us too far from our theme. Finally Ala al-Din was murdered and though his son, Rukn al-Din was not sorry to have it happen, a severe and incapacitating illness at the time exculpated him from any direct involvement. Several probably innocent persons were put to death for the crime: no one knows who was really responsible.

1258: The last of the Alamut Ismailis

Rukn al-Din (1255-1258), the last of the Alamut Ismailis, attempted desperately to appease the Mongols. Early in 1258, they sacked Baghdad and put to death the last caliph, Mutasim (1242-1258) and all of his kin they could find, extinguishing the Abbasid Caliphate. No candidate for caliph, an obviously empty title, emerged, though the Ottoman Sultans, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century found it convenient to assume the role when dealing with the Western powers. Rukn al-Din lasted a little longer; the Mongols extracted from him all they could in the way of surrendering Ismaili strongholds, including Alamut, and then murdered him after he had travelled all the way to Karakorum, in vain, to plead to be left with something - Hulegu did not even grant him an interview.

1260: The Mongols repulsed from Syria

Hulegu's conquests, with their usual massacres, extended into Syria, but having left an army to consolidate these, it was destroyed at the battle of Ain Jalud by the Egyptian Mameluke Kotos in 1260, and the Mongol movement westward was finally halted. However, Hulegu established a kingdom with a Persian core and though himself remaining a pagan, being buried with appropriate heathen rites (virgins strangled to accompany him &c), perforce used the Muslim elite as administrators. Half a century later, his great-grandson, now a devout Muslim, was consecrating much time and energy to the revival of the culture Hulegu had attempted to destroy. Unfortunately for Muslim unity, the population was Shi'a, and Persia/Iran has remained a Shi'a state from that day to this.

The Mongols left of the Ismailis only a remnant in the Middle East and Persia, but a mission to faraway India had been successful and their tradition asserts that a small son of Rukn al-Din survived to sire a line of Imams, whose descendant today is the Aga Khan. In Syria also the sect during all this time had flourished and to its activities there we must now turn, though they did not survive the Alamut Assassins for very long.

1100- 1273: The Assassins in Syria

Missionaries from the Assassin stronghold of Alamut established by Hassani Sabbah found the mountainous terrain of northern Syria at once suitable and familiar as a venue for a power-base, but their inhabitants less amenable for it to be used as such, partly, Lewis suggests, because the emissaries were Persians. As well as indigeous "moderate" Ismailis, there were plenty of other sects to cultivate and convert, including the Druzes, who had broken away from the orthodox Egyptian Fatimids, on the disappearance of the Caliph al-Hakim in 1021, believing, in what seems a standard Muslim convention, that he would reappear in the near or far future. The Alawites, despite their orthodox Shi'a "Twelver" beliefs, combined these with "extremist" tendencies and must have seemed suitable material.

A policy of local alliances: Aleppo 1100-1124

The Assassins (a name of Syrian origin, dating from this time, which we can now use legitimately) managed to sieze, in 1106, the fortress of Afamiya, some 150 miles south-west of Aleppo, where they had many sympathisers, including its ruler Ridwan, who was more than suspected of making use of their services. Or, as Lewis puts it: "the Assassins offered [him] the possibilty of... compensating for his military weakness among his rivals in Syria."

It was not, however, any of these who eliminated Afamiya, but Tancred, Prince of Antioch, or more precisely, Regent for his uncle Bohemond, who was a captive of the Danishmend Turks and whose ransom, for various reasons, no one, including his nephew, was in a hurry to pay. He is the first crusader Lewis introduces, in many ways typical of the Norman variety, brave, land-hungry (Antioch should have been returned to the Byzantines) and devious, but we have no time to say anything about him here. I have relegated to an Appendix information, which the general public seems to badly need, about the Crusades and Crusaders, who became a factor in the Near East after their capture of Jerusalem in 1099.

Unable to secure an independent base, the Assassins continued to operate courtesy of the rulers of Aleppo and Damascus. They lost no time about it; in 1103 they assassinated the ruler of Homs (possibly to oblige Ridwan) and, to quote Lewis: "The history of the Syrian Ismailis, as recorded by the Syrian historians, is chiefly the history of the assassinations which they perpetrated." Only a decade after the seizure of Alamut, and the first assassination organized from there, the Syrian Assassins were following the precepts of Hassani Sabbah.

This state of affairs couldn't last, of course. Ridwan of Aleppo died in 1113 and relations with his son, Alp Arslan, deteriorated. Not long after his accession, the leader of the Assassins was executed and 200 of his followers punished in various ways by the commander of the town militia, who was assassinated when he fell from favour and fled the city in 1119. Finally, in 1124, the Ismailis (or at least those suspected of Assassin tendencies) were expelled from Aleppo.

The policy continued: Damascus 1124-1128

Undaunted, their leader, Bahram (a Persian, as his name suggests) moved to Damascus where he was well received by its ruler, Tughtigin, though more so by his Vizier. Tughtegin not only gave him the castle of Banyas, situated just his side of the Jordan, the boundary of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, but also a building, described as palace, for his headquarters. Bahram himself was killed in a raid, where an expedition to gain converts had turned into a typical Arab feud, and was succeeded by another Persian, Ismail, who carried on his policies and activities. But just as in Aleppo, when Tughtegin died in 1128, an even fiercer reaction against the Ismailis, and their protector, the Vizier, followed. The Vizier was murdered and 6 - 20,000 Ismailis (according to which source is believed) were massacred.

1128: The Assassins have to become autonomous

Ismail fled, surrendered Banyas to the Crusaders and took refuge in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, where he died in 1130. His asylum-seeking should not arouse surprise; already the Crusaders were just one of the small Levant states making or breaking alliances or at war with each other in kaleidoscopic fashion. When immigrants arrived in the Kingdom of Jerusalem eager to kill Muslims - anyMuslims - their hosts had to explain that things weren't quite that simple: there was a truce with Them, but it was open season against Them.

Lewis is a little vague as to how the Ismailis managed to survive during the few years before they finally secured defensible territory, especially castles. All the same, they managed to continue with their assassinations, though it was from Alamut that retribution came to Toghtegin's son, Buri, despite his wearing armour and his armed guard. In 1132, the Assassins bought the fortress of Qadmus, then acquired al-Khaf in 1136, securing Khawabi, Rusafa, Qulaya and Maniqa about the same time, and in 1140, what became their most important stronghold, Masyaf. Almost all of these are on Lewis's map, clustered in the mountainous region of the Jebal Bahra, and on the border of the County of Tripoli, (feudal dependancy of the Kingdom of Jerusalem), with which they were usually on good terms, though for some reason they assassinated its Count, Raymond II in 1152, incidentally their first Crusader victim.

The Assassins were much less worried about the Crusaders than about their Muslim enemies, by Zangi (1100-1150) in the north and Saladin (1137-1193) in the south. Zangi, the independent governor of Mosul, founded a dynasty (1127-1262) which in absorbing the minor Syrian states, such as Aleppo, Damascus and Homs, inevitably came into collision with the Assassins. Two governors, or emirs, of Mosul had already been assassinated, in 1113 and in 1126, obviously in anticipation of such a western move. The behaviour of the Zangids towards the Ismailis in general and the Assassins in particular fully justified their fear of them.

The threat from Saladin, "protector" of the Fatimid caliphs arose from the alliance of the Ismailis with the Nizaris, their theological differences either ignored or forgotten. The Assassins seem to have neutralised Saladin to some extent by two serious and nearly successful attempts on his life in 1176 and later by demonstrating there were plenty of Assassins among his entourage. Perhaps he was also reminded that, before he was born the man responsible for the disinheriting of Nizar was assassinated (in 1121) and, in 1130, the Fatimid caliph himself, quite probably by the Assassins.

Another account by a later historian gives a sounder reason for the Assassins' hostility. A raid from anti-Shi'a Iraqis had massacred some 13,000 Ismailis - it must be remembered that most Ismailis lived peaceful lives as far as it was possible; only what might be termed the activists kept to their castles, from where they organized any necessary fighting and assassinations. Saladin had taken advantage of this raid to conduct some massacres of Ismailis himself, winding up besieging Masyaf, the Assassins' main stronghold. Somehow (the facts are obscure) a non-aggression pact was negotiated and neither side troubled the other for some time after. Otherwise, it is difficult not to assume that the Assassins could have eliminated Saladin had they really decided to do so. For by this time (see below) the Assassins had been organized into an efficient menace to those who aroused their hostility.

1162: Sinan, "The Old Man of the Mountain" takes charge.

Sinan ibn Salman ibn Muhammad, also known as Rashid al-Din (1133-1193), the only Assassin that anyone in the West seems ever to have heard of, came from Basra, with, so he claimed, credentials from Alamut, having been brought up with the two sons of Muhammad II, Hasan (who succeeded him) and Husayn. That may have been so, and certainly it is unlikely that he could have attained his position without such credentials, probably from Hasan, but he emancipated himself so successfully from obedience to Alamut, that the "Chief Missionary," writes an Arab historian, "sent emissaries from Alamut a number of times to kill him, fearing usurpation of the headship, and Sinan used to kill them. Some of them he deceived and dissuaded from carrying out their orders." It is to him that most myths and legends of Assassin practices have been attached. Indeed, one Christian visitor testified to one of these being demonstrated in his presence, when a number of his disciples, at his command, unhesitating leapt to their deaths from the walls into the depths below.

Sinan turned out to be as charismatic as the Assassins' founder Hassani Sabbah, and as efficent an organizer. The same historian quoted above summed up his achievements and status:

He built fortresses in Syria for the sect. Some were new and some were old ones which he had obtained by stratagems and fortified and made inaccessible. Time spared him and kings took care not to attack his possessions for fear of the murderous attacks of his henchmen. He ruled Syria for thirty-odd years.

Although their main enemies remained Moslems, the Assassins had to turn some of their attention to the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem which with the Principality of Antioch controlled the Levantine coastline from Cilicia to Egypt. Their major assassination coup, in 1192, was that of the claimant-King of Jerusalem, Conrad of Montferrat, who had saved its remnants from disintegration after the capitulation of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187. Even so, it may actually have been a personal matter. Runciman, who goes into the matter in his The Kingdom of Acre (volume 3 of his History of the Crusades) in more depth that does Lewis, says Conrad refused to give compensation for a ship of Sinan's he had captured. The survivor of the two assassins (contrary to Lewis, who says both assassins were siezed alive, Runciman states that only one was killed), under torture, failed to implicate anyone else. In realistic terms the Assassins had nothing to gain by the consolidation of Muslim power into a single state, stretching from Egypt to Iraq, as witnessed by their extirpation when this actually happened.

Though the Assassins' suicide missions invariably targeted (or blackmailed) specific powerful or influential people - caliphs, sultans, viziers, governors, distinguished visitors and the occasional hostile cleric, for whom intimidation was usually enough, one category of leader was left untouched, the Masters of the celibate Military Orders, the Templars, Hospitallers and the Knights of St. John. It was a waste of resources to assassinate these, for they would be replaced by men just as tough and dedicated to their vocation. In fact, like all the other powers, in the area, local, territorial or institutional, the Orders came to terms with the Assassins, either paying or receiving "protection money", for immunity for pilgrims or caravans as the situation fluctuated. Under these circumstances, assassinations were unnecessary - the threat was enough. If anything, the Assassins leaned towards the Christian powers, who, they knew, would have to be physically ejected before a unified Muslim state could be established in the area.

1193-1273: The last years and end of the Syrian Assassins

Sinan died in 1193 and the succession passed to another eastern Ismaili, Nasr, a Persian. Full relations with Alamut were restored after Sinan's de facto independance. In fact, despite this, the strange antinomian episode (1165-1210) initiated by Hasan who had succeeded his father in the year of Sinan's accession (probably no coincidence) and continued by Muhammad II, had caught on, though Sinan moderated its excesses, and its ending was without incident.

There is little more to say about the Assassins before recounting the events leading to their extinction, except that they seem to have maintained the status quo established by Sinan even after the wiping out of the Alamut regime in 1258, following the Mongols' thorough extermination of the Abbasid Caliphate, with which, during its brief independence, the Assassins had been on good terms. The onslaught of the Mongols on Syria was now impending. Fortunately for the Muslim world, it was ready - just in time.

1250 - 1811: The Mamelukes of Egypt

When Saladin died in 1193, the same year as Sinan, the usual squabbles over the sucession took place, but a satisfactory candidate emerged and the dynasty survived. Its last sultan, a benign one by contemporary accounts, Malik al-Salih, beat off the Last Crusade by St. Louis at Damietta in Egypt (where he was visited by St Francis on a personal peace mission). More importantly for the future, he bought large numbers of male slaves, mainly from the Caucasus, to be trained as soldiers, who became known as Mamelukes, derived from an Arabic word for slave.

1260-1277: Baybars the Mameluke

When Malik al-Shah died, leaving only a baby boy, a Mameluke took over after the usual murder and mayhem. After he was murdered, another, Kotos took over. He was responsible for the great victory of Ain Jalud in 1060 over the Mongols - they never returned - but was in turn murdered by his lieutenent Baybars, who maintained his position for the rest of his life, terminated by his dying in agony in 1277 from poison he had prepared for a victim who craftily switched the drinks.

Baybars received the submission of the Assassins a few years after he came to power and "their skilled services seem to have been, for a short time at his disposal" as Lewis puts it, though the missions had declined from purely the suicidal to high-risk ones, with payment attached: "If the murderer escapes," the famous traveller Ibn Battuta explained, "the money is his; if he is caught, his children get it. Sometimes their plots fail, and they themselves are killed." The sometimes is significant. Prince Edward, the future King of England Edward I, a sort of gap-year Crusader in 1272, almost fell a victim; his death might well have changed the history of the British Isles.

1173: The end of the Assassins

But Baybars, whose life-work was the liberation of the Muslim Near East from the double threat of the Christian Franks [a general term in use for all Western Europeans, and not confined to those of French origin] and the heathen Mongols, could not be expected to tolerate the continued independence of a dangerous pocket of heretics and murderers in the very heart of Syria

Nor could they be trusted, there were enough of them devoted to the old ways to arouse suspicion, justified by a certain amount of evidence that a mission was being organized to assassinate Baybars himself. The last leaders of the Assassins, who after the fall of Alamut in 1158, had been appointed by Baybars, were exiled to Egypt and the remaining castles surrendered. The end came not with a bang but a whimper.

Cultural contrasts between Islam and the West, then and now

Although Western Europe, from Scandinavia to the Atlantic could be regarded as Christianized by 1000AD and Christian beliefs and practices regarded as the social pattern to be aspired if not always adhered to, two fundamental customs, which are not given any biblical sanction, became firmly established. The first was a total ban, for any reason, on suicide. The other, of slower growth, was succession by primogeniture. It might be noted that Orthodox, Byzantine Christianity, to which the Russians converted, supported a suicide ban, but in the period we are dealing with, dynastic succession was less firmly rooted than in the West.

Suicide, permissible and impermissible

The taboo against suicide meant, of course, that there could be no Christian equivalent to the Assassins, or the modern suicide bomber. This taboo was rigorously enforced by the Church (a single unit in Western Europe until the Reformation in the sixteenth century - which made no difference) which equated it with murder and consigned the dead criminal to hell-fire, since he or she had obviously died unrepentant, while the corpse was denied burial in consecrated ground. Whether the doctors of the Church, or the university schoolmen debated the prohibition of suicide is strictly irrelevant: it was fact of life. The Jewish position is probably the same, but this I am not certain of. The only suicides I can think of in the Old Testament are of King Saul and his armour-bearer and Achitophel, whose counsel was rejected by King David. These are recounted with neither approval or disapproval.

The Christian prohibition against suicide survives very strongly even in largely secularised Western societies. Abolition of the law against it has only been achieved in the last few decades and "assisted suicide" is still a controversial matter, far more than abortion. In all other major religions - Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian and Shinto - suicide is a part, a small part admittedly, of the political culture. The Islamic has been demonstrated by the Assassins in the past and the modern suicide bomber in the present, Tamils Tigers are the Hindu element, if we exclude suttee, Buddhists immolate themselves, the Chinese regard (or regarded) suicide as a preferable alternative to public shame and everyone knows about the kamikazis of Japan. Western and Eastern Christian and post-Christians societies denied its legality under any circumstances for almost all of their existence, and they appear to be unique.

Although we can perhaps learn little of use for ourselves from the techniques of the Assassins, perhaps we should remember that they targeted key individuals, and should be aware that the modern Islamic terrorists have not forgotten this and know that it is far from certain that the modern political, democratically elected leader will be replaced, as would have been the Commanders of the military religious orders, with another as tough and dedicated to the work in hand as he was.

Primogeniture: succession made plain

The convention that a man's estate should pass whole to his eldest son and then to that son's eldest son, regardless of other male relatives, who might be older, stronger or wiser, was almost certainly the result of the feudal system, a series of hierarchies, based on land holdings, with the knight the bottom unit, sufficiently supported by his land income to afford armour, horse and retinue, owing direct allegiance to a superior, perhaps a baron, who in turn owed his to an earl, who owed his to the King. It was a system that may have sacrificed a certain degree of military efficiency to certainty of status. Any disputes could be settled by litigation, which tended to strengthen the system, the influence of which may even have worked its way upward, so that Kings, instead of dividing up their possessions to parcel them out among their sons (as William the Conqueror and Henry II did with theirs in England and France), saw the merit of a system that sanctioned their being transmitted in a single package.

It hardly needs pointing out that this system was infinitely preferable to the Islamic one, which entailed a free-for-all amongst those who thought they had a chance of replacing the defunct leader, usually but not always, his sons. The three great Islamic dynasties, the Abbasid, the Mughal and the Ottoman all displayed this in their days of greatness, while the eventual Ottoman solution was almost worse than the disease - to keep the Sultan-in-waiting, together with any potential competitors, sequestered until his accession, so that his ignorance of outside affairs made him unfit to rule. Oddly enough the only exception to the "usual methods" employed in the area to decide on the succession were the Assassins, where the transmission of power seems to have been almost invariably smooth.

An appendix on the Crusades and Crusaders

The era of "apologies" is on us and the late Pope was ignorant enough to apologize to the Muslim world for the Crusades. It would have been more relevant for him to have apologized, if at all, for the contemporary Christian reconquest of Spain (a success) than to have done so for the Crusades (a failure). The Crusades, if properly managed, could have kept the boundary of Christendom fixed as far as the Taurus in Asia Minor, or even the Caucasus. Think how convenient that would have been to the bureaucrats in Brussels, with their headache of negotiating an EU extension to the same boundary! Instead, the Crusaders opened up to the Turks a means of destruction of the Byzantine Empire and conquest almost as far as the gates of Vienna. For this the Papacy does bear a heavy responsibility.

To put the matter briefly, the Crusades should, perhaps could, have been a rescue mission, badly needed by the Byzantines, who wanted a large contingent of fighting men to act under their orders. The Empire had suffered a crushing defeat at Manzikert, near their eastern border, in 1071 by a part of the Turkish invaders who were otherwise busy subduing the (Arab) Middle East, aggression beside which any effort by the Crusaders pales into insignificance. But they became Muslims, so that's all right, isn't it? Unfortunately, rather like the Muslims, the Byzantines tended to solve their succession problems in the same way, though not so brutally, and it wasn't until 1081 that the winner, the Emperor Alexius was firmly on the throne. Relations between the Eastern Orthodox and Western Churches were even worse than usual and it was not until 1095 that he was able to call for help to clear Asia Minor and establish the old boundaries.

Instead of what he wanted (after a rabble of pilgrims had been safely deposited on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, to be slaughtered by the Turks) what arrived at Constantinople was, for its time, a well-organized army, intent, for those with a religious agenda, on "liberating" Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulche, and for those with a more secular one, to sieze land to rule completely independently. Both these objectives were achieved, but what should have been their priority was not. Asia Minor was by-passed and lost and, in due course, the Ottoman Turks, with it as their base, ensured that South Eastern Europe was lost as well for many centuries.

The Architect and His Wife: A Life of Edwin Lutyens
Jane Ridley
Chatto & Windus, 2002

The great grand-daughter of the architect ("Ned" to all) and his wife (Lady Emily Lutyens, nee Lytton) has set herself the quadrangular task of describing the lives of both of them, together with his architecture and her theosophy. Their interests, to which both were strongly bound, conflicted and in others, and probably at other times, would have ensured their separation. But as his letters (The Letters of Edwin Lutyens to his Wife Lady Emily, edited by Clayre Percy and Jane Ridley) can attest, much more strongly than this book does, they retained a deep affection for each other, certainly amounting to love initially and at the end of their lives together. "In the last years of his life," wrote Lady Emily, in her autobiography Candles in the Sun, "I like to think that we were closer to each other than we had ever been before." And, penitently, after re-reading their letters two months after his death, she found hers and herself "a revelation of such an odious person, and Father so endlessly sweet and patient." His letters (a superb collection, and a joy to read) certainly bear this out: as far as I know, hers have not been published - perhaps as she would have wished.

Unfortunately their incompatibilities were enormous. Just for a start, neither seemed to have any idea how to make love. Perhaps if Emily had been seduced by Wilfred Scawen Blunt, "a corridor-creeper" as someone characterised him (and got away with it; and, in the circumstances it did seem an amazingly close-run thing - see A Blessed Girl by Lady Emily herself) he might have taught her how to initiate the obviously clumsy virgin Ned. As it was, after the birth of Mary, the youngest child, she refused (by letter) to have any further sexual relations with him. Fortunately, perhaps, they did not live together very much; at first his work took him to sites and clients, South Africa and India, later her theosophy to camps, congresses, India (he had to warn her that if she came when he was there, he'd have to throw up his work) and Australia. The children suffered terribly - or do I exaggerate?

The houses Lutyens bought for the family to live in also sound appalling - one was perennially damp, all were sparsely furnished (bare boards underfoot) and under-heated, if not actually icy. How can I sympathise with an architect who does not care for comfort, for others, let alone for himself and his family? Maybe the Cenotaph and the War Memorials he designed appealed to him as projects because no one had to live in them? In a passage I remember but cannot find, the author states "Lutyens' houses [for his clients] were notoriously uncomfortable" and there are references to draughts, smoky chimneys and inadequately lighted rooms, to say nothing of increased costs over the estimates.

Even "Viceroy's House [in New Delhi] was not an easy or a comfortable house to live in", Ridley admits, p. 402. He paid his office staff the lowest wages in the business and some of them were probably, perhaps because of this, dishonest. His feuding with Herbert Baker, fellow-architect and once his friend, and far more magnanimous in his attitude to Lutyens, was surely excessive. He could never forgive him for "deceiving" him about how the approach road at Delhi would dip so that the view of Viceroy House, with its dome, was sometimes lost. Later, when the project was complete, many judged this did no harm to or even enhanced the effect. Yet, in spite of his defects, Lutyens comes across as an attractive, cheerful (he was always making jokes) and ultimately lovable man. His daughter Mary who wrote her autobiography To Be Young confessed that though she had tried to redress the balance to some extent in favour of her mother, it didn't work.

Somehow the lives of everyone seem more austere, uncomfortable and chaotic than has been the impression given in other biographies by Mary and her mother. The breakthrough of Lutyens himself into success is not made clear, perhaps because he was always bad at managing money and worried about becoming poorer and poorer, like his father, and dying in poverty. Yet by the time he was 30 "he had so much work in Surrey that he spent most of his time there (p. 73)." He seemed to have wanted to build in the local 'vernacular' style, but of course sought clients who desired large houses. Gertrude Jekyll, the legendary garden designer who had, from his first days, been a close friend, collaborated with him and found him many clients (12 out of 20 documented jobs between 1892 and 1896, p. 69) and there were others, Barbara Webb and Betty Balfour, and the Duke of Westminster. At least one house sounds like a disaster, the principal rooms facing the wrong way (p. 70).

It is difficult, of course, to describe architecture, let alone the thought processes that bring it about, without far more illustrations than are possible in a book of this sort and the reader is tacitly referred to other works, particularly Hussey's Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens. Perhaps that is why Lutyens' efforts to get work (one or two bordering on sharp practice) are more obvious because easier to recount. Other features that emerge is his obsession for work, even to the last few days of his life, and linked with it, his painstaking care for detail. His long relationship with Lady Sackville (Macsack) seems to have been a failure architecturally as well as personally.

His achievement in New Delhi was, by contrast, a triumph. It was a paradox that an architect so English should have made something so suitable for India, somehow taking the features of a culture and people he basically thought inferior in order to achieve it. That, at least, is how I see it. Jane Ridley makes the proper anti-racist sounds, but Lutyens was merely a man of his time, nor could the British have ruled India if they had felt anything but superior to the natives and made them feel the same.

By contrast, it is Emily's (and Mrs Besant's) position, now perceived as so conventional, that was remarkable. Society, for all its racism, tolerated her behaviour then more than ours would today would her husband's. Its racist element actually probably made it easier for Emily and Mrs Besant, President of the Theosophical Society (white), to judicially remove Krishna and Nitya from their father (black). Krishna, or Krishnamurti as he became, had been identified as the Theosophical Messiah, a role he repudiated later. As for the sinister 'Bishop' Leadbeater, today he would long ago have been locked up as a paedophile. I expect the Rev. Whitworth Elwin, who had named Emily as "a blessed girl" when a teenager and caressed her by his fireside, while his wife grumbled quietly in a corner, would have been on some sort of police list, too. Such are our more enlightened times.

Ridley makes little attempt to explain what Theosophy was (or is), perhaps thinking (and correctly) that Emily would have found some other weird thing to do. (My apologies to modern Theosophists, whose lifestyle is presumably different, and, I trust, much more comfortable now than then). It is very unlikely that it would have been anything that helped her husband, who took the refusal of his marital rights (as they were then regarded) very hard. Although both Edwin and Emily lived through both World Wars (he died on New Year's Day 1944) neither war is given much prominence - it seems a strange intrusion when one of Edwin's trips to India is menaced by a U-Boat. There is no mention of any of his relatives being lost in either war. Emily's sister Barbie lost three sons in WWII; its effect on Emily's family seems to have been minimal. Only after WWI did it seems to affect Edwin when he served on the War Graves Commission and designed memorials, the Cenotaph being the most famous.

As for his work, strangely his best known did not make money; he waived his fee for the Cenotaph, his beautiful Queen Mary's Dolls' House (scale 1:12, see the almost as beautiful book of the same name, by Mary Stewart-Wilson and David Cripps, photographer), with its multiple collaborators (typically, Bernard Shaw was the only one to refuse to contribute a tiny book to the Royal Library) was a personally inspired (and unpaid) jeu d'esprit and the Viceroy's House didn't bring him a profit. And his (Roman Catholic) Liverpool Cathedral, the design for which he was working on his death-bed, has become an architect's fantasy, never (apart from the crypt) to be built, though a full model of it still exists.

Emily survived Edwin for twenty years, dying at 87 from Alzheimer's. Two years before, her daughter, the composer Elizabeth Lutyens, had taken her on a tour in Surrey, visiting there the houses her husband had designed. But "Have I ever been married?" enquired the bewildered old lady. Tragically, after her death, two of her four daughters committed suicide, but all her children left progeny, though of the twenty two now of the fourth generation, only one male bears the name of Lutyens.

Note: Lutyens is a unique family name (as, I believe, is Guinness), all being descended from Bartold Lutkens, a Hamburg merchant who immigrated to London and was naturalised in 1739, anglicizing his name to Bartholomew Lutyens; Edwin was his great-great grandson and had nine brothers and three sisters. At least three of these survived him, but his daughter remembers that from time to time, her father would don a black suit and top hat to attend the funeral of one of his siblings.

One of them, his second elder brother, John went to India after he joined the Royal Engineers and befriended Kipling, then a cub reporter who later in tribute put him in by name as the hero of the polo match in his story The Maltese Cat: "Why Lutyens? What an odd name," I'd wondered as a boy, long before I'd ever heard of the architect.

Five Lutyens, one of them Edwin's grandfather, fought in the Peninsula, three at the battle of Corunna. Oman, in his History of the Peninsular War, mentions a Captain Lutyens, presumably one of the other two brothers, who, just out to the Peninsula, may (the facts are obscure) have been killed in a disastrous skirmish there.

Another brother, Englebert, had the duty of keeping an eye on Napoleon on St. Helena, which he did with such consideration (against orders) that Napoleon gave him a pair of pistols. Edwin also thrilled his children with the ghoulish story that "Englebert was on duty the night after the post-mortem on Napoleon, guarding his remains, when waking from a doze he was just in time to stop a rat from making off with Napoleon's heart."

"Fought" is perhaps not the quite the correct word to describe the role of another brother, Edwin's grandfather Charles, who was a general in Wellington's commissariat, and left the army a wealthy man. As Ridley puts it, "The administrative offices of the army were notoriously venal and, though in his war diaries he grumbled about dishonesty and graft, it seems unlikely that the shrewd and worldly Charles, as commissary general, neglected altogether the chance of enriching himself."

The Buddha and the Sahibs
Charles Allen
John Murray Publishing, 2003

It came as something of a surprise to me that so much that is now known about the Buddha (the "Wise One", not an exclusive title in his time) seems to have been discovered by Europeans, who, later joined by the Americans, played a large part in the revival of Buddhism in the East, as well as its spreading into the West. It may be a fault in this book that the reader is really left in the dark as to the actual tenets of Buddhism. There have been plenty of investigators eager to claim significance for their discoveries, but their painstaking translations are rarely quoted and Asoka's famous much-carved edict, triumphantly deciphered after 2000 years of incomprehensibility, and generally deploring violence, is more noted for the rarity of such an expression of its sentiments than for anything profound or even unusual about them.

Undoubtedly a historical person, the Buddha was born Siddhartha, prince in a small Sakya kingdom on what is now the Indian-Nepali border, into the Gautama tribe or clan: Sakyamuni and Gautama are thus other designations, as well as Burkhan (holy). The trouble with written records in the subcontinent at this time and for many centuries to come is that they were extremely perishable, ranging from bark in the north to palm leaves in the south. There were inscriptions on rocks and pillars, but ability to read them had long been lost. Oral traditions, however venerated, could not be regarded as reliable.

Most histories and reference books I have looked up give 568-463BC for the Buddha, or a few years earlier, linked to the known reign of the Mauryan king Asoka, 273-232BC. Allen favours the Sri Lankan source for 624-542BC, as Buddha's lifespan, while Keay in his India, a History puts his death between 400 and 350BC, two or three generations before Alexander the Great's incursion.

Enter the sahibs, from the late 1700s on, mainly younger sons or others from impoverished families or both, joining the East India Company, where it was possible to make a fortune, if one survived, for in that climate mortality was heavy. Enough of them manifested curiosity about the country to which they'd come to learn its languages and look at its monuments. Sanskrit (spelt Sanscrit by those who wrote about it at the time), the ancient language, from which the various languages and dialects of North India were derived, was kept by the Brahmins as far as possible a secret from others trying to find out anything about it.

After this barrier was breached, it became apparent, somewhat to the amazement of European scholars, that Sanskrit had strong affinities to their own languages, and even more to Greek and Latin, their ancestral classical languages; its grammatical structure being much more elaborate and systematic. In the often quoted words of William Jones (1746-94), though he was not the first to study it, it was found to be "of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either." In fact (though this is not mentioned here) the discovery of the affinities of the Indo-European languages should be credited to James Parsons, FRS, whose book, published in 1767, The Remains of Japhet, Being Historical Enquiries into the Affinity and Origins of the European Languages, has, according to J.P. Mallory in his In Search of the Indo-Europeans, languished in obscurity because of its length and tediousness.

William Jones went badly off the rails in his speculations about a common culture embracing Egypt, Ethiopia and India - before any documents from Egypt or Mesopotamia, let alone Ethiopia had even been discovered, let alone deciphered. He did, however, manage to find the date of the Indian king Chandragupta, by identifying him with Sandrokottos, cross-referenced by Greek historians for his contact with the post-Alexander Seleucids in 303BC. From a reasonably reliable list of Indian kings with their lengths of reign, other dates could be established, the most important, from the connexion with the Buddha, being the reign of Asoka (268-233BC), third in line after Chandragupta. This king, after a successful campaign to add territory to his dominions, was so sickened by the death and devastation involved, that he decided to put into practice the precepts of the Buddha, to which he had so far merely nominally subscribed. He had numerous (forty two discovered to date) pillars and rock faces inscribed to this effect, made peace with his neighbours and forbad animal sacrifices.

If this seems an unduly prolix and discursive introduction to Buddhist origins it merely matches the author's, who sets the scene of general ignorance, as of a jungle through which numerous characters metaphorically, and often literally, had to hack their way to add some fragment of information to be assembled, jigsaw like, into a final solution. I should be sorry to have missed information on any of these who all had to pursue their investigations in their spare time. But to pick just one: easily the most attractive is James Prinsep (1799-1840), of whom there is a charming picture, confidently lecturing, aged 20. As employee, later Master of the Calcutta Mint, he found that by early rising he could complete his duties by 10 o'clock, and turn his attention to other matters, including making a detailed map of Benares, which led to his scheme of draining its pestilential swamp.

This, and other benevolent projects, won him the gratitude of the Indians, who built a ghat on the Hooghly in his honour, its name, unfortunately, worn down into "Prince's". Any normal person, but not James Prinsep, would have had no time or energy left to work on the deciphering of the Asoka inscriptions, to which his expertise in numismatics contributed; any knowledge of the scripts had long been lost. It is sad to record that his passion for work contributed to his early death; he suffered a complete mental collapse and, carried back to England in this condition, died of "an affection of the brain, which proved to be a softening of the substances".

To be fair, the sahibs in India were looking at the most difficult place, though, to excuse them, they hardly knew what they were looking for. Buddhism had long disappeared from India as a living faith, and the last two witnesses to its presence there are the Chinese pilgrims Fa Hian (400AD) and Huang Tsang (537AD). There is some evidence that in Kashmir Buddhism had been forcibly replaced by Hinduism around the earlier date, and it is uncertain to what extent persecution or simply assimilation of multiple incarnations of the Buddha to Hindu Gods was responsible for its disappearance in India. There was a Buddhist kingdom in Bihar as late as the 12th century, but it and its Buddhist institutions were destroyed by the Muslims at its end.

Looking for Buddhist origins in India therefore was a matter of archaeology and it was a triumph in this field that, working with the itineraries of the two Chinese pilgrims, the site of the capital of the state where the Buddha was born was discovered. There was a rogue archaeologist who was exposed as such and had to resign, but the other two, Waddell and Smith, must get the credit. Rather typically, Waddell never got back to the site, his military duties taking him to India's North West Frontier and to China to participate in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 (Allen has these in the wrong order).

Somewhat earlier than the sahibs who began their investigations in India, others were doing the same in Ceylon, the coastal region of which had been taken over by the British from the Dutch, together with all their other overseas possessions, when Holland was conquered and then "allied" with the French Republic. Here they found a population that was largely Buddhist, together with a literature which, when translated, gave an account of its origins and how the religion had been brought to the island by one of Asoka's sons (not his successor) and a daughter, around 270BC, and therefore during Asoka's lifetime. It is from this source that Allen takes the anomalous dates for the Buddha's lifespan.

From Ceylon Buddhism had spread to Burma and Siam. This branch of Buddhism, originating in Ceylon, is known as Theraveda Buddhism (the Doctrine of the Elders) or Hinayana Buddhism, the "Lesser Vehicle", as distinct from Mahayana Buddhism, the "Great Vehicle", which from its original source in North India spread to Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, China, Korea and Japan. Allen pays little attention to this form, presumably because sahibs had little or nothing to do with it, repelled by the extreme filth of its Tibetan practitioners. The ultimately sanguinary "Mission" to Tibet in 1903-4, led by Francis Younghusband, a military sahib not actually that different from the sahibs of this book, tended to confirm the opinion that Buddhism there was a very degenerate form of that religion.

It is rather difficult to evaluate the effect of this unearthing of a religion by Western investigators, intellectually curious rather than expecting or seeking to find a system of beliefs that might satisfactorily replace their own. There was approval of its basically pacific tenets, contrasted with the warlike substratum of both Hinduism and Islam. In the later part of the nineteenth century Buddhism became, as it were, a sort of supplementary religion for some of these investigators.

Two people were important in this regard. One was Thomas Williams Rhys Davids (1843-1922), who encountered Buddhism as a civil servant in Sri Lanka. Even so, its Scriptures were in a dead Indo-European language, Pali, descended from Sanskrit and unrelated to the languages of South India and Sri Lanka. Rhys Davids undertook to organize the translation and printing of Pali texts: "the sacred books of the early Buddhists have preserved to us the sole record of the only religious movement in the world's history which bears any close resemblance to Christianity," he enthused. Steering Western interest towards Hinayana Buddhism, Rhys Davids had no hesitation in characterising it as a pure, "Protestant" form of the religion, compared with the corrupt, priest-ridden, "Catholic", northern Mahayana Buddhism, overlaid with demonism, various hells and (one should not forget) physical dirt. It is debatable, says Allen, whether Rhys Davids considered himself a practicing Buddhist, but his own words come close to saying as much:

Buddhist or not Buddhist, I have examined every one of the great religious systems of the world and in none of them have I found anything to surpass, in beauty and comprehensiveness, the Noble Eightfold Path of the Buddha. I am content to shape my life according to that path

The other, probably the greatest populariser of Buddhism in the English speaking world was - perhaps still is - Edwin Arnold (1832-1904) whose 50,000 word blank verse Tennysonian-type poem The Light of Asia (1879 and still in print) gave an account of the Buddha's life and teaching in an accessible form, sympathetic to the Protestant Victorian mindset on both sides of the Atlantic. Arnold had gone to India when he was 25, with a wife and child, to take up the post of Principal of Deccan College in Poona. He did not stay there long (though long enough to master Marathi, the local language, and to learn Persian and Sanskrit), returning to England to become a journalist and ultimately, for sixteen years, editor of the Daily Telegraph. His poem, he said, "was composed in spare moments, being jotted down on anything that was available and transcribed later." It received tremendous acclaim, and was even turned into an opera. I cannot give a personal opinion of the work, for I have mislaid my copy, but remember it as a "good read", though from many years back.

Inevitably perhaps, more dubious disciples from the West took to this newly discovered religion, whose vague theology left it open to individual manipulation. Easily the most notorious of these was Helen Petrova Blavatsky (1831-91), estranged wife of the Governor of Erevan in Russian Armenia. When exposed as a fraudulent medium by the Society for Psychical Research, she was forced to leave India and the Theosophical Society she had founded with an American colleague, Colonel Olcott. He had his problems with her equally strong-minded successor, Annie Besant (1847-1933), whose interest, however, was deflected from the Theosophical Society (of which she remained President until her death) by her taking up the cause of Indian Independence. Another questionable character that caused the Society trouble was ex-Anglican priest Charles Leadbeater, whose paedophilia in these times would certainly earn him a gaol term and probably bankrupt the Society. The bizarre and austere life of its followers, is well-recorded, for those interested in it, in the autobiography To Be Young, of Mary, the youngest daughter of the architect Edwin Lutyens, long-suffering husband of Lady Emily Lutyens (nee Lytton), devotee of the Society and of its reluctant Messiah, Krishnamurti, a title later repudiated by him.

Buddhism has settled down in the West as one of the many movements that are untainted by accusations of brainwashing and kidnapping. The general public here seem to be reluctant to accept one possible implication of its dogma of reincarnation, that disabled people are expiating sins and crimes committed in a previous life. When a football coach, whose name I have forgotten (perhaps everyone else has) made such a suggestion a few years ago, the outcry against him was universal, including a condemnation by the Prime Minister, who thought, as everyone did, that he should lose his job, as, of course he did. No Buddhist organization or individual came to his rescue, nor, being what he was, could he defend himself, his pronouncements being usually of the level "the boy done good."

As for the East, it would be strange if the spread of authentic texts and moreover ones printed and cheap did not have considerable impact. One cause of a Buddhist revival in Ceylon, for instance, was Olcott's Buddhist Catechism, approved by the highest Buddhist authority, to be learnt by heart by believers, despite its "rationalist views that in many instances ran contrary to the Buddhist practices then prevailing on the island." The practice of meditation by lay persons resulted from the translation of a Pali text (of course incomprehensible to all but scholars) by Rhys Davids, entitled The Manual of a Mystic. Other results were not so happy: there were squabbles about sacred sites, all of which, if recognized as such and supposed to retain any holiness, were occupied by Hindus.

This book is harder to read (and review) than the author's previous one, Soldier Sahibs, the Men Who Made the North-West Frontier, whose activities were of a more simple and straightforward nature: "There was nothing but God above and duty below," as one of them put it, and if their peace-keeping duties sometimes involved considerable bloodshed, it was not because they stood idle while massacres took place nearby. Nor is likely that the sahibs who searched for the Buddha in their spare time would shirk their duty when called upon to do their real job.

The publishers, as so often is their habit, provide an irritation by putting on the cover of its paperback edition a picture of a tall, gaunt military figure, leaning against the leg of a giant statue, reaching about to its mid-calf. There is nowhere in the book or on its cover any indication of who it is.

The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language
Melvyn Bragg
Sceptre 2004

A History of the English Language
Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable
Routledge & Kegan Paul 1951, revised 1978.

It is probable that those who have watched Melvyn Bragg on television and have heard him on radio on the subject reviewed here, will find the printed word, in short, his book, by far the superior medium to communicate it. It would be tedious to enumerate the advantages of the printed word, but the lack of sound is its great drawback, for of course language is oral, not visual - yet the only evidence of its past and development is visual, not oral. In his fluent, informative and thoughtful account of our language, Bragg tends get excitable: English faces "challenges" and, at a critical stage even "kept its nerve", though whether its speakers were aware of these anthropomorphic postures is doubtful. Readers might do well to keep by them the more sober narrative of Baugh and Cable.

Although he gives a mention to the Indo-European stock from which almost all European languages differentiated, Bragg very sensibly begins in the fifth century when a variety of invaders from the mainland of Europe started to land in what is now England, speaking a distinctly different language from those who were already there. This language was a Germanic one, existing in a number of dialects. Some dialects were brought across, others left behind. The resulting mixture evolved into Anglo-Saxon, though it seems its closest living relative is present-day precarious Frisian.

The Anglo-Saxon speakers moved west, gradually conquering the resistance of the Celtic-speaking inhabitants and replacing their language with their own. One must be careful to distinguish this process from one of replacement of the inhabitants themselves, for studies of the DNA of today's population indicate that this was far from being the case. However, the Celtic language itself survived only in Wales and Cornwall, though refugees transferred it to Brittany in France, while a related Celtic language continued unaffected in Ireland, and what was probably another one, spoken by the Picts in Scotland.

Bragg shows that Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, continued to develop more or less in isolation for nearly four hundred years. It took on very few Celtic words and Christianity, from the sixth century, brought in its Latin and Greek terms, such as church, bishop, monk and angel, most, as the examples suggest, originally Greek. Though Latin was learned by monks, little if any other than religious words percolated into the vernacular.

The next event, as far as the language goes, was the series of invasions by the Danes during the ninth century, starting as raids and continuing as colonisation. Bragg sees King Alfred's victory over them at the battle of Ethandune (Edington) in 878 as bringing this process to a halt, though consultation of any history book shows that Alfred continued to fight the Danes till the end of his life in 899 and the ultimate settlement left most of England in Danish hands. They had, however, agreed to become Christians, a big step to assimilation. Their presence in the north and east of England can be charted by the endings to place names, some 1,200 and counting: "-by", "-toft" and "-thwaite": "mickle" (cognate with Greek "megalos" = great) was common to both languages, which were not that distantly related.

It is almost certainly going too far to claim, as Bragg does, that the victory saved English as a language. The Danes failed to impose theirs on the north and east of England which they controlled. When another lot of Danes took over Normandy at about the same time and under the same conditions, they soon became French speakers. Danish donated some one hundred and fifty words to English, according to Bragg and, unlike many later imports, they are recognizable only by experts. What could be more English than they, their, them, birth, take, call, dregs and egg? Very often both English and Danish words continued side by side, diverging into different meanings: we still have English doom, and Danish law. Other features are evidence of speakers of two different languages trying to get along with each other by adapting their speech. As a result even core words - pronouns, prepositions and parts of the verb "to be" passed into English: "They are at..." is an example. Because case-endings were often different in the two languages, they tended to be dropped in favour of prepositions, a process that was going on anyway.

The next foreign language to make its impact was French, after the Norman Conquest in 1066 - and it may be of interest that at the time the invaders were always referred to by the English as "the French". Once again, Bragg sees two languages in an epic battle with each other; in fact, other sources deny that there was any hostility by the rulers, who spoke French, towards the language of the ruled. French was the language of the government, but there was much less of that then than now. Although Bragg does not make this clear, for the first 150 years or so after the Conquest, English absorbed far fewer words than in the next 150, when French was plainly in decline.

During the first period, kings of England ruled large areas of France as well, and the aristocracy were as much at home there as in England. These lands were lost in 1204, and after that their feudal owners had to make the choice of being either French or English. Gradually, with this link cut, Norman-French became more and more isolated from mainstream, metropolitan French, and by 1250 there is evidence that some, perhaps most of the nobility, probably, Bragg suggests, because they had been brought up by English mothers or nurses, were actually having to learn French as children. Upwardly mobile English were doing the same - and, of course, still speaking English as well. The kings also started to speak English, at least as a second language. Edward I (1272-1307) knew it well enough to make jokes in it, and used the threat to it as a rallying call against a French invasion. By the end of the century proclamations and directives to local officials were made bilingually.

As the French-speaking, and generally better-educated people turned to English, they inevitably brought into it large numbers of French words. This influx peaked during the lifetime of Chaucer (1340?-1400), a courtier who wrote in English, while Wycliffe (1329?-1384), or rather, it seems, his followers, translated the Bible (from Latin) into English, obviously now the dominant language of those who could read. But, paradoxically, it was just as French was going out of use that it enriched English the most. Indeed some French words replaced the English ones - uncle, envy and noble, for example. During the whole period slightly more than 10,000 French words came into the English language, 75% of which are still in use today - 40% of all of French origin.

It was during this time that pronouns and auxiliary verbs progressively replaced case endings for verbs. As for nouns, all endings were lost except two. One is those for the plural, "-s" and the rare "-en", found now only in brethren, oxen, men, women and children - and if the last is replaced by kids, only men and women will soon be left. The other is the possessive case-ending, where "-'s" (once "-es") is still an alternative after the noun to "of" in front of it. Together with these grammatical changes went the loss of gender for inanimate objects, which effectively became neuter, together with any need for adjectives and adjectival pronouns to take the gender of the nouns they were attached to. There was also a shake-up in possessive pronouns, which are now "my", "thy/thine" (obsolete or obsolescent), "his", "her/hers", "ours", "yours", and "their/theirs". The neuter possessive pronoun, once "hir", got lost for an obvious phonetic reason. For some time, it was replaced by - well, "it", and "thereof" placed after the noun (which is always the case in the King James Bible), until "its" was invented around 1500. Its came slowly into use and, purists will be disconcerted to learn, was optionally written "it's" until about 1800.

If all these changes were a blessing, English spelling has been regarded as its perennial curse, partly due to changes in pronunciation and partly due to the importation of foreign words, also altered, together with attempts to retain for both the original spelling. A free for all in spelling continued through the sixteenth century, writers sometimes varying the spelling of a word throughout a single letter or document. By the end of the century there were calls for order: Richard Mulcaster, for example, issued a list of 7,000 words in 1582.

Well before 1500 English was recognizably the language we have today. If we stumble over Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (pre-1400), we have less trouble with Wycliffe's Bible (revisions up to 1407) and hardly any at all with Malory's Morte d'Arthur (1470). The printing press now enters the scene: the Englishman William Caxton returned from the continent, where he had learnt the craft and set up as a printer-publisher in 1476. Over time, the printed word has done much to stabilize a language as literacy spreads from such modest beginnings. Caxton printed both Chaucer and Malory - not Wycliffe, of course: translations of the Bible were burnt whenever they fell into the hands of the authorities.

It took more than fifty years before the Bible appeared in English in print, and this was largely due to the work of one man, William Tyndale (1494?-1536), to whom Bragg pays generous tribute. For most of the first half of the sixteenth century promoting a vernacular translation of Holy Writ was a dangerous thing to do, not merely in England, but in large parts of the continent, unfortunately those with the best printing-presses. Tyndale was caught in the Netherlands and, his work unfinished, strangled and burnt. What he had done, however, became the foundations of the English Bible for the next four centuries. Bragg hits the mark when he says:

"It is impossible to over-praise the quality of Tyndale's writing. Its rhythmical beauty, its simplicity of phrase, its crystal clarity have penetrated deep into the bedrock of English today wherever it is spoken. Tyndale's words and phrases influenced between sixty and eighty percent of the King James Bible of 1611 and in that second life his words and phrases circled the globe."

In some ways Tyndale was a conservative strand in the development of English. During the century following his death some 12,000 new words were incorporated into English, many via French, others from Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch - the last, apparently, adding obscenities to the curses until then only blasphemies. The renewed interest in the classical languages brought words in via the academy. All these would be absent from the Bible translations that followed Tyndale's. Even Tyndale may have been deliberately archaic: "thou" and "thee" are retained, though found only once in the contemporary translation of Froissart from French (1525), "ye" and "you" remain nominative and accusative throughout, "yes" occurs only four times instead of "yea" and "its", as noted, is absent. The translators who followed Tyndale, who regarded themselves as revisers rather than innovators, kept these archaisms.

The influence of Shakespeare, who revelled in using new, even experimental words, is more difficult to evaluate; most people would never see or read his plays, certainly not in the way they would hear and read their Bible. But he could, with his English thus enriched, give us, as Bragg says "a new world in words and insights which would colour, help, lighten and depict our lives in thought and feeling. He had to the known limit exercised that most important and mysterious faculty, the imagination." And Hesketh Pearson, a now forgotten popular biographer, enraged his father by pointing out (nearly a century ago) that there were more quotations current from Shakespeare than from the Bible.

Bragg does not quite say that we would all be speaking Spanish if the Armada had managed to do its job and put several thousand troops ashore in 1588. After all, its purpose was regime change rather than conquest and England's population was still about two-thirds Catholic, with much of the nobility liable to swing either way. However such a outcome might well have obstructed the overseas expansion of England - and English. Spanish, and the closely related Portuguese had, or were about to spread, granted rather thinly, right over South and Central America and much of North America and then across the Pacific to the Philippines. England had barely a foothold at the eastern edge of North America by 1600.

Rather more than 200 years later, to skip the important events that brought it about, most of North America was English-speaking. The United States dominated the continent, its population increasing phenomenally both by the high birth-rate of its predominantly English white settlers and by a completely open policy (or a neglect of any policy at all) of immigration, almost entirely from the Protestant countries of Northern Europe and still mostly from the British Isles. Bragg pays much attention to the development of American English; rather staid, disciplined though still innovative in the East, with Webster's Dictionary replacing Dr Johnson's, while in the West, as Bragg puts it in his hyperbolic fashion, "English went wild".

The spread of American English reinforced, perhaps guaranteed English as a world's common language, a near necessity for international communication. Indeed, especially in India it has achieved that status for internal communication as well. During the nineteeth century some fears (or perhaps hopes) were expressed that the speech on either side of the Atlantic would become mutually incomprehensible. Insufficient attention was paid to the rapid progress of all forms of intercommunication; instead each has absorbed words and locutions from the other, with most of the traffic flowing this way. Hollywood films, later supplemented by American soap operas on television helped this traffic, while pop songs, if they are to be taken seriously, must have an American accent.

Originally a Cumbrian dialect speaker himself, Bragg perhaps makes too much of dialects and patois as survivals, and pidgins and creoles as possible developing languages. All of these have to be discarded by the individual, as Bragg admits was his own case, who wants to get into the mainstream and make his way, though the pressure is not what it was. Though dialect words are inadmissible, especially in writing, differing accents, if mild, are generally tolerated and even imitated by the elite when afraid of sounding too posh (a word with a well-known false etymology).

The homogenization of writing and speech was well under way by the eighteenth century and the Scots philosopher and historian David Hume (1711-1776) submitted drafts to his English friends for correction. Samuel Johnson, with his Dictionary, did much to stabilize the language, particularly its spelling, though he claimed to describe, rather than prescribe. He would be surprised that, as Bragg points out, for the next century and more, "correct" speech and writing would be propagated by the pastime of reading novels. Jane Austen led the way and Scott and Dickens firmly relegated vernacular speech to the lower classes.

When it comes to the incursion of English into India, Bragg is in a dilemma but does succeed by grasping both horns. His book, after all, verges on the triumphalist, but then, on the other (left) hand, wasn't the Empire a matter of exploitation and a source of misery? Somehow "English was often eagerly sought by Indians and yet it was also forced on them." As for the reasons for learning English, these were not only for mere self-betterment. Bragg quotes the disappointment Rammohan Roy felt in 1825 when he found that, instead of spending funds for education on "employing European Gentlemen of talents and education to instruct the Nations of India in Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Anatomy and other useful sciences," the East India Company "are establishing a Sanscrit school under Hindoo Pundits to impart such knowledge as is clearly current in India."

Macaulay clarifies this situation in his much misunderstood (and surprisingly inaccessible) Minute "On Education in India" of 1835, issued when he was a member of the Council of India. He was seeking to change the type of support, confined to "learning in the native languages", given by the Company since 1813. One result had been the setting up of schools to teach Indians Sanskrit (for Hindus) and Arabic (for Muslims). Unfortunately the graduates, after being supported through ten or twelve years of instruction, could find no means of employment. Macaulay puts it succinctly: "We are forced to pay our Arabic and Sanskrit students, while those who learn English are willing to pay us." He also points out that 23,000 volumes of Sanskrit and Arabic works had been printed, at a cost of about �6,500 (multiply by 40 to get present day value), which next to no one would buy.

As for the matter of what should be taught, Macaulay is dismissive of what Indian literature had to offer. Bragg quotes: "I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the value of the Orientals themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia." In fact Macaulay wrote "at the value of the Orientalists", i.e., students from Europe of Oriental languages and literature, not "Orientals", and Bragg's mistake distorts the meaning of the whole quotation. Certainly it was not within "Oriental learning" that Rammohan Roy (who died two years before Macaulay wrote his Minute) would obtain what he wanted.

Macaulay was successful and forty to fifty million Indians speak and write English as well as we do, and often better, while "three hundred million have some sort of familiarity with it" out of population of nearly a billion. Bragg does not document his assertion that at any time it was really "hated and resented", or there was "often savage opposition" to it. Perhaps Ghandi, whom he cites, stands in for the usual clutch of intellectuals who seek victim-status from benefits conferred, like the woman writer of Indian origin I heard recently liken herself to an offspring of rape, after confessing her love of Shakespeare.

The British rulers could not have been so stupid as to be unaware that the literature Indians were thus given access to was replete with enough subversive words and deeds to stimulate imitation. From the very nature of our culture, and the vehicle which carried it, this was simply inevitable. Was it our fault that Indian politicians chose Marx and Fabian socialism instead of Adam Smith and capitalism? I fear the answer is probably Yes, for our own politicians were doing much the same thing when we gave India its independence.

In conclusion: what else do I wish Bragg had included in this excellent book? A comparison with other languages to further justify this English Success Story would not have come amiss, especially the degree to which they have incorporated foreign words, something research (which Bragg must have on tap) could easily quantify. It has been estimated that only 5,000 of our words come from Old English, though ninety three of the hundred most-used words do (two come from French, five from Danish-Old Norse). A serious omission is an account of how English spread to other parts of the British Isles, particularly within Scotland, where England had (apart from a few years) no political control.

Dr Johnson's Dictionary
Henry Hitchings
John Murray 2005

The fifteenth of April marked the 250th anniversary of the publication of Johnson's Dictionary, the making of which Hitchings has subtitled The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World. Johnson lives on as a personality, immortalised by Boswell, but more for his idiosyncrasies and oracular bon mots than for his literary eminence. Should interest flag, the appearance of another biography or an interesting book, such as this one, revives him as an icon.

This is not to minimize his status as a writer (after all, how many eighteenth-century writers are nowadays - a word barely admitted by Johnson - read for pleasure?) However, the considerable bibliography listed by Boswell does consist mostly of what Johnson would certainly have regarded as ephemera, though the 208 bi-weekly numbers of The Rambler (March 20th, 1750 - March 14th, 1752), essays of 1200 - 1500 words, were collected, revised and published, going through ten editions during the lifetime of the author. His novel Rasselas can be compared to its advantage with Voltaire's Candide, as treating the same subject matter in greater moral depth than Voltaire's cynicism could plumb. Both were published in 1759 and so closely together that Johnson remarked that "there was not time for imitation". Written hurriedly in a week to pay for his mother's funeral and sent to the printer in instalments, it was never, Johnson claimed, actually read by himself - until 22 years later, when he came across a copy in Boswell's coach, which he devoured with great interest.

Between the ephemeral and the immortal lies a dictionary, or, I should say lay. Until forty or fifty years ago the same dictionary could stay on the shelf for reference for the same period of time. Now the paperback dictionary attests its impermanence, as technological and social neologisms crowd in for recognition and definition. Whereas we accept the fluidity of our vocabulary and by extension of our language, from the late seventeenth century on there was a general suspicion, voiced by Dryden, Defoe and Swift, that both would lead to incomprehensibility. An authoritative" dictionary would prevent such a trend getting out of hand by "fixing" the meaning of words and even, by excluding some as unsuitable, "refining" the language "for ever". Johnson moved away from this purist to the pragmatic approach of recording words which were used rather than prescribing those which should be. But he confined himself to the written word, preferably from the works of authors who were dead.

There was a more practical reason for publishing a dictionary: the booksellers saw the need to replace the inadequate ones available - and Hitchings supplies some definitions from the "best work of the period" to make this apparent. The bookseller Robert Dodsley takes the credit for perceiving that compiling a dictionary was a one-man job, a far from obvious fact, and that Johnson was the one man. Johnson was at first hesitant, then confident: "I have no doubt that I can do it in three years." In fact it took seven, and nearly eight from when the contract to undertake it was signed. As a single bookseller could not underwrite this project, Dodsley formed a consortium with three others. Johnson was to be paid 1,500 guineas (£1,575) which Hitchings reckons to be worth £150,000 in our money. Johnson took on all the expenses of producing the actual work, though the booksellers paid the printer some £1,200 and spent £1,500 on paper. Thus the total outlay was more than £4,000.

The wealthy printer William Straham was someone who took care to obtain excellent fonts and high quality paper ("thick, almost luxurious to the touch") and became Johnson's good friend and, to a certain extent, his banker and manager. There is no mention of any solicitation for subscribers and the only patronage mentioned as having ever been sought (famously in vain) was that of the Earl of Chesterfield, to whom Johnson addressed his prospectus, A Plan for an English Dictionary, receiving only a paltry £10 in acknowledgement. There seems to be no explanation - certainly not from the Earl himself - for this indifference in someone who had been flatteringly addressed by Johnson as one "whose authority in our language is so generally acknowledged". In the end, as Johnson wrote in the Preface (composed, as most prefaces are, at the completion of the work), "The English dictionary was written . . . without any patronage of the great". And his magisterial response to Chesterfield's attempt to ingratiate himself ex post facto is too well known to recount here.

Johnson moved into a large house, 17 Gough Square, which still stands, the only one of Johnson residences to do so, paying £30 a year rent. It had, and still has, a large garret well-lit by daylight and this was where the work was done. Like all other dictionary-makers, Johnson plundered the word-lists of others, but the definitions were all his own and he dealt faithfully with the many shades of meaning of such common words as "put", "take", "in" and "up". He was not the first to use illustrative quotations from "authoritative sources", many taken from his capacious memory, often inaccurate and sometimes improved to fit, others picked out from (not, Hitchings makes clear, searched for in) the concurrent reading he carried out for the purpose: he mentions that he had never read Bacon until then. Careful of their moral effect, Johnson excluded a number of authors (Thomas Hobbes, for a start) and, of the 42,000 plus words defined; some 10&percent; were garnished with quotations from the Authorised Version of the Bible. The words from the quotations, garnered in this almost random and haphazard manner, but also with regard to their use, not only supplemented those already available, but in due course became his preferred method of generating them.

Boswell did not meet Johnson until eight years after the Dictionary was published and Hitchings maintains that he did not understand the method of its compilation. Nor how laborious it was as a task, something that Johnson himself, safe now in his celebrity, tended to make light of, even suggesting that it was one he had contemplated before being asked to do it. One of the obstacles to its progress was that Johnson was a convivial man, the last to lock himself away and get on with the job. Helpers were needed, amanuenses who copied out on paper slips the marked quotations - in soft pencil, easily erased with breadcrumbs, Johnson claimed - from the books he quarried them from, and filed them until they were needed for the words embedded in them. Such helpers were not acknowledged, as they would be in a modern preface. Some of them Hitchings identifies; there seem to have been six in all, though never more than four at work at a time. They seem to have been hacks down on their luck, badly in need of a job and personally known to Johnson.

It would not, I think, be unfair to say that Hitchings wanders up many byways in describing Johnson's methods and way of life, but these, after all, parallel Johnson's own habits. For example, a businesslike visit to Oxford to browse in the Bodleian and consult persons likely to be helpful in the compilation of introductory essays was extended for social reasons. However, most readers will hardly feel helped by the author's chapter headings, which proceed alphabetically, from Adventurous to Zootomy, with words and definitions from the Dictionary. This might have seemed a good idea at the time, but the link with the chapter contents is tenuous. The chapter in which Johnson deals with scientific terms is "Microscope", which should remind the reader and reviewer of its subject and "Publication" is about just that for the ultimate appearance of the finished work. "Philology" is not where the naive might have expected to find Johnson's inadequate treatment of etymology - that is under "Lexicographer". But it does tell us that "not more than 5,000 Old English words have survived into modern usage," though it is under "Pastern" that we discover that perhaps "a well-educated adult . . . has an active vocabulary of around 50,000 words".

This quirk is the more unfortunate because Hitchins has amassed an enormous amount of material about words, though in the way of such things, in small packets, which the reader, on encountering, thinks: "How interesting," and then forgets about or cannot remember their context. Though the chapter headings will not help him, the General Index, which is a good one, may, and so may the Index of Words, 476 in all, which Hitchings has picked out for comment, or at least a mention - more than 10% of those in the Dictionary. All the old chestnuts are there, of course - oats, network, pastern, patron, pension, Whig, Tory, excise and lexicographer - and many others intriguing enough to look up. Sixty, by my count, are no longer in use (though I had hopes of "boghouse"). A surprise to me, as a zoologist, is that "zootomy" is still extant, though perhaps as a courtesy to Johnson's last word. Doubtless some, such as "barbecue" (a hog dressed whole, in the West Indian manner), have changed their meaning, if intelligibly. Some were plainly redundant: Johnson has "gazingstock", "laughingstock" and "pointingstock", but one would have to delve into the Dictionary itself to find from its quotations if they were concurrent. He said - perhaps jokingly - that he had coined only five words himself. Contemporaries found some of his inclusions far-fetched, including, I can't help thinking, "subderisorious" (scoffing or ridiculing with tenderness and delicacy), a practice I wish could be substituted for what goes on now. Do political cartoons, for example, have to be quite so disgusting?

Publication day came at last. 2,000 copies had been printed, at a price of £4 10s; if all were sold, they would generate £9,000, more than twice the booksellers' investment. What did - what does - it look like? It is massive: 20 pounds weight, 10 inches wide and one foot six inches deep, consisting of 2,300 pages, containing 42,773 words with their definitions and illustrative quotations. Though designed to be bound in two volumes, it was often put into four - the British Library's copy, stacked up, is nearly ten inches high. Aesthetically, with its fine typeface and spacing, it makes a good impression. The public reception was favourable and Johnson rose from obscurity to recognition - it is possible that but for this achievement and rise in status, Boswell would never have met (or wanted to meet) him and written his masterpiece, leaving him a next to unknown eighteenth century literary figure. But fame, such as it was, did not bring financial security. He had been paid for his work as he went along and there was nothing left; in fact, he had been paid £100 too much, a debt which the booksellers forgave him. Boswell's bibliography shows that he continued what looks like literary hack work - reviews and essays in the Literary Review and prefaces to other men's works. He also, from 1758 to 1760, issued a weekly essay, The Idler, in the style of The Rambler; it also was collected and issued in bound form at the completion of the series.

In 1762, seven years after the publication of the Dictionary, Johnson was rescued from this hand to mouth existence by being awarded a state pension of £300. His sentiments on pensions of this kind (the word did not have its modern meaning) were well known from his Dictionary definition ". . . generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country" and he consulted a number of friends as to whether he should accept one. The suspicion of bribery to keep the government immune from attack by a writer of Johnson's quality was not unreasonable, but we need not disbelieve his account that the Earl of Bute, who was responsible for such handouts, when thanked, said to him (twice, to ensure his hearing it), "It is not given you for anything you are to do, but for what you have done." Thomas Sheridan, among others, had set the ball rolling: in case anyone should chalk this up to the credit of the dramatist (who was eleven at the time), I should make clear this was his father (who obtained a pension for himself as well). Johnson, on being told by him that the pension was to be granted, was fervent in his gratitude to the King, finding he could express himself fully only by employing the French word penetre.

And there, I think, we can leave him, with a comfortable standard of living, soon to be boosted further a year or two later by the hospitality of the Thrales, who set aside a room for his use in both their town and country houses. He was delighted to receive a pension and bore the sneers of Wilkes and others philosophically. If his writings became less polemical, the accession of George III in 1760, who "gloried in the name of Briton", was an excuse for Johnson to tone down his hostility to the House of Hanover. He even wrote a pamphlet against the rebellious American colonists. But he never altered the definition of "pension" in later editions of the Dictionary.

But greater ease could not guarantee greater happiness and Johnson remained all his life subject to bouts of melancholy, or clinical depression as they would doubtless now be diagnosed, a condition not alleviated by the sombre tenets of his religious beliefs. Even the generosity which others noted he was now more able to afford can only have brought him a sense of stern rectitude to counter the irritation he must have felt at the quarrels of the indigent characters he gave shelter to. He did not stop work by any means. His edition of Shakespeare, with prefaces and notes, and his Lives of the Poets still lay in the future, though delayed now not only by his indolence but also a lack of urgency. And we can be quite sure that without his pension (and without Boswell) he would never have made the expedition that produced his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.

Gallipoli Memories
Compton Mackenzie
Cassell, London, 1929

First Athenian Memories
Compton Mackenzie
Cassell, London, 1931

Greek Memories
Compton Mackenzie
Chatto & Windus, 1932

Aegean Memories
Compton Mackenzie
Chatto & Windus, 1940

(All out of print)

Compton Mackenzie, A Life
Andro Linklater
Chatto & Windus, London, 1987

Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972) has left little in the way of reputation behind him. Both his early "serious" and his later "lighter" novels are now unread. Like all "personalities" dependent on attention from and appearances in the media, memory of them and him soon faded and disappeared when these ceased. In Scotland, to which he retired, physically and metaphorically from a wider scene, he is little more remembered, even as a founder member of the Scottish National Party, with which he became disillusioned. Yet when young, before the First World War, he was widely regarded as a near-genius of great literary promise and when it was learned that he was bound for Gallipoli there were plaints in cultured circles that the country, after the death of Rupert Brooke in the same theatre of war, could not afford to lose another of the same calibre. Yet it was as a result of his decision to participate (for this was still a voluntary act) that he produced his masterpiece, in four volumes of "Memories", which I hope will at some time be republished to ensure him a deserved immortality. His ninety-three other books do not include a credible competitor and it would be a pity if the film Whisky Galore, from the book of the same name, was his only and inadequate memorial.

Gallipoli Memories, published in 1929, was the first in what Mackenzie seems to have projected as a four-volume account of his First World War experiences. He was as eager as anyone of his age to do his bit (we must put aside any sort of back-projection of a pacifist atmosphere generated amongst intellectuals by four years of trench-warfare) and could pull strings to do so. A military doctor told him he would only be fit for service in a warm climate such as Egypt. It was Orlo Williams, to whom the book is appropriately dedicated, who, having noticed that Sir Ian Hamilton, the Commander-in-Chief of the Gallipoli Campaign, was reading Mackenzie's novel Sinister Street, found him the job on Hamilton's staff, ensuring Mackenzie his share in the campaign. Though he wholeheartedly approved of it, after a while he had the gut feeling that it would not succeed, justified later by his realisation that it was insufficiently supported by the military back home.

He was not trying to make an historical contribution in this book. He did not keep a diary and such letters as survived were mainly useful for fixing dates. Perhaps the most prominent feature of all the books are his studies of his associates, largely favourable and observed without malice, those otherwise regarded being left anonymous. It is a loss that he never met Churchill (anyway not at this time), but Maurice (later Lord) Hankey who came out instead, "did make a most definite impression" on Mackenzie. He was only 38, not that much older than Mackenzie, but was "always . . . alluded to as if he were trembling on the verge of eighty" and was "the only man throughout the war for whom I never heard anybody suggest a better substitute".

Another phenomenon was Aubrey Herbert, the eccentric, near-blind Turcophil (for more about whom, see Margaret Fitzherbert's The Man Who Was Greenmantle.) For other friends &al, see Index: Aspinal-Oglander (surely Keyes' biographer?), Wyndham Deedes (1883-1956: father of Bill?), Hadkinson, the gone-native fisherman, Heathcote-Smith, Lt.-Gen. Hunter-Weston, whose invaliding-out may have lost the whole venture, Eddie Keeling, Kenny, George (later Lord) Lloyd and Harold Thompson.

The early pages are full of comical attempts to get the right - or any kind of - uniform, and then how to get from Alexandria to the Aegean and when there to find where GHQ actually was, and then how to get there. The fact that the Allies occupied neutral Greek territory at will passes without an allusion, let alone an explanation. The constantly mentioned ubiquitousness of flies is a reminder how much is owed to DDT by later combatants.

Mackenzie richly illustrates the maze of espionage, to which he was assigned, with the tragi-comic circumstances of the Vassilaki family (two brothers, three sisters), under suspicion after having back-migrated from the US in an attempt to do well out of the war. His amusing (and successful) machinations convinced everyone, including the Germanophil Nomarch of Lesbos, and the hapless British Consul there, that he was looking for suitable sites for a camp for three divisions on the island as a jumping off place for an invasion of the Anatolian mainland. Even though this may have diverted Turkish troops from the Gallipoli peninsula at a time of a vital attack, this was the tragically mismanaged one on Suvla Bay when the troops loitered on undefended beaches, even going swimming, instead of pressing on inland, while an absurd concatenation of accidents kept the Commander in Chief, Sir Ian Hamilton, uninformed. The volume ends when, too ill to be of further use, Mackenzie leaves for Athens to be cured and to find another job.

In First Athenian Memories the story continues: Mackenzie has been invalided to Athens and, though it is not made quite clear why, he must also, and apparently first, find a job there in Security, though he is obviously pretty ill with a combination of dysentery and cystitis. After a sort of farewell debauch (which includes a road accident most perilous in its bureaucratic aftermath) he is booked into an extremely boring clinic, with a dragon-nurse who does not speak the Italian he was promised and forbids him to whistle. On the other hand, the doctor, an authority on Asclepius, is charm itself. The cry in the street outside, "Seeka freska" ( Fresh figs!") - it is August; they must be in season then - is the chapter heading of this episode.

Between seeing the doctor and entering his clinic, Mackenzie encounters a variety of personalities at the British Legation, including the Minister, Sir Francis Elliot, "spare and taut as a wire rope", and his own superior for this book, the "mysterious V", never otherwise designated by Mackenzie (but revealed as a Major Samson in Andro Linklater's biography, where his letter is R) "whose courtly grace and charm of manner" he writes, "sometimes reminded me of a French marquis and sometimes of a high grade mandarin." V's actions seem to border on the futile and absurd, like so many persons in the book, including, by his own admission, Mackenzie himself, without any of them being in any way to blame. An example of the ridiculous behaviour to which V could sink was his idea of meeting a colleague/subordinate in a cemetery instead of his office. Mackenzie himself claims the letter Z, and there is an absent C, whose identity is never divulged (though we find out more about him in Greek Memories). It must be said at once that the circumstances in which espionage was conducted did not seem to be regarded as likely to be lethal, either by Mackenzie and his associates and agents, or by the persons whose designs he was attempting to frustrate. Future events suggests that this attitude was over-complacent.

Writing in 1931, Mackenzie did not have to explain the state of the war in 1915, or the complexities of Balkan politics; King Constantine's German connexions he could take as known, together with who Venizelos was and why Greek politics were polarised between him and the King. The British Foreign Office, under the gentle dilettanti Sir Edward Grey, had no discernible Balkan policy: "Had the British Government been illuminated by even the glimmering notion of what it wanted in the Balkans, that notion could have been carried out," claims Mackenzie in exasperation, "as it was, the British Foreign Office led the hand to mouth existence of a street conjurer, producing Thrace, Cyprus, Macedonia and badly cut chunks of Asia Minor [to gain allies]". Fortunately, Mackenzie's relations with his French opposite number were excellent. For those who can appreciate it there is a fine parody of the Athanasian Creed with reference to the various jurisdictions in the Levant on the pages following 346.

With this complete chaos as a background, the reason why Mackenzie had to leave Athens in a hurry in November after of the dissolution of the Greek Chamber of Deputies is obscure to us now, and was so even to him at the time. He went no further than Naples and Capri (where he had been staying at the outbreak of war). And why can he then return within a month? But that is to reach the end of the book omitting all the intervening action.

As before, a prime feature of interest is the cast of characters, most of whom he found congenial even though some of them were distinctly bizarre, and even more so some of their agents or informers, or those who aspired to be. Many of the names of these, and of some colleagues, are made up, either by themselves or by the author, though it seems odd to give to a Maltese as a pseudonym the distinctly German name Liebig (Linklater reveals his name as Monreal) who had been in British (secret) service for nineteen years and who V became convinced was a fantasist and, to Mackenzie's relief, managed to get rid of.

Not the least fantastic of the clandestine episodes is the account of how a (male) stenographer had to be hidden in a cupboard to record the interview with a suspicious (in both senses) agent, in the chapter fittingly entitled "Absurdities of Secret Service". He produced an excellent transcript, but alarmed V by his threat to leave Athens if employed in such a way again - to absolve the cupboard from suspicion, Mackenzie had been tossing empty bottles into it during the interview. In a world which takes cars for granted, it is almost comic to read how difficult it was for Mackenzie's unit to secure one; but it was a good one - a Sunbeam - with an excellent chauffeur.

It is nearly impossible to wend one's way through this complex maze and it does seem strange that the Greek king should have been able to muster a pro-German party which would entail Greece being drawn onto the side of both Turkey and Bulgaria, traditionally long-standing enemies. Most touching story: the obviously emotional encounter after forty years between Mackenzie's cook/housekeeper Lisa and the magnificent Archbishop of Syra, a very tall man with flashing eyes and flowing hair, a superb profile, and a beard of Zeus-like majesty".

The publication in 1932 of Greek Memories, Mackenzie's continuation from First Athenian Memories, got the author into trouble under the the Official Secrets Act, purportedly for quoting from a document or documents that came to his knowledge during the war. Considering that the book was republished effectively uncensored in 1939 and is full of quotations from official documents it was for long a mystery why he was prosecuted at all, fined £100 with £100 costs, incurring more than £2,500 expenses plus, he claims, a like sum in wasted time - all this in pre-war money, some twenty to thirty times its value today. The responsibility for this persecution, as revealed by Ando Linklater, goes as high up as King George V; Mackenzie, after all, spent a lot of his time as described in this book, in conflict with the Germanophil King Constantine, a relative of King George, as well as, of course, the Kaiser.

Linklater's also reveals that Mackenzie's mysterious boss C was the legendary Mansfield Cumming, subject of a recent biography by Alan Judd, The Quest for C: Mansfield Cumming and the Founding of the Secret Service. Relations at a distance between them had not been too good, but when Mackenzie finally went to London in October 1916, they became, as two fellow-romantics, blood-brothers. Mackenzie reports C as telling him: "I intended to make myself extremely unpleasant to you; but I said that when I saw you I should probably find you a man after my own heart, and fall on your neck," which of course is exactly what happened; he then introduced Mackenzie to his wife as the man who had given him more trouble than anybody else in the service."

To the story itself: as mentioned, the most important component is the vendetta between King Constantine and Venizelos which in the end brought about the departure of both Mackenzie and his unit for the island of Syra, selected since it was the telegraph cable centre, in the middle of the Cyclades, and ideal for organising the consolidation of Venizelist power in the Aegean islands. Unfortunately the Greek Army (in the upper ranks at least) was Royalist and dominated Athens sufficiently to make this move necessary, aided by the incompetence of the French Admiral whose ships were anchored in the Piraeus, doing little to counter German submarines, and who trusted King Constantine's assurances longer than sanity should have permitted. This ensured that rioters sacked Venizelist houses in Athens (and would have killed Mackenzie when they sacked his, if he had not hoodwinked them) and killed some eighty British and French marines. Despite this, Mackenzie retained good relations with most of the French diplomatic corps.

Mackenzie goes through the year 1916 in 12 chapters, month by month and most of the narration is light relief compared with the nearly lethal ending. There are, for example, the three attempts to intercept the German mail, the last of which succeeds, and the surrender to Mackenzie personally of the most able German agent who prudently refused to break his parole, given to Mackenzie, when Royalist militiamen offered to liberate him; he survived to enjoy a comfortable internment on Malta. There are motor car journeys, sometimes through idyllic countryside to inspect coastal caves suspected of containing stores of petrol (always called benzine) for German submarines, never found, other journeys leave everyone caked in dust. Once only the alert ear of the chauffeur detects the noise that indicates that a wheel has been malevolently loosened, and is about to come off; another time, a large boulder bounds down from Lykabettos a few yards in front of the car, "normally an unusual event."

Mackenzie was frequently incapacitated by severe attacks of sciatica, probably the reason why photographs in which he appears show his face tense and strained. Again, his colleagues and agents are part-grotesques; he never seems quite to take the competent but rotund Tucker (for whom he successfully struggled to gain the rank of lieutenant) seriously, the women clerks he finally secured are paragons of efficiency, the Minister, Sir Francis Elliot, is ever the imperturbable Minister, even when waving with his umbrella for the shooting (by the other side) to stop. Some, of course, are carry-overs from First Athenian Memories. The most blatant imposter in the book is a Mr. Watney Hyde who, when unmasked and sent back to England by Mackenzie, managed, on the strength of a piece of office stationery with the Royal Arms stamped on it, and the scribble MI6, to return all the way back to the Aegean, expenses paid, where he had the misfortune to encounter Mackenzie again on Syra. Mackenzie's cruellest tease is to terrify a young Lothario who has been impressing and seducing governesses and nurses by indicating that he knows military secrets. Instead of being shot, or, as a commutation, merely beheaded, he is sentenced to scrub the floors of the Annexe three days in the week and to leave his hair uncut.

Mackenzie as man of action is actually quite impressive, witness such acts as his kidnapping the Royalist Colonel/Commandant of Naxos, with the Mayor added in as a bonus and his bluffing the Royalist police force of Syra itself into capture before the arrival of a sea-sick Venizelist contingent from Crete. The oration by the unlikely-named Poseidon (in translation by the speaker, which Mackenzie assures us does not do justice to the original version in Greek made for him) closes the book, with the crowd applauding "Hail, thou golden-mouthed one!".

Aegean Memories, the fourth and last of Mackenzie's War Memoirs (never so called by the author), written in 1939/40, 22 years after the events they describe, takes up the tale when he had to leave an Athens dominated by Royalists since December 1st, 1916 and to set up his establishment on the island of Syra. As already stated, this was chosen because it was the junction of the East Mediterranean cable/telegraph network. With this advantage he was instrumental (as recounted in Greek Memories) within the month of garnering in for the Venizelist cause almost all of the Cyclades. These were acquisitions from "Old (i.e, pre-1913) Greece", which were supposed to be Royalist in tendency, as opposed to Venizelist "New Greece" - Crete, Macedonia, Thrace and the East Aegean islands.

The vendetta between the King and Venizelos was irreconcilable and the French, who seemed for some time to favour the King, resolved it clumsily, coming down off the fence, forcing him to abdicate on Greece's most unlucky day, Tuesday, May 29th, anniversary of the Fall of Constantinople. Venizelos returned to Athens as their protege, rather than with either obvious popular or Allied backing. This led to the Minister Sir Francis Elliot asking to be recalled, an unfortunate event for Mackenzie whose position, with an unsympathetic replacement, was undermined, as more and more British personnel of varying incompetence and obstructiveness arrived in Athens, from which he was excluded. He was reprimanded for making a quick visit to see Venizelos - because he saw no one else.

In fact, Mackenzie had made too many enemies within his own ranks, to say nothing of his allies. However cordial personal relations were with their representatives, both France and Italy were well aware that he was willing and able to thwart their interests. "Every suggestion I have made since I started here has been finally adopted and has worked well. Not a single suggestion made by anybody else but has failed to work well", he protested at the time. Unfortunately, the Foreign Office right at the top, and all his superiors seemed to have no clear idea what British policy ought to be. "It is absurd to talk about winning the war without saying what winning the war means," he comments on an appreciation of the Balkan-East Mediterranean situation by Lord Loch. It is illuminating to realise that even Lloyd George had a short attention span - "He can't listen too long at a time to anything nowadays," confided Lord Milner to Sir Francis.

Much of the book is given over to intrigue, which may have seemed tedious reading in 1940, and I fear does so now, but has a kind of documentary interest in describing how it actually is carried out. Again, the author's interest in people and personal relations, so important in his role as spy-diplomat, comes out in the narrative and his affection for his colleagues. The invaluable Tucker, he records with grief in 1940, had died two or three years before, back in Istanbul from where he had come to fight the war. Francis Storrs (brother of Sir Ronald) died on Armistice Day from the virulent Spanish flu, again to Mackenzie's great grief. A flamboyant character, later to have a distinguished academic career is (Professor) J.L. Myers, whose great black beard, reminiscent of an Assyrian king and the pirate Teach, whom he resembled in other ways, is always mentioned, though it was occasionally nibbled by cockroaches. There is the taciturn Larkins, who warned him that heat was not good for sciatica and was killed when transferred to Tanks, the cheerful Molesworth, mad teenager Macartney (unfortunately with a criminal destiny), loyal and generous Knoblock and boon companion Hope Johnstone. It was in his incarnation as a French naval officer that he met an unobtrusive Pierre Loti.

There were heart-rending partings when he finally left Syra, in his little ship Avlis, especially from his tiny, sweet housekeeper Lisa, expressing herself in broken French to the last: "Jamais plus. Vous jamais plus. Lisa jamais plus vous voir." A friend told him that in August 1939 he was sure he had seen her, boarding a tram in Athens.

An Australian naval surgeon, who visited him in Capri, invalided him out: "You won't do any more active service in this war" after wondering how he was ever passed fit: he never had been, having gone from Capri, via Alexandria, to Gallipoli. A constant of Mackenzie's life is how often he was laid up by illness, not only the frequent, if irregular attacks of sciatica, but also by bouts of dysentery, while any travel by ship meant sea-sickness.

Back in London, C, who had had his own difficulties, revealed to him that a War Office list had noted against Mackenzie's name "This officer has too much initiative, but should make an ideal Number Two." He suggested a fortnight later that Mackenzie might become his Number Two, but later still had to say that all his staff had unanimously protested - not that Mackenzie himself seems to have been much tempted. C died in 1922, long before any of the Memories were written, and Sir Francis Elliot in 1940, just before he could read the proofs of this book. And Compton Mackenzie himself as man of action: wasn't the rest of his long life - he died at 89 - something of an anticlimax?

The '45
Christopher Duffy
Weidenfeld & Nicholson 2003

Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart
Frank McLynn
Routlledge 1988

Prince Charles Edward Stuart's campaign to regain the British throne for his father is the most romantic episode in British history, retold many times. Landing in Moidart on the Scottish mainland with seven companions, and then persuading a number of clan chiefs to support him, he conducted a brilliant campaign that took him to 120 miles of London. Because of the passivity of the English Jacobites and the failure of any French help to arrive, the clan chiefs refused to proceed further and the army retreated back to Scotland and ultimate defeat. The five-month hunt for Charles through the Scottish Highlands and Islands until he escaped at last to France provides a coda just as romantic and more material to make him into a legend, which even turned the head of Frederick the Great.

Duffy's massive 639 page account is primarily a military history, giving much information on the forces of the two sides, Stuart and Hanoverian, their movements, tactics and morale, but strangely lacking serious discussion of strategy. The political background, national and international is likewise missing; in 1743 Britain had got involved in the war of the Austrian Succession (1740-48), and was at war with France. It may be that the author is overconscious of going over well-trodden ground, but it seems perverse to opt out of giving an account, or even a summary of an account, of the council of war at Derby that decided that the Jacobite army should retreat, and though he dissents from that decision himself: "It is not the purpose of the present work to recapitulate the details of the sessions, which are recounted at length in every serious biography of the Prince and study of the '45 (p. 301)".

McLynn's biography makes it clear that the Highland chiefs, whose clans had been the spearhead of the invasion simply refused to continue. They had been disappointed by the lack of French intervention, promised by Charles, together with the passivity of the English Jacobites. Duffy makes much of the fact that the scale may have been turned by the false information that the Duke of Cumberland's army was about to block any possible retreat provided by the Hanoverian agent, Dudley Bradstreet, masquerading as Oliver Williams, an English, or more likely, a Welsh Jacobite volunteer. Bradstreet must have had nerves of steel, for he stayed with the Prince on the retreat, and was not slow to take the credit for it. Duffy does not say when he deserted - for that one would presumably have to read Bradstreet's own account (1750; edited and republished, 1929). Needless to say, it is far from being accepted by everybody as gospel.

There is no doubt that until Derby, the rebels had won every move, mainly because of their greater mobility and their seizing of the initiative. Even the weather, usually bad, favoured them, despite or even because by the time the crisis came they were conducting a winter campaign, for which they were better suited than their opponents, not only because of the greater hardiness of the Highlanders, who made up their shock troops, but because of their logistics. They advanced from town to town in an orderly manner, usually collecting money already accumulated there for tax payments and sometimes clothing and equipment. What they did not get, especially after they had crossed the border, were many recruits. The impression given is that most of the population, both in England and Scotland, had decided to sit things out and see what happened.

Although remote, the Highlands may well have been the most sensible place for Charles to start the campaign, since it was only there in the British Isles that the male population still consisted of and regarded itself as, should the occasion arise, natural fighting men, with arms for the purpose. To go with this, as Duffy makes very clear, was an extremely squalid lifestyle; the men did little other than indulge in cattle-raiding while, as in most primitive societies, the women did most of the work. The only alternative to, or reinforcement for the Highlanders would be a force of French regulars of about the same numbers - upwards of 5,000 - landed, with the help of smugglers disaffected to the government, in South East England, where, Duffy argues, the geography would help the formation of a bridgehead and an advance on London. Britain was at war with France (and had an army on the continent, from which the Duke of Cumberland was recalled) and the Duc de Richelieu, on Louis XV's orders, organized an invasion attempt, but was (according to N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean) unready at the critical time, becoming aware of the retreat from Derby when he arrived to do the job. Rather pointlessly he planned an operation, then abandoned it: the important thing is that the French were not there when wanted, expected and needed.

Even a token attempt by them might have been sufficient to have swayed Prince Charles's advisers to fall in with his wish to march on London - which was clearly also that of his army, as distinct from its leaders. Both the opposing forces, Wade's and Cumberland's, were poorly positioned to resist it, able to march at only about half its speed and, after much fruitless activity, in a poor state physically and psychologically. Foreign observers in London, in particular the Swedish Ambassador, noted how disorganized the government response was. Derby was only 120 miles from London and Highlanders could march 25 miles a day for five or six consecutive days.

By any judgement, surely, the whole project was a gamble and Duffy does not give the arguments, if any, as to how retreating at this stage would favourably increase the odds, while it decisively boosted the morale of the Hanoverian government. The reverse would be the case for the Stuart army and the effect was disastrous on the Prince, who fell seriously ill when back in Scotland. Certainly from then on, matters for the Jacobites seemed only to deteriorate. There was no attempt to turn and fight in England, a garrison was left in an inadequately defended Carlisle and then abandoned and captured, then the Scottish lowlands were evacuated. One reason for a retreat to Scotland was that much of the North East coast was held by the Jacobites with adequate forces, gathered since the Prince left for England, making communication with France feasible and reinforcements of men, munitions and money from there possible, though much was intercepted by the Royal Navy. Yet the ports there were also abandoned and resources frittered away in localised fighting. After a botched attempt at a night attack, the result next day of the battle of Culloden, with weary, half-starved rebels, pitted against rested, well-fed troops, now properly trained to resist a Highland onslaught, was inevitable.

Duffy emphasises more than once that Prince Charles saw no point in continuing the conflict as a sporadic guerilla war and after Culloden that there was nothing for him to do but to escape. He had determined to carry out his campaign in proper form, with a orderly, disciplined army, which is what he did, at all times leading it from the front, usually on foot, until the retreat, when he brought up the rear. There was little or no looting or misbehaviour by his soldiers, Highlanders or others. For a full character assessment of Charles, Duffy refers readers to Frank McLynn's biography, which unsparingly depicts its terrible deterioration in his later life. Duffy's own opinion of the Prince is: "I have to say I found him to be an extraordinarily impressive character," and the narrative bears this out. His opponent Cumberland also comes out better than one might have expected, considerate of his troops' welfare, and a competent commander in contrast to his subordinate Hawley. His harsh behaviour towards the rebels does not seem out of line with the times; the contrast of Charles in the treatment of prisoners might be put down to differences in policy from necessity of conciliation as opposed to repression.

Cumberland's - and the government's - measures following the rebellion can be seen to be justified since the comparative leniency shown after previous uprisings and disturbances had obviously not worked. The Highlanders were disarmed and their style of dress (rather different from the present one) banned; clans as potential armed units withered away. As superb fighters with other no source of employment, however, Highlanders as individuals were soon surprisingly willing to serve King George.

Duffy does not deal with the political fallout from the rebellion, or speculate on what might have happened had things turned out differently. It may be worth while to note, however, that the House of Hanover had now reigned for 30 years, that Whigs had been in government for the same length of time, for much of it under the control of Walpole, and that neither were popular, let alone charismatic. The mechanism of "regime change" through a parliamentary two-party system had not yet been properly established, though after 30 years the country was probably needing something of the sort. The '45 therefore coincided with a situation which might have allowed "regime change" to take place.

McLynn plainly leans towards the possibility that Prince Charles might have succeeded, without quite saying so:

"With the recent revival in Jacobite studies, we are at last able to appreciate the deadly threat to the regime posed by the 1745 rising. Some of the finest young historians at work today now rate the mixed phenomenon of domestic rebellion and foreign invasion threat, as in 1779, 1798 and, most clearly, 1745 as more important threats to the social and economic order than the much trumpeted revolutions of the 1640s and 1688."

This is a very odd statement because, if it means anything, it is that threats which didn't come off should be "rated more important" than revolutions which did. Nor are the two examples given in any way convincing or impressive. In 1779 Spain joined the vultures gathering to take advantage of the American Revolution (not exactly a "domestic" rebellion), so that the combined French and Spanish fleets greatly outnumbered ours in the Channel. However, the French had badly bungled their preparations, rendering their fleet almost useless, had no charts or pilots or any idea, for lack of scouting, where the defending fleet was, which was under the command of a cool and competent admiral. The expedition withdrew to Brest and the crisis passed. In 1798 there was even more of a fiasco. Located in the west of Ireland, there was a "domestic" rebellion, but it was crushed before French assistance had even set out. The 1,000 French troops, uselessly landed, were rounded up and seven of the ten ships that arrived a month later were captured or sunk.

We must not be distracted by speculation of what might have been, though it is hard to believe that Charles could really have taken control of London with just over 5,000 men, not all Highlanders. The rebellion failed and its repercussions were suprisingly slight. The war with France continued and George II went on quarrelling with his ministers about the priority he wished to give to defending his vulnerable electorate of Hanover. Only in the Highlands was its aftermath important, where a long-overdue pacification started to bring the region under the rule of law.

The Stuarts in exile had been a marginal element internationally for decades; now they became a nuisance and, finally, an embarrassment. By the terms of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, Louis XV undertook to expel Charles from France which he did, though not without an enormous fuss and resistance by the Prince who finally had to be arrested, bound hand and foot and driven away from Paris. After a very expensive visit to Avignon, which was Papal territory, and which paid the bills, he settled in Venice.

There would be no replay; he would never return. His character, if nothing else, ensured that. The legend and the myth live on, deservedly so, but as myths and legends are, things of the past, not inspiration for the future. Even contemporaries must have noticed, as we can see now, that Parliament, representing the governing class, was becoming more important than the monarch. The rebellion had given it a fright, but it slipped easily into its old ways, as if nothing had happened. Perhaps nothing really had, and the '45, noisy and frightening as a thunderstorm, was ultimately a Non-Event.

Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945
Max Hastings
Knopf, 2004

I do not suppose that at any moment of history has the agony of the world been so great or widespread. Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering then ever before in the world.

Sir Winston Churchill's bleak view, given to his daughter at the Yalta conference, reflects the deplorable state of Europe in February 1945. The end of the war in Europe was now clearly in sight; however, the finale promised, and delivered, horrors of a truely grotesque nature.

The nature of the German collapse was such that it has not received a great deal of attention by historians. Once the Allies were fully established on the Continent with their victory in the Battle of Normandy, the nature of the outcome of the war was set, and apart from Operation Market Garden, the Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle of Berlin, not a great deal of attention has been given to the general course of operations in Europe.

That is not so surprising. The collapse of Germany was in the most part a gradual erosion rather then a swift cracking. The German army had been broken in France, but logisitical problems and the weather had halted the Allies progress; given time, the Germans were able to scramble enough forces to halt the Allies advance; even launch one last desperate counterattack.

The erosion and collapse of German military power forms the basis of this book, but it is much more then that.

It is also the tale of those who were caught up in these terrible events. This is a comprehensive, but not compelete coverage of events from September 1944 to May 1945. The Italian campaign is ignored completely; the Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle of Berlin are given only cursury coverage, with the excusable reason that these have been better covered elsewhere.

Hastings concentrates on the stories of ordinary soldiers and civillians; thanks to the end of the Cold War, he is able to present a picture of the tale as it looked on the Soviet side as well. This really makes the book; the crimes of the Red Army are not excused, the horrors of Soviet conquest are recorded here. But the Red Army was a complex, strange machine, with very human strengths and weaknesses. Hastings is able to get Red Army veterans to speak in their own terms.

That is important; too often, the Red Army is presented as a mindless rabble of Orc-like creatures, blind, ignorant, driven on by the lash of its commissars and Marshals themselves living in mortal terror of Stalin. It was that, but it was much more then that too- it was a body of men (and women) with hopes and fears, and great emotion. In Armageddon, we get a glimpse of these.

Hastings writes more convential history too; and he asks some hard questions about all the participants. He looks at why British and US forces seemed so inferior to equivilent German units (political choices is Hastings' answer). He examines the Allied bomber campaign, and its effect on Germany, and the costs and benefits of it.

Most of all, he examines the horrific contradicition of the Germans. At one end of the front, he recounts the terror and the agony of East Prussia as it was savaged by the Red Army; at the same time, the pangs of starvation Germany inflicted on the Dutch in the terrible Hongerwinter are revealed. In between, the fate of the prisoners of the Reich are recounted; the grand canvas of misery that gave truth to Churchill's observation is painted for the instruction of the reader.

Although Hastings has strong opinions, and does not hesitate to state them, this is that rarity; a work of history that does not try to make a case, but simply to recount events. A clear narrative, with new material (the collapse of the USSR has provided a boon to historians that is plainly not exhausted yet), and well chosen photograhs. I found this book a pleasure to read and I commend it to Samizdata.net readers with an interest in the history of this most terrible period.

Smoking, Class and the Legitimation of power
Sean Gabb
Hampden Press 2005

What are you first reactions to reading this?

In any society, the main function of government is to provide status and incomes for the ruling class. However recruited, the members of such a class will be motivated by a disinclination to earn their living by voluntary exchange, or by a delight in coercing others, or by a combination of the two. Its size and activities will be determined by the physical resources it can extract from the people, by the amount of force it can use against them, and by the nature and acceptance of the ideology that legitimises its existence. None of these factors by itself will be decisive, but each is a necessary factor. Change any one, and the working of the other two will be limited or wholly checked.

Just the use of the phrase �ruling class� is sufficient, among many people, to conjure up unfortunate images of Trotskyite college professors and bed-sit Che Guevarras. But read the above paragraph carefully. If you assumed that this was a bit of Marxist cant, you were wrong. In fact, it is an extract from the Introduction to the latest book by classical English liberal academic, Dr. Sean Gabb.

A large part of the book actually consists of reprints of three long articles that Sean originally penned in the late 1980�s for FOREST. Each article consists of defence of the right to smoke from a historical perspective, a Christian perspective and a Conservative perspective. Each is discussed in more detail below.

But this is more than just a reprint of previously iterated views. Dr. Gabb now concedes that while has analysis of the methodology of the anti-smoking lobby was accurate, even he was unclear as to the primary motivation behind the crusade, blaming various phenomena such as junk science, resonant Puritanism or decaying Marxism. But, as he now admits, he overlooked (or failed adequately to comprehend) the primary cause of the war on tobacco.

Introduction

The pattern is so wearily familiar. One day, seemingly out of the blue, a shock, horror report about the dangers of [insert as appropriate] appear in some national news organ, apparently penned by some notable medically or scientifically qualified person or persons. Next thing, similar reports are making headline news right across the land. Then everyone starts talking about it and, more importantly, worrying about it. About this time, a hastily-assembled and previously unheard of squadron of �experts� are appearing on every TV screen with furrowed brows and ominous assurances that [insert as appropriate] is a catastrophe that is blighting the lives of every man, woman and child in the land and the government must act now before it is too late. By the time you have switched over to the football, the legislative prohibition/restriction/regulation/taxation is already being spewed out of the government printing presses.

We all know how it works, but why? Why is it that these ridiculous crusades march on relentlessly from inception to fruition without a pause for debate, discussion, analysis or rebuttal?

The answer lies in the need for the political ruling class to maintain their legitimising ideologies:

An economy based on voluntary exchange is not inherently unstable and in need of programmes of demand management and a welfare state. People of different nationalities can live together without having to be bullied by law into pretending to love one another. We are not running out of natural resources, and our industrial pollutions do not threaten life on earth. There are no satanic child abusers. Sexual abuse of children is statistically insignificant. Smoking and drinking and consuming other drugs and fatty foods are at least less dangerous than is claimed, and there is no good reason to believe that passive smoking even exists. But whether a problem is real is far less important than whether the people can be brought to believe in its reality and in the need for solutions that justify income and status for the ruling class and its various client groups.

Take out the word �tobacco� and one could replace it with fatty foods, firearms, marijuana, sport utility vehicles, pornography, alcohol or any number of other hobgoblins du jour.

Although this book is ostensibly presented as a defence of smoking, it is so much more than that. What Dr. Gabb has done is to present what I consider to be the most plausible unifying theory to explain the intrusions and predations of the modern welfare state and he does so by means of class analysis; a tool which, Dr. Gabb would contend, is every bit as essential to the free market movement now as it was to the Marxists in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Historical View

This section (written in or around 1990) takes us first of all through an infuriating account of the advance of the current anti-smoking lobby whose barely-occluded goal is the complete prohibition of tobacco in all forms.

It is impossible to deny that these people have all the political, legal and cultural momentum on their side right now but it may not always be so. Despite recounting in the gloomiest detail, the relentless success that these foes of liberty have enjoyed, Dr. Gabb takes us on a fascinating tour of the history of smoking to provide a soaring note of optimism. Anti-smoking laws may seem to us to have modern provenance but, in fact, they first started appearing only a few short years after the tobacco plant made its journey across the Atlantic.

Further, the previous rounds of anti-tobacco fury have often manifested themselves in draconian punishments for smokers ranging from excommunication to torture, castration and death. The good news is that every single one of these campaigns has ended in failure. Despite being threatened with the most blood-curdling of sanctions, people continued to smoke because they enjoyed smoking and, after a few short years, with the law in a state of disrepute, the authorities have always relented and let smokers simply do their thing.

The current crusaders may appear to be unstoppable but history is not on their side. They are merely the latest wave of killjoy busybodies whose ambitions will, sooner or later, be stubbed out.

Christian View

It is necessary to say at the outset that this is not a treatise on faith or theology. Rather, it is an analysis of the philosophical development of Christendom and the praxeological effects of the religion as reflected in both politics and morality.

No atheist or agnostic should be deterred from reading this finely wrought and scholarly essay which examines the pivotal role that Christianity has played in the development of Western canon in general, and Anglo-Saxon liberalism in particular.

Conservative view

Dr. Gabb is just about the only person I know who sees no inconsistency in calling himself both a Conservative and a Libertarian and in this essay he not only lays bare the base and scurrilous methods of the anti-smoking lobby but also persuasively argues the case that all Conservatives should defend both the right and freedom to smoke.

The right to advertise

This penultimate section of the book deals with the attack on advertising which has already succeeded in creating considerable limits and restrictions in pursuit of what are touted as altruistic aims.

Advertising is freedom of expression and that fact that the motives are commercial does not make it any less worthy of defending. In fact, Dr. Gabb makes the customarily persuasive point that it is precisely because of its unpopularity that it must be defended so resolutely:

It will be said against me, I have no doubt, that I am simply arguing for the right of people who are already very wealthy to go on making money from the needless suffering of others�that I am using the great names and arguments of liberalism to defend the most sordid of motives. That, however, is an occupational hazard. Unless its enemies are able to mount a frontal assault, freedom of any kind is invariably attacked in its outermost extensions, in those places where it is often least convenient or productive of honour to fight in its defence. But it is there that the battle is won or lost.

In conclusion, �Smoking, Class and Legitimation of Power� is a fascinating, compelling, infuriating, uplifting and powerful book which resounds with quotable lines. It is not just a Weapon of Mass Debunkment, it is also, in my view, a highly valuable resource for anyone who seeks to maintain and defend the traditions of Western liberty from the various forces that threaten it.

In my humble opinion, this ranks as Dr. Gabb�s finest work to date and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

The Duel
John Lukacs
Ticknor & Fields, New York 1994

Five Days in London: May 1940
John Lukacs
Yale Univ. Press 1999

We buried Winston Churchill forty years ago. Sixty five years ago, come May, he faced, for us, the greatest crisis of our history. BBC's Radio 4 commemorated his death with a fine, hour-long recall of his funeral and the crisis of 1940 with a gripping drama, Playing for Time - Three Days in May 1940. I do not know whether the author of the play, Robin Glendinning, owed anything to the books noticed here, but to me they seem to autheticate it. Another Radio 4 programme, Churchill's Roar, very perceptively analysed the voice that spoke the words that still move us.

The World's Debt to Britain

To put it no higher, the world is fortunate that, for a whole year, from June 1940 to June 1941, Britain had a government that did not capitulate to or compromise with Hitler. The situation during that year looked barely a stalemate. The Axis Powers now completely dominated Europe. Italy was an ally, Spain was friendly and the USSR no threat (the only person Stalin ever trusted was Hitler). Germany had absorbed Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938, then in less than a year's war had overrun and partitioned Poland, occupied Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg, and completed her conquest of Western Europe by knocking out France. The Balkans represented no problem.

Although it may have been the result of miscalculation and misfortune that for a year Britain "stood alone", it turned out to be the right thing to do. And more than calculation stood behind the decision: it felt the right thing to do. But what could Britain hope for? The Dominions (except for Southern Ireland, still officially one of them, whose government played its ignoble role, excused by its history, until the very end) were loyal and contributed men and arms. The United States was sympathetic but strongly isolationist: to win the Presidential Election in 1940, Roosevelt felt he had to promise to keep out of the war. There was little Britain could do but protect herself and trounce Hitler's jackal-ally Italy in Ethiopia, Somaliland and North Africa - and hope that Hitler would make some mistake.

The Inevitable Parallel: Napoleon and Hitler

The parallel between Britain's struggle against Napoleon and that against Hitler hardly needs to be drawn, but if there is any lesson in history, surely it is here. Napoleon retains his high reputation, gained from victory in a dozen battles; Hitler never commanded in the field, yet subjugated Europe more thoroughly. Both underestimated Britain in both her power and persistence, Hitler the more excusably. Napoleon abandoned the attempt to invade, and did not in person try to eject Britain from Spain and Portugal; in combination, a fatal error. Hitler postponed his invasion attempt, half-hoping the fruit would drop into his hand, also a fatal error.

Hitler's Priority - and his Four Mistakes

We can see now that the priority for Hitler was the elimination of Britain. Any move that Hitler made that did not have this purpose was bound to be a mistake. From June 1940 until April 1941 he had no other enemy; a better opportunity to attack her was never to recur. That he failed to concentrate on this was his first mistake. Then he made his next; he attacked Jugoslavia and Greece, wasting energy merely to enter the irrelevant theatre of the Mediterranean by a more difficult route than one he already had, through Italy - Rommel was already causing us trouble in North Africa. The third error, the colossal blunder of invading the USSR, followed in June; from then on Germans were to be killed on a large scale, though at terrible cost to the Russians because of the stupidity of Stalin and the wastefulness of his generals. Even so, the first German offensive would almost certainly have captured Moscow, Leningrad and European Russia, including the Ukraine, had Hitler's resources not been depleted by his Balkan adventure and the need to keep watch on Britain. We on our part, began to send arms to Russia. Hitler's fourth mistake was the inexplicable stupidity of declaring war on the USA. This sealed his fate by rendering Britain impregnable and providing inexhaustible armaments to anyone willing to fight him.

That the US military alliance was vital, no one can deny. Churchill, in May 1940, our darkest hour, confessed to his son that his only hope was somehow to get the United States into the war. The rapport that Churchill and Roosevelt developed was an extraordinary bonus, not something that could have been taken for granted. Although it can be confidently asserted that Churchill took the initiative and that necessity drove him, yet the bond formed was firm and lasting. When Roosevelt died in January 1945 Churchill wept copiously at his Memorial Service; reciprocally, Roosevelt had confided to a colleague that Churchill was "the greatest man alive".

Why Britain's Survival in 1940 was Essential to Win the War

The survival of Britain as a fighting power after June 1940 was thus essential to victory. Without it, the US would would almost certainly never have come to Europe, where the political scene, whether dominated by a Nazi Germany or, much less likely, a Communist USSR would be at best depressing, at worst horrific. While both ideologies might mellow or collapse over time, that time would undoubtedly have had its fill of horrors and humiliation. It would certainly have been most of the last 65 years and of the lifetimes of those born since 1940, the year we are now so reluctant to see as our Annus Mirabilis.

...and Why We Should Have Fought On

There have been suggestions that Britain, in 1940-41, might have reached a modus vivendi with Hitler, similar to the Peace of Amiens in 1802 with Napoleon. Logically, Hitler should have offered to withdraw to 1939 boundaries (which still included Austria and Czechoslovakia), but this would have been for Hitler, a political and psychological impossibility. He made no offer anything like it. For Britain to have accepted anything less, on the other hand, would have been unwise, leaving her vulnerable, both materially and psychologically, to a second round. And Britain in 1940 was not Britain in 1802. In 1802 her foreign policy was run by a handful of aristocrats with a managed Parliament, who took their country in and out of wars and alliances with little need to consult public, or even informed opinion. In 1940, by contrast, a government that stopped the country fighting would have had difficulty in starting it again.

Churchill as Inspirer (or Mouthpiece?)

The resolution of the government, in 1940 as in 1802, remained all-important, and accounts of Cabinet meetings and less formal discussions leave one in no doubt that this resolution would have wavered, had it not been for Churchill. Well might he have said, in the words uttered (without bombast, one feels sure) by Wellington after Waterloo: "By God! I don't think it would have done if I had not been there!" In fact, Churchill's assessment of his own part was humble: "Had I faltered at all in the leading of the nation I should have been hurled out of office." Yet when Churchill inspired, first his cabinet, then the nation, while France crumbled and the BEF was being evacuated from Dunkirk, he had been Prime Minister for less than a month.

Since any terms offered by Hitler would have been equivalent to surrender, Churchill refused to condone any negotiating, which would merely admit weakness. Both RAF and Royal Navy chiefs thought they could prevent an invasion, but emphasised the importance of national morale. Churchill probably overestimated the nation's courage and determination, but in thinking he was only its mouthpiece, he inspired it into believing itself what he thought it was. "It fell to me," he wrote later, "to express their sentiments on suitable occasions. This I was able to do because they were mine also. There was a white glow, overpowering, sublime, which ran through our island from end to end." With the Battle of Britain won and the Blitz endured, Britain was saved. and, ultimately, the war was won. If any one man was responsible for this achievement, it was Churchill.

If Britain Had Been Beaten...

Allow me to reiterate the logic of this claim. If Hitler could have subjugated Britain, he could then, by concentrating all his resources, and in his own time, have occupied or neutralized all of Europe west of the Black Sea, dominated the Mediterranean, and still have surprised the USSR and annihilated her armies. The USA could only have acquiesced in this state of affairs. It might ultimately have collided with Japan, but yet have taken no action while that power absorbed the Far Eastern possessions of the Dutch, French and British and turned China into a helpless puppet. India could have experienced a spurious liberation, either by the Germans or the Japanese - how can anyone know what might have happened to her?

The laws of Physics determine that however long and strong a lever may be, without a fulcrum it cannot be used. It is almost impossible to believe that Germany could have been beaten without either Soviet or US participation, but in the event, neither could it have happened without Britain's survival through the year 1940-1 when she stood alone. We do not know whether or for how long we could have survived a determined German attack, but we do know that Churchill's role in Britain's defiance was paramount. The VE Day crowds in 1945 did not doubt it. When he told them "This is your victory" they roared back "No - it is yours".

...or negotiated

By the end of October 1940 the British Government knew that German invasion plans had been cancelled. It is presumably during the next five months, until the German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece, which was started at the beginning and completed by the end of April, that some modern historians see a "window of opportunity" for a negotiated peace. Whether or not this seems reasonable in retrospect, it is difficult to see how it could possibly ever have happened. Churchill was now at the zenith of his power and prestige and had no intention of discussing peace. There was no politician of any standing whom a peace party could form around; Chamberlain was dead, Halifax (as a lord, anyway more or less disqualified) had been sent as Ambassador to Washington and Cripps to Moscow; Butler had been sidetracked into the unwarlike Ministry of Education.

Which Would Hitler Invade First - Britain or the USSR?

Be that as it may and granted that Churchill had the bit between his teeth (we can surely dismiss personal ambition) we still have to decide whether peace was a reasonable option and on what terms. The question boils down to this: if Hitler had spent the better part of a year preparing to invade Britain, would he have succeeded? For this his best strategy would be a massive aircraft and U-Boat building programme. The Army was certainly adequate as it was. But here a large factor looms - the USSR. With hindsight, we know that Hitler always intended to subjugate it. From captured documents the British government knew that in July 1940 Hitler had initiated the planning to do so. So for Britain, the question must have been not "If?" but "When?" As we have seen, Hitler's best strategy would have been to neutralize Britain first; as soon as Britain knew the attack on Russia was fixed for June 1941, there would be no reason to seek peace. The British Government would not be justified in making, or in considering, peace overtures if the evidence showed that Germany was either not making a serious attempt to dominate the Channel, or that such an attempt would fail. After the Battle of Britain, which we won, evidence for both became overwhelming.

So confident was Churchill and the government of this that the the British felt able to send troops to Egypt and campaign, in a morale-raising way, to throw the Italians out of North Africa. Hitler refused Rommel reinforcements which may, at the time, have revealed that he needed the men elsewhere - Russia.

The Academic Debate: The Price We Paid - Unnecessary or Inevitable?

Despite the facts in the analysis above, it has been claimed that this interlude, irrespective of Hitler's choice between the two alternatives, would have been a good time to negotiate. Large numbers of Britons (200,000+?) would have stayed alive, large numbers of houses and factories would not have been destroyed, our empire, including its oil-rich territories, would have remained intact, and its resources diverted to counter any threat from the Japanese. The morality of such a policy could be brushed aside and with some reason; Nazi atrocities were largely in the future, were dwarfed to date by Communist ones and, it has to be said, did not affect military strategy when they were known.

Lives Lost...

None of these reasons is really valid. What of the 200,000+ putative lives to be saved? Spread over the whole country, this would be a one chance in 275 of being killed, about twice the likelihood of anyone today being killed in a road accident during their entire lives. In human history, warfare has ranged from being regarded as a somewhat dangerous sport, through all the various stages of high-risk activity to kamikaze and suicide bomber. In short, it is difficult not to believe that most people in this country would have accepted a 100 to 200 to 1 chance of being killed in preference to the risk of trusting Hitler. Admittedly, in the armed forces, the risk would be higher!

Material Resources...

The other reasons can be dealt with more straightforwardly. The actual aftermath of the war has shown how rapidly material resources can be regenerated. The undeniable fact that the two defeated nations subsequently outstripped the victors economically even suggests that a thorough demolition of obsolescent structures, physical and psychological, can be even beneficial.

...and The Empire

As for the survival of Britain's empire; this had been held together by moral force; selfconfidence in the rulers, acquiescence by the ruled. It would have been amazing if it could have survived a perceived British defeat any better than it did the ultimate British victory, especially in the case of India. The Japanese, had they taken care not to become embroiled with the US, could have over-run Malaya and Burma just as effectively as they did in 1942. To them, the difference between a compromise peace and an outright British defeat might not have seemed sufficient for them not to take the risk.

The Surprising "Moral Dimension"

Coming, lastly, to the moral dimension, it may surprise cynics, blase to British claims to hold the higher moral ground, to find how crucial this was. If the Germans had treated the inhabitants of White Russia (Belorus) and the Ukraine humanely or as allies against Bolshevism, as most of them wished to be, the Soviet Union might well have fallen to pieces nearly 50 years before it did. Hitler was even advised to do so but opted for their enslavement, largely because he regarded them as inferior human beings. With a parallel idiocy, both sides ill-treated their prisoners, instead of wooing them.

But Back to 1940 - 41: The Actual Situation...

During the months October 1940 to March 1941 Churchill waited to see whether Germany was going to move against Britain or the Soviet Union first. Given his complete dominance over the Cabinet, Parliament and the nation, there was, because of his refusal to consider them, no chance of peace negotiations coming about and the discussion of their desirability is literally an academic exercise. The academic exercise conducted in the paragraphs above suggests that he was right. At Nuremburg, the German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop (if one can believe him) claimed that Hitler himself, baffled as to what to do about Britain, even turned in desperation to Japan - to initiate an alliance that was to make his ruin ultimately complete.

Britain's "Compromise Option" - To Be Eaten Last

There was, of course, an enormous risk that Hitler would succeed in completely defeating the Soviet Union, disintegrating its armies, killing or capturing Stalin or after occupying Moscow and Leningrad, turning him into a completely discredited, hunted man. But this risk would be much increased if Britain was neutral and our position would become desperate when the last power independent of Germany in the whole of Eurasia disappeared. Consequently it was not in our interest to agree with Hitler to give him a free hand to deal with the Soviet Union; that would be merely to accept the privilege accorded by the Cyclops to Odysseus - to be eaten last.

Because the United States, due to Hitler's folly, became involved in the European war, Britain never had to confront either single power, Germany or the Soviet Union, dominant on the continent. However, whichever it had turned out to be, we should have been best to do so fully armed, with our resources mobilised in a fashion that only actual belligerance can ensure.

In The Duel, practically a day by day account of 80 days, May 10th to 31st July 1940 Lukacs explains how Churchill put the backbone into the British policy of defiance, a policy justifiable at the time only because the alternatives would be worse, but ultimately vindicated. Its most obvious feature is Churchill's determination and will power, compared with the pessimism, if not actual defeatism, of, in particular, Halifax and Butler. Against their wish to explore Hitler's terms was Churchill's awareness of the "slippery slope" down which any interest in them might lead. It was another matter to carefully place "false feelers" to confuse and delay German reactions.

But there are other points well worth taking into account. The magnanimity of both Chamberlain and Churchill emerge; Churchill in his loyalty until his time comes and his kindness thereafter; Chamberlain's acceptance of his replacement (he surely realised how much more adequate Churchill was to the task) and his pressure on his own supporters to rally behind Churchill. The number of Conservative MPs who began the period hostile to Churchill was large (large enough in the Commons Chamber to cheer Chamberlain rather than Churchill after the changeover). I rather wish that Lloyd George (Petain in waiting?) had been followed up.

The famous "calling off" by Hitler of Rundstedt's advance on Dunkirk remains (to me) unexplained. The book finishes just as the Battle of Britain begins. Not perhaps argued strongly enough by the author is his suggestion that airborne or paratroop landings by the Germans might have led to the defeat of Britain immediately after, perhaps during, the Dunkirk evacuation. But were such airborne facilities yet developed sufficiently?

As an American, Lukacs is aware of the dependence of Churchill upon hopes of US help and knows the personalities in US politics; the various ways and means may have been simplified here. The weakness of a democratic system, especially of the US constitutional type, shows up in the difficulties Roosevelt had in aiding Britain, e.g., for his political support he had to keep the defeatist Joseph Kennedy as Ambassador to Britain. He also characterises John Foster Dulles as an isolationist in 1940 - and John F. Kennedy following his father in his defeatist attitude. It seems amazingly fortunate that the Republican candidate in 1940 was Wendell Wilkie, who also favoured intervention short of war.

In his Five Days in London: May 1940, Lukacs, in 1999, followed The Duel with a more detailed examination of the most critical period of 1940. I am not sure if I can say that he has added much to the subject, though doubtless the detail is greater. Perhaps there is more about the precariousness of Churchill's position, but even so, this seems to have ended before the Dunkirk evacuation when far more men had been rescued that had been thought possible by anyone at its start. He may have thought the book was necessary after the publications of such revisionist historians as Charmley or Lawler, while he cites fairly often Roberts' biography of Halifax, The Holy Fox (1991) and Eminent Churchillians (1994), often to correct and contradict. The book has the merit of greater brevity, concentration and force than The Duel.

The aftermath

Britain emerged from the War exhausted and bankrupt, unable and unwilling to be any longer a Great Power. The Americans had come to liberate us all from the Germans; they remained to protect us from the Russians. Increasingly content, like the rest of Western Europe, to shelter under the American umbrella, and increasingly powerless, we could all cavort beneath it in a parody of independence, indulged by our benign protector, whom we treat in the normal, expected way - with ingratitude.

From Babel to Dragomans
Bernard Lewis
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2004

Two passages from this collection of essays catch the eye for quotation. The first is from the author himself, written in 1999, in an essay entitled The Taxonomy of Group Hatred:

Let me begin with a proposition that may seem outrageous: to hate the other, the outsider, the one who is different, who looks different, sounds different, smells different; to hate, fear and mistrust the other is natural and normal - natural and normal, that is to say, among baboons and other gregarious animals, or in the more primitive forms of human existence, such as forest tribes, cave-dwellers and the like. Unfortunately it survives into later forms of human development. It survives in even the most advanced and sophisticated civilised societies. It is, and we should not disguise this from ourselves, a very basic human instinct, not just human, but going back beyond our most primitive ancestors to their animal predecessors. The instinct is there, and it comes out in all sorts of unexpected situations. To pretend it does not exist and that it is some sort of ideological aberration cannot lead anywhere useful.

The second is itself a quotation, from the Baghdad-born conservative British historian Elie Kedourie (1926-92), and is the epigraph of Lewis's essay Islam and the West:

There was nothing unreasonable in believing that the Muslim world would attain the power and prosperity of Europe by the same methods Europe had used, and that this could be done without endangering any of the essential values of Islam.

Sad to say, I have encountered the work of Bernard Lewis late in the lives of both of us, but this collection of essays written during the last fifty years, between 1953 and 2003, provides some samples to encourage investigation of his more extended productions and here I can only discuss a sample of his samples. His territory is what used to be called the Near and Middle East, that area of Asia (like Europe, a strictly non-Islamic term) extending from Turkey to Pakistan. It is probably best to say at once, for those who do not know it, or others who might think that I was trying to conceal a relevant fact, that Bernard Lewis is Jewish, though how "observant" I do not know and cannot infer from these essays. The xenophobia, elucidated in his first quotation and amply displayed in his subject matter, past and present, does not lead him to lose hope in the fulfilment of the belief stated in the second. Yet his explanation of how Islam and the "West" (another non-Islamic term) fundamentally differ in their political philosophies makes it clear how difficult such a fulfilment will be.

When, in the 7th Century the Arabs conquered all the land mass stretching from the borders of India to the Atlantic, bringing Islam, their new religion with them, they were also bringing a social system with no distinction between the sacred and the secular and certainly not between church and state. There was (and is) no "church" or indeed any religious hierarchy, as Lewis keeps pointing out. Christianity had penetrated the Roman Empire in quite a different way, over a period of some three hundred difficult years, resulting in two organizations, church and state, ideally harmonious but often antagonistic. For Muslims, by contrast, religion seamlessly laid down both the rules by which they lived and the authority by which they were ruled.

Until comparatively recently Muslims were rarely subjected to infidel rule and the Islamic core lands when conquered were conquered by Muslims. Lewis points out more than once how this promoted isolation from and ignorance of their Christian neighbours until it was too late: a medieval Muslim description of European political geography is quite ludicrous, but, its author apologetically explained, only put in for completeness. Even as late as the seventeenth century, when the Thirty Years War (1618 - 48) was devastating central Germany, the Ottomans seemed unaware of the opportunity this gave them to smash through the Habsburg bulwark.

Lewis makes clear that almost all of the traffic and travelling, such as it was, between the two rival civilizations took place, until almost the end of the nineteenth century from Christian to Muslim lands. Muslims were used to Christians, as such, for there were tolerated communities of these living among them. The converse was certainly not the case; Muslims were unwelcome in Christendom, had no incentive to go there and for centuries could assume, as members of a superior culture, that nothing was to be gained from visiting such a benighted place, one of whose main exports was slaves.

Compared with what educated Muslims knew about Europe, educated Christians during all this time knew far more about the Near and Middle East; it was, after all, where their beliefs, and much of their intellectual heritage had come from. They would know more, indeed, of the pre-Islamic Persian, Mesopotamian or Egyptian Empires than any of the Muslim historians who knew next to nothing about them.

The title essay, From Babel to Dragomans extends this theme of physical isolation to that of mutual linguistic incomprehension. A dragoman (a word Lewis derives ultimately from ancient Assyrian) was an interpreter, used, by the sixteenth century by Europeans to make themselves understood to Turkish officials, merchants and others. He was usually Greek and something of a professional, having been sent to Italy by his well-to-do family for his education, returning fluent in that language which perforce became the medium of communication.

The reliability of such translators was suspect, and rightly so when it is taken into account that they were Ottoman subjects who had to be careful what they said to whom and how they said it. Thus a firm ambassadorial message tended to get turned into a humble supplication. (The Russians apparently got round the problem by ending any such communication with "Do so, or I will declare war," which was normally effective.) The plea of the British Ambassador's dragoman to a top Aga who had locked him up for some reason is the most obsequious piece of writing I have ever read (p. 26) - and that was just its page one.

By the eighteenth century clever young men were being sent out to their embassies to pick up the language and matters were not lagging behind back at home: by 1800 there were 70 Arabic, 10 Persian and 15 Turkish grammars in print, with 10, 4 and 7 corresponding dictionaries, as well as a lot of matter to use these aids on. The preponderance of Arabic was due to its acceptance as a "classical" language, fit to be studied at universities: the others were not - any more than were English, French, German or Spanish. The old system of making oneself understood at official (as distinct from tourist) level might be said to have packed up for good when the Grand Dragoman was publicly hanged, together with the Oecumenical Patriarch, in 1821 on suspicion of complicity in the Greek Revolt of that year.

As distinct from travelling outside it, within the Muslim world from its beginnings there was wide scope for such activity and "Mediaeval Islamic society enjoyed a far greater degree of voluntary, personal mobility than did any other known premodern society (p. 399)". The obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca, instituted by Muhammad, who died before the Arabs broke out of Arabia, gave the impetus to those with more secular matters on their minds. Merchants did not suffer from the low status they had in most other contemporary societies, for was not Muhammad himself a merchant? Scholars, attaching themselves to the merchants' caravans wandered as far as China in search of knowledge. Borders were permeable and, during the first few centuries, non-existent. Quite a large travel literature (rihla) emerged as a genre, the best-known example of which is probably that of Ibn Battuta in the first half of the 14th century who started from (and returned to) Tangier and got as far as Canton in China, with considerable journeys to places in between, including a visit to Constantinople and an eight-year stint as a judge in India.

Lewis is also much impressed by Islamic history-writing: "The first thing that strikes us is its immense richness and variety, as contrasted with other history-writing civilizations. It has been calculated that the historical literature of medieval Islam is far greater in bulk, just in Arabic, that the literature of medieval eastern and western Christendom in Latin, Greek and all the vernaculars combined." It would be interesting to know whether the availability of paper, common in the Islamic world long before it reached Europe, had anything to do with this. "Islam, from the very beginning, has attached enormous importance to history. Indeed, in many parts of the world, reliable history begins with the advent of Islam (p. 406)." This last applies particularly to India. Lewis also stresses that Muslim historians were scrupulous with their facts - and as frank about their defeats as about their victories. It seems strange that with all this material to transmit, printing did not "take off" until the 19th Century.

One can almost see Lewis licking his lips as he describes in an early essay (1960) the opening of access to The Ottoman Archives, which date back to 1453, when they began to be kept in Istanbul; but their perils started when the Empire came to an end in 1923. However, when nearly 200 "bales" faced what is now called recycling, the scandal involved ensured their proper treatment. Official obstruction over the centuries to their inspection has ceased and now researchers have merely to face "a difficult language and an obscure script . . . an involved chancery style and a highly technical official vocabulary (p. 419)." Lewis makes clear just how hard a job this will be.

The last essay, undated and "previously unpublished" and which I suspect may have been written especially for this collection is On Occidentalism and Orientalism and is more or less a justification of the author's specialty. It may even be a riposte to Orientalism, by the late Edward Said (1935-2003), though neither the book (which I have not read) nor the author is mentioned by Lewis. Googling a long way down an article entitled Debunking Edward Said, however, I came across "If Said can be said to have a bete noir it must surely be Bernard Lewis," with quotations to prove it. It might be mentioned, for those who do not know it, that Edward Said, a Christian Arab born in Cairo, for many years until his death held a secure academic position in the US. Lewis quite mildly points out the natural, if irrational, resentment those from one culture feel when practically all the study of it has been carried out by members of another. Somehow we are back at the first quotation from Lewis's essay The Taxonomy of Group Hatred: "to hate the other, the outsider... is natural and normal." Amongst academics? God forbid!

Can this reader suggest to the editor of such a collection as this that the source of each essay be placed near the essay itself, either at its beginning or end? The information itself is there, but printed at the beginning of the volume. Some of the essays in the text, justifiably arranged thematically rather than chronologically, are headed by the date, but many are not. The absence of an Index is regrettable, but forgivable.

The Cost of "Choice"
Edited by Erika Bachiochi
Encounter Books, San Francisco, 2004

This is a frankly partisan book, and though subtitled Women Evaluate the Impact of Abortion, it would be fair to say that positive claims for any impact are given short shrift, and the editor is someone who has changed her mind. Changed her mind in what sense? Perhaps the greatest difference between British and American attitudes - and I must make clear that this is not the same as British and American practices - is that while here we regard abortion as a range of moral options, Americans have been polarised by their legal system into only two: for or against. This is an American book (the experience of other countries is hardly mentioned), the editor is American; she was once for abortion and is now against it. Under all circumstances? It is fair to say that this not much discussed.

The landmark decision on abortion in the US was the Supreme Court ruling (which has been strengthened by several subsequent ones) in Roe v. Wade in 1973, five years after the Abortion Act was passed in this country. Both effectively legalised abortion on demand, at any stage in the pregnancy, so that it was it was perfectly permissible to kill someone who, if born, could survive if supported by present-day technology, or even without it (p. 6). Personally I would like to think that such cases are uncommon. However, the on-going US debate on "partial birth" abortion, where parturition is induced so that the emerging baby can more conveniently be killed (p. 19), suggests otherwise. Congress passed a law against it, which was vetoed by President Clinton, but signed by President Bush in 2003; it may yet fail at the Supreme Court, which in 2000 declared partial-birth abortion legal.

Although in this country the matter was debated in Parliament (though without its later ramifications being even suspected) and laid to rest when the Act that legalized abortion passed into law, in the US "the decision of Roe v. Wade launched a civic debacle... [when] the Court abruptly brought this process to a halt (p. xii)". There is no doubt that this decision, tortuously argued from a "right to privacy" not mentioned, let alone enshrined, anywhere in the US Constitution, was correctly called by one of the dissenting judges "a power grab" and by another "an exercise in raw judicial power". And if legislatures could be circumvented in this way, where would it all end?

In fact, it looks as if this short-circuit "legislation by judiciary" is a one-off. Some constitutional lawyers had their misgivings but at least the men seem, as one of them put it in a burst of frankness, to have "been made to understand that the abortion issue was so important to the women in our lives, and it did not seem that important to most of us (p. 12)." And what, to be cynical about it, could be more convenient for the errant male than to be absolved from the responsibility of paternity by paying for an abortion? So much for the "oppressive patriarchy". As for the upholders of the, up till then, conventional morality, perhaps their surrender is best typified by the reply of the Jesuit dean of Boston College: "Well you see, Mary Ann [Glendon], it's very simple. According to Vatican II, abortion is an 'unspeakable moral crime'. But in a pluralistic democracy, we can't impose our moral views on other people (p. 11)." Such passivity, of course, is not the stance of a true activist, but perhaps for Catholics, already overcome by the consensus on fornication, adultery and contraception, a defeat on abortion was simply the inevitable continuation of an unstoppable trend, one they were, if politicians, "personally opposed to" but also could do nothing about and even vote for if electorally advantageous.

So much for scene-setting. Twelve women have contributed essays to this book, but it must be said that anyone hoping to see facts laid out in tables, graphs or histograms will be disappointed; there is one table in the text and one in a footnote - and nothing else. But never mind about that; the aims of the group are unclear. It is obvious from the tenor of the articles that all the writers regard abortion as undesirable - that is their reason for their contributions. "Is the unborn child inside or outside the circle of moral concern? That is the heart of the matter." Such is the rather roundabout statement made in the Preface by a thirteenth woman, University of Chicago Professor Jean Bethke Elshtain. I should prefer the simpler question: "Is the unborn child a human being?" Whether the foetus, at any stage of its existence, has any human rights is uncertain, for these, such as they are, depend entirely on the will of its mother, who can kill it at any time, though it remains criminal to kill it without her consent. Human rights groups, so far as I am aware, have no interest in the subject. Incidentally, it might be noted that the adjective "moral", both here and in the Jesuit's statement above, is merely used for emphasis and quite unnecessary.

According to surveys given here, most Americans do regard the unborn child as human and are far from agreeing that it is a mere lump of parasitic tissue, as the more militant feminists tell them it is. Most of them are also unaware that "the right to choose" has been expanded to include abortion on demand. Even many law professors seem surprised when told this is the case (p. 6). Howover this ignornace is less likely in those in a position to know and two-thirds of all obstetricians and gynaecologists refuse to do abortions under any circumstances, especially those young (under 40) and female, the very category that should be most sympathetic to the pro-abortion message. Most abortions are carried out in clinics set up for that purpose which are, from what is said here, far from being supervised, inspected or regulated satisfactorily.

It also seems to be a fact that the number of abortions in the US is falling, though only slightly - from 1.36 million in 1996 to 1.31 million in 2000. Proportionately, this decrease is not great, but it might be noted that it is twice the number (200,000) of illegal abortions estimated to have been carried out annually before Roe v. Wade. For some readers, it may be a defect in the book that these abortions, which represent 25% of all annual US pregnancies, are not classified in any way, by age, race (it is well known that abortions are disproportionately high for black women), or economic status or at what stage or trimester in the pregnancy they are carried out. Perhaps these data are more difficult to find than I think they ought to be: a quick (amateur) google did not give quick results, and those only from 1974 until 1994, at www.abortiontv.com/Misc/AbortionStatistics.htm. These did, however, show a definite shift from younger to older women during that time, and (confirming the statement given above) an even more definite one from white to black, presumably correlated with the progressive disintegration of black families during this period.

There are two consequences of abortion examined here, additional that is to the elimination of the foetus: psychological trauma and subsequent ill-health. It is probably not too harsh to say that the evidence for the first more than verges on the anecdotal. No one can deny that many women bitterly regret their abortions, whether undergone willingly or under coercion, and suffer greatly. But the evidence here was not gathered by sampling, but by solicitation (e.g. p. 87), and there is no mention of those others who may have had no regrets, didn't suffer and felt only relief. However it is only fair to mention that, in a study based on Finnish statistics, post-abortion suicide was three times the national average for women in the same age-group, which itself was twice the rate for those who had given birth, taking the following year as the time interval (p. 96). It may well be objected that causal does not follow from correlation, and that a woman who has an abortion may have other problems, leading to both abortion and suicide. Yet only the heartless can dismiss the possibility that the