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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

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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 œ6,500 (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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 prevention of the first might prevent the second.

In the matter of subsequent health problems we are undoubtedly on firmer ground. The evidence for a link between abortion and breast cancer seems well-documented and two authors who believe in it (Shandigian and Lanfranchi) discuss it at length, including the endocrinal mechanism by which the one may cause the other. However, the extent to which the link is still controversial is indicated by their admission that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists did not support their position. On the other hand there is evidence, again anecdotal, that academics are reluctant to discuss the link in the milieu they expect to attain professional advancement, while learned bodies ban discussion of it at their conferences as "too political" (p.85). According to one study (numbers not given), there is an increased hazard for women who have a family history of breast cancer. All pregnant teenagers from such families who aborted their first pregnancy developed breast cancer by the age of 45 (p. 67 and 75). Would this information give such a pregnant teenager pause? The chances are that she would never hear about it.

In the end we confront the question this book does not really face, but which the reader inevitably asks: what is to be done about the 1.31 million abortions per annum? If the nation is comfortable with this, is there nothing more to be said? If it uneasy about it, as surveys seem to show, though in a non-urgent sort of way, then pro-lifers can hope to get their way, to the extent they limit their demands to what is politically possible. For it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that a country as rich as the USA, and from where women travel as far as China to find a baby to adopt, can afford to absorb this hypothetical surplus, or at least some of it. Can this potential supply be manipulated to meet this demand? Can a social climate be generated where abortion is not a first option? The mere suggestion arouses hostility; even organized attempts to persuade pregnant women not to abort seem to face an uphill task. For example, the California affiliate of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) got First Resort, a "pregnancy care service" with this purpose closed down (p. 37), and, of course, such services are entirely privately financed. So, to be sure, are the pro-abortionists, but they do not have to provide any "care services" beyond pointing applicants in the direction of abortionists, who will do what is wanted for the money. It would probably also not be wrong to say that they are by far the better organized, and have the backing, explicit or implicit, of mainstream women's and feminist organizations.

If it would take too long to develop a general social climate in which the unwillingly pregnant were persuaded to give birth, and their unwanted children could be reared, perhaps the answer would be legal coercion to restore the status quo ante 1973. Once the clinics where most abortions are carried out came under State supervision and law enforcement, something could probably be done by legislation to introduce limits which the public would not only expect, but welcome. The situation would inevitably be messy, with "shopping around" between States with lax and severe laws, but would be the only method by which a realist could expect to bring about a reduction in the number of abortions. Quite simply, if it is made more difficult to get an abortion, there will be fewer of them. The first step towards this end, if desired, is of course to reverse the Supreme Court's decisions and return the problem to the State Legislatures from whence it came. This will only come about if more judges who are "strict constructionists" of the Constitution are appointed to replace those who retire or die and if somehow a relevant legal case is brought to reverse Roe v Wade and the other decisions that extended it. I do not need to go into the enormous difficulties facing those who would have to try to bring this about.

The rise in abortion is in fact only one more feature of what has happened to what might be roughly called Western Civilization during the last forty years, put in lapidary form by Louis Roussel, head of the French National Institute for Demographic Studies and quoted here:

It is exceedingly rare in the history of populations that sudden changes appear across the entire set of demographic indicators. Yet in barely 15 years, starting in 1965, the birth rate and the marriage rate in all the industrialised countried tumbled, while divorces and births outside marriage increased rapidly. All those changes were substantial, with increases or decreases of more than 50 percent.

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The Court of the Caliphs
Hugh Kennedy
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2004

There were 37 Abbasid Caliphs, in a succession that lasted from 749 to 1258, when the last of them was rolled up in a carpet and suffocated by the Mongols after the surrender of Baghdad. Why Hugh Kennedy should sub-title his fine, interesting and rather horrifying book The Rise and Fall of Islam's Greatest Dynasty is a bit of a mystery. The last effective Caliph was assassinated by his Turkish guards in 861 and although the Family Tree dribbles down to the bottom of its page until 1031, perhaps just to fill it up, Kennedy continues his history only as far as 935, by which time the Caliphate had fragmented into independent entities in Spain, Africa, Egypt, Persia and Khurasan. According to Hitti's History of the Arabs, from 945 the Caliphs were puppets of the Persian Shia Buwahids ("who made and unmade Caliphs at will"), ruling Iraq (and Baghdad) from distant Shiraz until in 1055 they were replaced by the Seljuk Turks ("a new and more benevolent tutelage"). As the Seljuk supremacy petered out around 1200, the Caliphate regained some power and prestige, only to be extinguished by the Mongol Hulagu in 1258.

Thus the effective rule of the Abbasid Caliphs was quite short and any 'golden age' during it even shorter. It began when discontented elements in the north-eastern borderland province of Khurasan rebelled against the Umayyad Caliph in Damascus. Despite their considerable resources, the Umayyads were unable to resist the forces organised against them by the able, ruthless, fanatical (and pseudonymous) Abu Muslim. Too obscure in origin to be a claimant himself, he perforce backed a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad's uncle al-Abbas (who had never actually become a Muslim himself and was assumed to have gone to hell). This first Caliph was sickly and died after a five year reign, being succeeded by his brother, called, after his accession, Mansur (Victorious), "the most remarkable individual in the whole story of the Abbasids" whose twenty year reign set the dynasty on its feet, and probably ensured it survived at all.

Although Mansur had been appointed heir by his brother, whose sons were too young to be contenders, he had to dispose of a threat by an uncle, who claimed to have done as much as anyone to defeat the Umayyads. With the aid of Abu Muslim, Mansur brought about the break-up of the uncle's army, and then lured Abu Muslim to his tent and had him murdered, behaviour often repeated in the history of the dynasty. As far as the legitimacy behind the claim for the Succession (the Caliphate) to the Prophet was concerned, suffice it to say that, in terms of relationship, that of the Abbasids was not indisputable. Descendants of the Prophet's daughter Fatima and her husband Ali were plentiful but poorly organized. Ali himself had been assassinated in 661 and both his sons had died, one in battle, the other possibly poisoned, which made all three martyrs to give rise to the Shia branch of Islam. Mansur had to destroy one outright claimant who made the mistake of starting his rebellion in Medina, which, howerever sacred, was "a place where there is no money, no men, no weapons and no fodder" and, in the end, no support. Other "Alids" were watched and confined to Baghdad, the new capital, founded in 762. There is a sinister tale that on Mansur's death, his heir found a whole room with their neatly laid out and ticketed corpses, of all ages. The Alids were invariable losers, and misfortune seems to have dogged their followers, the Shia, who have done either the right or the wrong thing at the wrong or the right time, down to the present day.

Harun al-Rashid (786-809), the fifth Abbasid Caliph, is the best known of all of them and the one whose reign became legendary for its power and prosperity, probably because of the chaos that followed it. He figures, for instance, as the benign Caliph in the Arabian Nights, and though versions were first current in the fourteenth century, long after the demise of the dynasty, their roots can be discerned within two generations of his death. On the whole his reign was successful politically and militarily, insofar as the Caliphate remained intact and raids against the Byzantines, who were going through a difficult period, kept them submissive. Unfortunately two key administrative problems remained unsolved: how to dismiss civil servants without a blood bath, and how to arrange a peaceful succession. Both resulted in spectacular failures. Harun had been supported at the critical time of his accession by members of the Barmakids, Muslim converts in the far north of what is now Afghanistan. These became his intimates at court and ran the Caliphate bureaucracy. For no clear reason, though the events of the coup are well-recorded, all disappeared into prison, never to be seen again, or were executed. As for the succession, Harun had laid elaborate plans for his two sons to follow each other as Caliphs, complete with oaths which both solemnly swore at a pilgrimage to Mecca. Instead, two years after Harun's death, civil war broke out between the brothers and Baghdad endured a siege followed by prolonged street fighting which left it in ruins. The elder brother was killed there in 813, but the younger, Ma'mun, who had ruled Khurasan from its capital Merv, did not come to Baghdad until 819.

Ma'mun did his best to reconcile the opposing factions brought about by the civil war and there were no severe reprisals. He died unexpectedly in 833 while about to start a campaign in southern Asia Minor against the Byzantines and was succeeded by his brother Mu'tasim who, probably because he was with him when he fell ill, was in a stronger position to do so than his son, who later lost his life in a bungled conspiracy. Mu'tasim did two things that sowed the seeds for the crisis and collapse of the Caliphate by the end of the century. He bought Turkish slaves from Central Asia to turn into a private army or bodyguard and he built a new capital, Samarra, 100 miles north of Baghdad. The Turks were unpopular in Baghdad and it may have seemed a good idea to segregate them, though it resulted in their acquiring so much power that after the short reigns of Mu'tasim and his son Wathiq they were able to pick from obscurity Wathiq's brother Mutawwakil in 847 to be the next Caliph.

Despite his Turkish installation, Mutawwakil was far from a nonentity or puppet and managed to put to death a number of the Turkish cabal. He was also "a prodigious builder of palaces" and "the last caliph to be free of major financial constraints". This independence, together with an attempt to regularise the succession among his three sons which only caused trouble, led in 861 to his murder by Turkish conspirators, who replaced him with his eldest son, who soon died. Chaos followed, including another siege of Baghdad. Caliph after Caliph was murdered, including Mutawwakil's other two sons. After this Kennedy tells us little of any of the Caliphs that exercised any power at all and: "In 935 a military adventurer by the name of Ibn Ra'iq took power as Amir al-Umara, Prince of princes, depriving the Abbasids of the last remnants of their secular power."

Sandwiched between the narratives are several chapters dealing with Abbasid culture in general, though the reader might be forgiven for wondering just when, in the hurly burly of the times, things became sufficiently settled for anyone to indulge in it. However, just as war has been described by its participants as long periods of boredom punctuated by short ones of excitement, Abbasid court life could perhaps equally be described as long periods of elegant liesure broken by short bursts of mayhem. It is a little dispriting to find that "early Abbasid court culture was dominated by poetry and song" especially when the "public poetry of the Abbasid court was largely praise poetry" and formed "the bread and butter of literary life". Epic poetry might have been suitable for public recitations instead, but there is no mention of it at all and drama did not exist. Nor, of course, did representational art, which came under the Islamic ban on the depiction of human and animal life; to some extent calligraphy flourished in its stead. Literacy was promoted by a need for an imperial bureaucracy and facilitated by the manufacture of paper, a technological import from China through Central Asia. Caliph and courtiers were alike literate, a contrast to the aristocracy of Western Europe, though not that of Byzantium.

It was at this period that elements of Greek science, medicine and philosophy were assimilated, but once absorbed, no longer studied. As Bernard Lewis puts it, in his The Political Language of Islam: "This literature... is neverthless of marginal importance in the political and intellectual history of Islam. The Muslim philosophers of the Hellenistic school were a comparatively small, relatively minor group. Their kind of philosophy flourished for a time in the Islamic academies during the Middle Ages, but it died out and had only a limited impact on later generations. It did, however, contribute substantially to the vocabulary of political writing of far greater significance..." Although there were large Christian communities and smaller Jewish ones living under the Caliphate, Kennedy makes no mention of any interaction between them and if Christians read the Koran or Muslims the Bible and Jews read both there is no suggestion that this led to any published result, of the type of controversial literature against heresies written by orthodox Christians during the pagan period of Imperial Rome.

Kennedy devotes a whole chapter to the Harem. Everyone knowns that, guarded by eunuchs, the Caliph was the only intact adult male ever to set eyes on its inmates. Other males were not the only moral hazards however: a grim anecdote recounts how one Caliph personally beheaded two slave girls found making love to each other. Broadly speaking, the Harem consisted of all the women of the Court, from the swarms of slave-girls and concubines to extremely influential and rich women at the top, sometimes a favourite wife (though Caliphs after Harun-al-Rashid seem to have given up formal marriage arrangements) or a Caliph's mother. Harun's mother Khayzuran, who ensured he became Caliph, and his wife Zubayda were both extremely rich. Another rich Queen Mother was apparently too stingy to give her Caliph son a comparatively small sum to pay his Turks, with the result that he was assassinated. On the whole the women connected with men who were assassinated or executed, or, before such events occurred, merely political enemies, were not themselves killed, harshly treated or even molested. An exasperated Turk is recorded as hanging one of them upside down and beating her to get her to tell him where her money was hidden (she refused), but such treatment was regarded as irregular.

There is little here about the Caliphate's military organization or the strategy and tactics of its armies, though something from the author's The Armies of the Caliphs (which I have not read), tucked away in the Bibliography, without even a reference to it in the text, would have been appropriate. Islamic expansion seems to have ceased and the border with the Byzantine Empire remained little altered during the whole period, having in fact moved somewhat to the east when the Islamic capital moved from Damascus to the more distant Baghdad. Campaigns against it were essentially larger or smaller raids and if fortified towns, such as Heraclea and Armorium were captured, they were later abandoned, though their inhabitants might be deported as slaves, resettled or simply massacred. The last siege of Constantinople, a crushing failure, had been in 716 by the Umayyads; there were none by the Abbasids. Why the enormous resources of the intact Caliphate were not brought to bear to eliminate the relatively small area of the last Christian power in the East is not examined, let alone explained.

In fact, most Abbasid warfare was internecine and possibly the most severe was the suppression of a revolt by black African slaves, the Zanj, who worked the saltpetre mines in the south of Iraq, lasting from 869 until 883. This uprising (in the name of Ali - who else?) is not mentioned by Kennedy, except in his Chronology, though it may have caused as many as half a million deaths. Ronald Segal, in his Islams Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora, credits the abandonment of any attempt by Islamic societies to use Africans as forced labour on the land, as was done centuries later in the Americas, to the trouble this revolt had caused.

It is not clear to me why the Abbasid Caliphate deserves the admiration that Kennedy obviously thinks I should feel for it. After less than two centuries of its existence the Caliphate it had usurped had fallen to pieces and the fertile, irrigated heartland it had inherited had been ruined. Whoever exercised power, whether Caliph or his puppet-master, had as councillors only sycophants or who were, if otherwise, suspect as subversive. In either case his caprice could kill. The succession, like that of other Islamic empires, the Ottomans and the Mughals, was always a problem, usually solved with violence. As with many historians and intellectuals, Kennedy gives too much credit to the trappings of civilization, rather than marking its more solid achievements. Poetry meant little to the peasants whose crops were trampled, irrigation ditches blocked and water polluted and whose taxes paid for the splendid palaces they never saw (is there something familiar about this last?).

There may be lessons which contemporary Arabs can learn from the events chronicled in this book, but they are not ones that should give rise to imitation. In his final paragraph beginning "The memory of the caliphate survived to inspire later generations..." Kennedy continues with words and phrases such as: power, prestige and unity, ancient greatness, potent inspiration for Osama bin Laden, cultural legacy, defined the style and performance of Muslim monarchy, showed how a caliph and vizier should behave (eh?), flowing elegant script, astonishing achievement. This is mythology, not history, and should be debunked rather than supported.

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Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right
Ann Coulter
Crown, 2002

I see from the current issue of Reason that Ann Coulter is not entirely persona grata with other enemies of the left. "Why are conservatives trying to rehabilitate McCarthyism and the Japanese internment?" asks Cathy Young, but treats only the second half of her question. Coulter is faulted for her favourable view of McCarthy in her book Treason- but Young does not discuss it. "In both cases there was a geniune security risk and a wrong headed government response that did grave damage to the very freedoms it was supposed to protect," she writes. In fact it is the pairing of the two issues that is wrong-headed. In Treason, Coulter says nothing about the rights and wrongs of the internment, but does point out that the "liberals" supported it. It "was praised by liberal luminaries such as Earl Warren, Felix Frankfurter and Hugo Black. The national ACLU didn't make a peep... There was one lonely voice opposed to the Japanese internment: that of J. Edgar Hoover (pp. 194-5)." Moreover, the intermnet was (Democrat) government initiated and enforced; McCarthy was trying to stimulate government activity. Does Young mean by the "wrong-headed government response" its passivity and stonewalling of McCarthy's attempts? I do not think so.

This introductory paragraph might not have been necessary if I had read Ann Coulter's books in the right order, instead of coming across her Treason hardback (2003) in a charity shop before finding her Slander paperback (2002) for five times the price in Borders Books. In this book she attacks what she sees as bias against the right in what is now termed the Mainstream Media (MSM) in the US- effectively the press and TV networks. Our own media in Britain (as in the rest of the world) is left unexamined, though someone else might find it worth looking at to see what the differences are, both in variety of political orientation and in national coverage.

The radio stations seem another matter, their ownership sufficiently dispersed, their impact seen perhaps as less influential, but their content dependent on their sponsors, in turn dependent on the market. Their "talk-show hosts" are, when right-wing, regarded by the left, in carefully phrased insinuations, as sufficently provocative to nourish the pathology of the Oklahoma City bomber. They are undoubtedly more popular; Coulter gives several examples of failed attempts by left-wing talk-show hosts to break into the market. Significantly, the only place for survivors is on National Public Radio, where they are heavily subsidised by the taxpayer- does the parallel with the BBC (unmentioned by Coulter) come to mind? The Internet is also an information and opinion source under suspicion by the left, and a number of them, including Mrs Clinton, have wondered how it can be muzzled.

Assisted by the Index, it is informative to list what she has in her sights. Most of the material from the (in Ann Coulter's view) left leaning press comes from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Newsweek and Time, with supporting quotes from The Boston Globe, The Chicago Sun-Times, Church & State, The Cincinnati Enquirer, The Columbia Journalism Review, Glamour, Harper's Magazine, The Kansas City Star, and USA Today. As for TV:

The one TV station that is not an ocean of liberal Democrats punctuated by the occasional 'from the right' opinion commentator is Fox News Channel.

So what difference does this make? The first chapter is a somewhat scattergun blast, targeting what I hope are the more far-out manifestations of leftist behavior. Republicans are regularly compared to Nazis. Ken Starr (remember him?) is compared to Heinrich Himmler (remember him?) Women who testify against Clinton are ugly and in the case of Paula Jones is "some sleazy woman with big hair" [eh?]. After 9/11, Americans are warned that anti-abortion extremists are more of a threat then al-Queda, while an academic "agonized" over flying the stars and stripes, an unambiguous signal of patriotism, which worried others of like mind. Right-wing blacks, such as Colin Powell and Clarence Thomas, are "Uncle Toms", with Clarence Thomas being a "chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom", a "house Negro", a "handkerchief head" and a "Colored lawn jockey for conservative white interests:, the meaning of which I would love to have explained. "Strict constructionists" of the Constitution, like Robert Bork, are intent on bringing back back-street aboritions, segregated lunch counters, and probably slavery itself. That's according to Teddy Kennedy, survivor of Chappaquiddick. Newt Gingrich's now abandonded and forgotten "Contract with America" ("Contract on America" as Clinton wittily put it) was equated with Hitler's genocide. The "Christian right" (more about which later) "inflamed the air", resulting in a "three-step process" that led to a couple of thugs beating a gay man to death in Wyoming. And of course, Bush wanted to add arsenic to the drinking water.

Chapter Two starts with a section of what used to be called "radical chic" (not a term found here, perhaps outdated)> A billionare brags:"I dont need a tax cut." Norman Mailer helps a murderer's release from gail, puffs his book wiht its Marxist cliche's, throws a dinner party for him, says it is "tragic" when he murders again. Naturally a pornographer who insults Christianity is a martyr for free speech. Then there is the sort of feminist that gets ignored - the right-wing one, Phyllis Schlafly. Coulter sketches her impressive biography which includes high academic achievements and ten books, none of which were reviewed by The New York Times, though at least one, A Choice not an Echo, which sold three million copies, was a best seller. Starting single-handed against the national consensus, she organised the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Suck without trace, it is too late now to debate whether ERA would have benefited, penalised, or made no difference to women at all. There is a scathing rundown of her rivals on the left, particularly of Gloria Steinem, founder of the magazine Ms, which failed, despite a million dollar subsidy from a male media tycoon. Schlafly also bore six children: "You can start a career at 50, but not a family," I believe she has said.

Nothing could be more contemptible then the insouciant attitude of American feminists to President Clinton's treatment of women because he showed up positive to their "litmus test" of being pro-abortion. One might think there was nothing they could gain or lose since abortion as a right had been inserted into the Constitution by the Supreme Court ( Roe vs Wade) thereby preventing any legislation to reverse the situation. However, Surpreme Court judges not being immortal, there was always the danger that a Republican president (especially a right-wing one) might nominate the wrong man or woman to fill the vacancy. And Federal Surpreme Courts have reversed previous decisions. Under these circumstances, it is best to have as many Federal senators as possible doing their utmost to block a presidential nomination. That is why "moderate" Republican senators are cosseted by the media. What can happen when a moderate Republican senator is no longer needed, as when Clinton reached the White House, is recounted in the sad story of Bob Packwood. His harassing sexual behavior towards mainly, it seems, his office staff then became public knowledge, though it seems to have been continuous through the seventies and eighties, but kept undisclosed even by his own persecuted personnel, because of his position on aborition. Explained one, "For me, abortion rights where on the line," so she held her tongue. Of course, the public disclosure radically altered Packwood's image in the media, not that theydid not already know but, pre-Clinton, "were not interested in financing the story". A deal between an investigative journalist and Vanity Fair "fell through". And that in 1992 when Anita Hil nearly ruined Clarence Thomas. Coulter has an amusing collection of Before and After quotes on Packwood in her chapter How to go from being a "Jut-Jawed Maverick" to a "Clueless Neanderthal" in One Easy Step.

The next chapter documents the cosy relationship between Democrat politicians and their staff and jobs in the media, when they change from a career in one to a career in the other. After all, it shouldn't be hard to get in: 89 % of media persons based in Washington voted for Clinton in 1992, when only 43% of the electorate did. Coulter lists 29 such career to career Democrats: I suppose it's up to those who think that doesn't suggest institutional bias to produce a similar list of Republicans. Another chapter is devoted to the bias of TV networks other than Fox. There is a long discussion on the behaviour of the networks on the Presidential Election night in 2000 (Gore vs Bush). By using exit polls networks can "call" a state for one or other candidate before the votes are counted, and even before the polls have closed. Coulter points out that networks other than Fox were quicker to "call" states that voted Gore than those that voted Bush. In the mess that Florida got into, NBC, CNN, ABC and Fox (as well) all called it for Gore on faulty exit data before the polls closed, thereby, subsequent surveys suggest, discouraging 10,000 to 37,000 Republicans from bothering to vote. But as actual counting got under way, prediction began to favour Bush and Fox was the first to call the state for him, followed by the other networks. Though they were all using the same data, and the trend was confirmed by the independent number crunching Voter News Service, and the prediction (unlike earlier ones) could have made no difference to the result, and which turned out to be correct, there was great indignation when it was discovered that a relative of Bush was working on the Fox team that night.

The cover of Slander states it to be "The #1 New York Times Bestseller", referring presumably to the hardback edition. This would be doubly gratifying to the author, since her strictures against media bias include the world of publishing: "publishers don't like conservative books, the major media ignore them, and bookstores refuse to stock them." It would be hard to deny that this seems to be the case with Glasgow's Borders Books where a wall of books on the US are nearly all anti-war, anti-Bush and anti-American - and by Americans. However, Coulter points out that when a conservative book does surmount the three hurdles she mentions and then does well, it tends to be called "a surprise best-seller" and lists seventeen books with that very phrase attached. "Surprise" right wing best sellers wouldn't, of course, have had good reviews. Candidates on the left would, and some would also have been given generous advances by their publishers - but then flopped. For good measure, Coulter adds the uncritical media treatment of literary frauds, such as Rigoberta Menchu, uncovered as an autobiographical liar after winning a Nobel Peace Prize (unrecovered: there was, its Director said, "no question of revoking the prize"), or Michael A. Bellesiles, author of Arming America , who made up data purporting to show that early Americans possessed hardly any guns. Eager to believe, publishers gave a $25,000 advance for a book alleging that President Bush had a cocaine conviction covered up so successfully that no evidence remained, only the word of the author. They withdrew it from the shops when they discovered he was a twice convicted criminal.

There are two chapters examining the perennial left-wing chant that Republicans, and especially Republican Presidents are stupid: "The Dumb Republican/Smart Democrat myth lives in a world devoid of rational thought and logical consistency. It never occurs to anyone to ponder why the Republican Party would pursue such a crazy strategy of consistently running really dumb guys for office - much less president. Or why the Democratic Party insists on tapping presidential candidates who are so mind-bogglingly smart they can never connect with the average voter." Need one say more? Only that the left mindset seems unable to admit that anyone can disagree with it and be intelligent.

Finally Ann Coulter looks at, or perhaps looks for the "religious right". This category of persons is difficult to identify or enumerate. And if "religious right" is a tautology for "religious Republicans" where is the surprise if they vote Republican? Another leftist bugbear "organized religion" turns out to be remarkably unorganized, at least in support of the Republicans. After all, the most organized religion in the US, Roman Catholicism, split almost evenly between the two parties both in 2000 and 2004. The less organized Protestants favoured the Republicans, but at 55%, only by 1% more than white men did. Even only 41% of self-styled Evangelicals register themselves as Republicans. According to The New York Times, the religious right uses its influence in two ways, with its money and its bloc voting. But where, in that case, are the large amounts of money that the religious right contributes to the Republican cause? Coulter can find nothing much and certainly nothing to match the $7 million trial lawyers gave to the Democrats for the election in 2000. As for the notion of a "bloc vote", no religious bloc can be identified comparable in any way with the Democrat-favouring black (90%), Jewish (79%), Hispanic (67%) and unmarried women\f0 /mothers?\f1 (63%) vote in 2000. And where is its leadership, charismatic or otherwise? The four most prominent (and familiar) overtly religious politicians are Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Buchanan and Gary Bauer. Two - Robertson and Buchanan - have run in Republican presidential primaries, but neither have been supported by the others; indeed Bauer endorsed Senator McCain who was attacking both Falwell and Robertson as "agents of intolerance and forces of evil". To quote a source known to all of them: "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

Ann Coulter is frankly partisan, a prosecuting council with no nonsense of allowing the Whig dogs to get the best of it, as our bludgeon wielding Dr Johnson would put it. Does her book convincingly demonstrate that there is left wing media bias, or just her paranoia?

To turn things round the other way, does the left have the same sort of grievances against the right? Could a similar book be written (perhaps it has?) about "the vast, right-wing conspiracy" that Mrs Clinton complained about following the fuss made about her husband's relationship with Monica Lewinsky?

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Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
Ann Coulter
Crown Forum, New York 2003

'Liberals' are the villains of this book, and its first word. How it became pejorative would need research more diligent than that to unearth the origin of 'neoconservative'. Still respectable in the United Kingdom, though most of us are aware that the Liberal Democrat party stands on the left of New Labour, in the United States it is a label which those to whom it is affixed seem reluctant to display and wary of using even in discussion. Ann Coulter, it is hardly necessary to say, is dealing with 'liberals' in the United States and, while confident that her designation of her quarry is well-understood, she states, for additional clarity:

"Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy... They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn't slowed them down."

Taking more than one chapter to deal with the case of Alger Hiss, Coulter begins by emphasising to what extent he was protected by the government establishment, as high up as the two Presidents, Roosevelt and Truman. Hiss's guilt would probably never have been established but for the persistence of Richard Nixon in 1948, more than nine years after Whittaker Chambers had defected from the Communist Party and as a Soviet agent and then reported to a high government administrator that Hiss, his brother and "at least two dozen" others working for Roosevelt were Soviet spies, an allegation which Roosevelt himself simply laughed off. The documentary evidence against Hiss produced by Chambers, in Hiss's own hand or typed on his typewriter was sufficiently overwhelming to have him convicted, not of espionage (prosecutions for this have a time-limit) but for perjury.

Yet it would not be too much to say that the media, academic and 'establishment' consensus that had been incredulous about the accusation remained incredulous about the verdict, up until and even after it had been verified by opened Soviet archives. Before their British opposite numbers preen themselves on being different, however, it might be as well to remember that the famous quartet of traitors - Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt - were never pursued, prosecuted and imprisoned, as was Hiss - the incredulity or inertia of the 'establishment' was quite enough to prevent that happening.

Joe McCarthy (... America's Most Hated Senator, in the sub-title of a recent biography) might seem a much more difficult subject for Ann Coulter to handle, but she should be read if merely to clear up some widespread misconceptions. McCarthy's anti-communist activities lasted from 1950 to 1953, by which date the Democrats had been in power for twenty years, ample time for communist infiltration. He had nothing to do with the investigation of Hiss, or, since he sat in the Senate, with the House [of Representatives] Un-American Activities Committe (HUAC) which was responsible for it. He had nothing to do with the arrest and conviction of the Rosenbergs. He had nothing to do with firing Hollywood actors.

So what was he doing? He was a member of the Senate Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations, charged with finding out about loyalty risks within the Federal Government and - this is the important thing - the most robust, persistent, noisy and rude member on it. And needed to be all of these things. "A host of other right-wing Republicans had sought to dramatize the communism issue, but only McCarthy succeeded," Coulter states. "Thank God somebody's doing it," remarked J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI.

There were, as we now know from opened Soviet archives, not only plenty of Communists in government service, which it would be perfectly reasonable to regard as security risks, but many of them were Soviet spies, right up to the top. Hoover was well aware of this at the time, but could not risk alerting the Soviets to the fact that their spy code had been broken. Coulter believes that "McCarthy had so badly stigmatized Communism [that] his victory survived him." But it also broke him; he did not survive himself. Just as DDT has been demonized because it is the only insecticide most people have ever heard of, so McCarthy has been demonized as the only anti-communist crusader of that era familiar to everyone.

Although Ann Coulter's further considerable documentation of the subversive and outright treasonable activities of the Liberal/Left is overwhelming, and her book should be read if only for her hundred or so pages on Joe McCarthy, there is little in it to lead to an understanding of the motives of those she attacks. As she makes clear, throughout the whole fifty year period these were the same sort of people - very often actually the same people - academics, journalists and opinion formers, having influence but no political power. Reared in a legal and political adversarial culture, they are very properly expected to monitor the nation's rulers, reveal the shortcomings and mistakes of its social system and suggest improvements and remedies. That there are dangers of this situation getting out of hand might seem obvious: after all, those who make a living out of muck-raking don't want to run out of muck. They do, and did, however, one notices, treat the Democrats more tenderly than Republicans: when Kennedy initiated involvement in Vietnam he was applauded, and left uncriticised after the Bay of Pigs disaster which, as Coulter see it, encouraged Khrushev's missile brinkmanship in Cuba. Certainly after President Johnson mismanaged the war and the Republicans and Nixon took it over, the Democrats turned against it, with relentless negative media support. And after all I believe it is a fact that around 90 percent of journalists and media persons in the US vote Democrat. Coulter makes much of the contrast between their treatment of Nixon and of Clinton in the case for impeaching either of them. She feels, in fact, that Nixon's downfall was the revenge the liberals took for his unmasking of Hiss.

The American defeat in Vietnam remains the great landmark for left-liberals. For them it proves that the United States can never win a war. It embeds the word 'quagmire' in their every description of one, right from the start. With this defeatist chorus, applied to Gulf War I, Afghanistan and Gulf War II within days of each start, and weeks before each swift conclusion, the only lesson would seem to be to ignore it whenever subsequently used. The only defeat suffered by the United States, that of Vietnam, was self-inflicted. The penalty was borne by the Vietnamese, and, by a terrible extension of American responsibility, by the Cambodians.

Coulter concludes her book with examples and discussion of the left-liberal mockery and attempted media sabotage of the current War Against Terror. During the Cold War many, perhaps most, of those involved might feel an ideological identity or affinity with their country's enemies. But how are they supposed to justify the aid and comfort they give to those dedicated to impose world-wide a Taliban-like society opposed to all the causes they advocate at home - feminism, abortion, permissiveness in sexual behaviour and orientation, to say nothing of other liberties longer established, such as freedom of speech and worship? Coulter notes that they frequently ask for "other solutions" rather than opposition to enemy activities, but that these turn out to be indistinguishable from surrender.

To repeat Coulter's thesis:

"Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy."

For related books on this type of subversion, see my Archive under the titles: "Admit nothing, explain nothing and apologize for nothing" and "Idiots (complete with a big list of idiots)".

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The Ottoman Turks
Justin McCarthy
Addison Wesley Longman Ltd 1997

On Horseback Through Asia Minor
Frederick Burnaby
First publ. 1878 (not, as stated 1898), republ. in pb by Oxford University Press, 1996, introduction by Peter Hopkirk.

The Turks have been a European problem for nearly a thousand years. The process began in the early eleventh century when the Seljuk Turks, invaders from south central Asia and converts to Islam, took control of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. Welcomed as fellow-believers, they rejuvenated the core of the Muslim world. In 1071 they broke the barrier into Asia Minor that the Byzantines had held against Islam since the seventh century. The response of Christendom, the Crusades, was inadequate and misdirected. The Turks were left to consolidate their position and, at the end of the thirteenth century, about the time the Crusaders were being finally ejected from the Holy Land, a small Turkish state was founded by one Osman or Othman in Northwest Asia Minor which by continuous conquest over the next three centuries became, and then for the next three centuries remained, the Ottoman Empire. Nomadic empires normally disintegrated rapidly: the Ottoman Empire was to be the exception.

Professor McCarthy describes and explains the events of these six centuries very satisfactorily, especially for beginners, though the more learned may carp that his text is not cumbered by any notes or bibliography. The maps are adequate and there is a sequential family tree of the sultans (unlisted, however, in the Table of Contents) on pages 45, 75, 160 and 288. If a historian can be both objective and sympathetic, he seems to have managed it, though perhaps by glossing over the devastation of conquest and emphasising the crippling financial restraints imposed by western bankers on sultans desperately trying to modernise a state two or three centuries too late and defend it at the same time.

One reason for the rise of the Ottomans was the destruction of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum by the Mongols around 1250, and the resulting fragmentation of the Turkish presence in Asia Minor (Anatolia). This setback to Islam had been of no use at all to Christendom, which had been itself fragmented by the activities of Crusaders who had captured and sacked Constantinople in 1204 and then divided up amongst themselves those parts of the Byzantine Empire they could lay hands on. Although the Byzantines recovered Constantinople in 1261, this merely distracted their attention from their Anatolian lands which they had held while waiting for this opportunity. Less than a century later, these were all gone and the Ottomans crossed the Dardanelles to Europe - and stayed there. By 1400 they had conquered most of the Balkans - the territory now Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania and northern Greece - and mopped up Anatolia, cleverly using their Christian subject allies to do so. Even the defeat and capture of the Turkish sultan Bayezit by Tamerlane in 1402 was a mere blip (he turned east, failed to start his project to conquer China, and died in 1405). But the disruption it caused, including a decade-long succession struggle between Bayezit's four sons, postponed the fall of Constantinople, after an epic siege, until 1453.

The Ottoman Empire was now well-established, secure from internal break-up, ruled by an autocrat, at least in theory, in a line that lasted for twenty two generations, with thirty seven sultans (some being brothers). By the universal Islamic policy, Christians were tolerated as second-class subjects and taxpayers. While Anatolia became largely Islamicized, with the notable exception of the Armenians, the European populations remained Christian, with the Turks constituting a sort of long term military occupation. Their numbers were not negligible and they made converts, but overall Muslims remained a minority, aside from the parts so well-known today - Bosnia, Albania and Kosovo.

The Empire was essentially organised as a military state, with a number of categories. There was a diminishing nomadic element, employed at the periphery of the empire to exercise its raiding and plundering propensities on its neighbours rather than its inhabitants. Turks who settled down on the land could still be called up as fighting men, supported by their villagers; this system degenerated into militia. At least in the early centuries, Christian units were well-integrated into Ottoman armies. But the most effective fighters were the so-called "slave-soldiers", far from a novel feature in the Islamic Near East, and the personal possessions of the sultan. The Ottomans originally recruited them from prisoners of war, but after their incursion into Europe they instituted a levy on the young boys of Christian parents. Selected for vigour and intelligence, indoctrinated as Muslims, they were the kapi kullari or devshirme, legally slaves. Most became Janissaries ("new troops"), the sultan's elite soldiers, the best trained, armed with the latest weaponry, including the earliest hand guns, and proverbially the most fanatical. Others rose to the highest administrative positions, to the extent of excluding the old Turkish nobility, which became territorial rather than military.

"As long as the sultan and the central government maintained a high degree of control, the army . . . was for long the most powerful force in Europe, perhaps in the world (p. 125)."

With this superb instrument, the sultans, still active warriors, expanded their empire during the century following the capture of Constantinople, culminating in the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent (1520-66). Mehmet II might have capped his prize of the Byzantine capital by taking Rome, but at his death in 1481 his army withdrew from its vicinity. Luckily for Europe, the next sultan, Bayezit II (1481-1512) preferred peace to war, while his son, Selim I (1512-20) had to turn his attention eastwards. Appropriately named The Grim, he removed his father, killed his brothers and, perhaps mindful of his own filial dereliction, killed all his sons except Suleyman. The eastern problem was that much of the Anatolian territory recently appropriated had been Shia Muslim, whilst the Ottomans were Sunnis. Selim dealt severely and successfully with his own Shias, but then had to confront Persia, which was then, as it is now, Shia, with a recently installed Turkish dynasty, the Safavids, fanatically attached to that creed. Selim marched east with a slimmed-down army, sending taunts to his enemies, who were using the correct withdrawal tactics, that they were too cowardly to fight. These taunts worked and, turning to fight on the wide plain of Chaldiran, the Safavids were soundly defeated (1514). Despite provoking wasteful and inconclusive conflicts, they never again so seriously threatened the Ottomans, but kept a scorched-earth belt between the two of them. Selim then annexed Syria, Palestine, Egypt and the strip of Arabia that included the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

After Selim's early death, his surviving son Suleyman extended his conquests in the east through Mesopotamia (Iraq) to the Persian Gulf and down the shores of the Red Sea to Yemen. By the time he moved west, Europe was a little better prepared than it had been to undergo another Ottoman onslaught. The amalgamation of Germanic and Spanish lands under the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1519-1555) created a great power just strong enough to halt further Ottoman conquest. As it was, Suleyman subjugated all but a strip of Hungary in 1526 and besieged Vienna, though unsuccessfully, in 1529. In his reign Ottoman power - and the sultanate - reached its apogee. "The Magnificent" is a title bestowed by the west, impressed by his buildings, his riches and his power; the Turks themselves style him "the Lawgiver". But Suleyman was more a tidier-up and codifier than an innovator. Such a role was not as simple as it might seem: the Empire was an Islamic state and it was difficult for a ruler to take a line which the religious authorities seriously disagreed with.

One practical example, which also illustrates a very characteristic feature of Ottoman society, was the matter of vakifs, or religious charitable trusts (p. 116-8). Any public activity that was not the responsibility of the state came by default under the supervision of the religious authorities, a rather loosely organised consensus of clerics. If a rich man wished to found a charitable foundation, for, say educational or medical purposes, it was automatically a religious foundation - and, as such, tax exempt. This ostensibly public-spirited act could, however, include other motives. Secular wealth could at any time be confiscated by the sultan, a vakif not only kept it out of his hands, but could also be established with a trustee, and a hereditary trustee at that, well-paid and inevitably a descendant or relative of the donor. Of course a sultan could - and did - declare that such a device was a mere subterfuge and close it down, but done on a large scale, this aroused clerical animosity: many vakifs siezed by Mehmet II were returned by his pious son Bayezit II. McCarthy sees vakifs as "a form of capital formation and investment" and finds it "hard to imagine commercial life in the Empire without them", though he does not explain how a business could plausibly be set up as a charity. Vakifs certainly did, however, run such as there was of a welfare state.

Though the Empire remained a great power for more than a century after Suleyman's death, problems had already started to accumulate. The sea route round the Cape of Good Hope, pioneered by the Portuguese and taken over by the Dutch and the English, reduced the trade brought overland which ultimately passed through Ottoman territory. It also brought about the development of the robustly-built ocean-going sailing ship, with its heavy broadside armament, consigning the oared galley to history. The discovery of the Americas, something that the Empire could in no conceivable way exploit, flooded Europe with gold and silver, giving rise to a general inflation that the Empire was least able to cope with.

These were external, unexpected challenges; the sharp decline in the quality of the sultans was a fundamental internal defect. There being no rule as to succession, there was very often a struggle over it, entailing the elimination of the failed competitors. If the reigning sultan decided to anticipate this, as did Suleyman's father and Suleyman himself, it could not be certain that the choice was the right one; Suleyman certainly picked a loser in Selim the Drunkard. Selim's grandson, Mehmet III, was the last sultan who spent any part of his early life outside Constantinople before coming to the throne, learning something about the world there, though it didn't seem to do him much good. For various reasons, one of which was humanitarian, princes from then on were effectively imprisoned in the palace until needed or, much the same thing, "available as pawns in palace intrigues." Though they could be well educated, it was not in statecraft. The Empire was run by the devshirme, slave-bureaucrats, recruited from the Christian population as described. They were highly intelligent and had risen on merit - but mainly the merit of being skilled in palace, rather than in foreign politics, which was what was really needed. The women of the harem also made their contribution, but being as ignorant of the outside world as were the sultans, often disastrously.

It cannot be without significance that the Ottoman Empire, like the rest of the world, did not participate in, or even be aware of until far too late, the European "take-off", that sequence of movements which began with the wake-up call of the Renaissance, continued with the upheavals of the Reformation and ultimately resulted in the Age of Enlightenment and the French and (the more useful) Industrial Revolutions. It may be that what started everything - Europe's discovery and intellectual interest in its pre-Christian past - could have had no parallel in the Islamic world. The ruins of past civilizations on which it sat were long buried and forgotten and would probably have awakened as little interest if discovered in the fifteenth century as they did when European archaeologists uncovered them three or four centuries later. Professor McCarthy gives no space to the arts and sciences and though the aesthetic interests of sultans are mentioned, these are either peripheral to a real life, or substitutes for one. He does not give intellectual curiosity and speculation as a characteristic of the Ottoman elite, and certainly not about what interested their Christian enemies. In a sense this was pardonable, for what use to their own society could these be? In technology, the two systems were still much on a par. The architectural achievements of the great Sinan (1490-1588) are unmatched, and the cover of this paperback depicts the splendid decorations of his mosque-masterpiece in Edirne, but one technology that did not interest the Ottomans at all was printing. This must surely be a sign of a cultural deficiency; it was not taken up until the early nineteeth century, though there had been a false start a century earlier.

If the Renaissance was undetected by the Ottomans as a symptom of European vitality, the Reformation could only have been regarded with satisfaction as one of weakness and decay. Though it must have sapped its Habsburg antagonists, now separated into Spain and Austria, preserving its northern border and its dominance of the Mediterranean for the duration of the seventeenth century, it concealed the fact that Europe's economic and political centre of gravity had moved north. The Near and Middle East was becoming a backwater as trade routes altered, and the great power in charge of it was unaware of the fact. Furthermore, a new enemy was pressing down from the north east, still semi-barbarous but (for a change) Christian - Russia. McCarthy dislikes the term "decline" and points out that the Empire took about 250 years over this hypothetical process and then reinvented itself as modern Turkey. However, it should be pointed out that during this time the Empire had ceased being a menace to Europe. Nor was the contiguous great power, Germanic Austria, especially keen to acquire not very valuable territory with not very assimilable Slavs - it had trouble enough with Hungarians after it re-conquered Hungary in 1699.

After this change, the Balkan border remained stable, but towards the close of the eighteenth century, under Catherine the Great, Russia expelled the Ottomans from the northern Black Sea coast, including the Crimea, and started to penetrate the Caucasus, not Ottoman territory, but getting close to it. Since Russia had also advanced into Europe by helping to obliterate Poland and keeping most of it, it had become a player on the European political stage and this fact was driven home when it was a major cause of the defeat of Napoleon. For the next century the threat of Russian expansion further into Europe and towards the Mediterranean tended to make the European powers, and especially Britain, prop up the Ottoman Empire, rather than encourage its dismemberment. Britain had particular reasons; it did not want a Russian navy in the Mediterranean and as Russia moved further and further south into Central Asia, it feared that its presence too near northern India might further destabilize that far from stable region.

Unfortunately, from the propping-up point of view, the Balkans were tending to fall apart of their own accord, the end result of the Ottoman policy of allowing religious communities to rule themselves. This arrangement easily led to territorial nationalism and by the end of the century, Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia existed in an unfinished condition, each hoping to expand into the ethnically mixed territory of Macedonia and Thrace, all that remained of Turkey in Europe. Romania, formed from the two trans-Danubian provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia, also broke free. Rather surprisingly, this chaotic rearrangement provoked only one major clash, the Crimean War, between Russia and Turkey, supported by Britain and France, (and, for some reason, the Kingdom of Piedmont) which, though notoriously mismanaged (at least according to the contemporary British press) achieved the purpose of the Allies and kept Russia quiet for some twenty years. The next crisis came when Russia, emboldened by France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, attacked Turkey in 1877 to turn Bulgaria into a very much enlarged client-state. It was solved by the Congress of Berlin, in which the European powers, mainly Britain and Germany, cut back the bloated Bulgaria and settled the Balkan borders until 1913. For its good offices, Austria took Bosnia and Herzegovina as a protectorate, annexing it later, an acquisition which did it no good at all. Britain occupied Cyprus, under the same terms.

For a snapshot of conditions in Ottoman Anatolia just before Russia started the war in 1877 to fashion a Greater Bulgaria in the Balkans, one could hardly do better than read Captain (later Colonel) Burnaby's On Horseback Through Asia Minor. Burnaby had made a name for himself with A Ride to Khiva, an account of his journey there the year before after he had heard that the Russians had forbidden any foreigner to visit it, their latest conquest in central Asia. Fortified with a publisher's advance of £2,500, which one must multiply forty or fifty times to get a present-day value, he set out to travel from the Bosphorus as far east as the empire's border at Kars and Khoi. Since his leave began in the middle of November, as in the previous year, this had to be done in the depths of a winter which was similarly truly frightful, though probably no more so than normal. Burnaby was physically well equipped for the task; at six feet four and fifteen stone he was reputedly the strongest man in the British Army. He was also an excellent linguist, fluent in Turkish, Arabic, Russian and German and proficient enough in other languages. A Russophobe and a Turcophil, he had no difficulty in finding that Russian intrigue was attempting to stir up disaffection amongst the Armenians: their consequent persecution by the Turks would be a pretext for intervention. Burnaby claimed that, in fact, the Armenians declared they would rather live under the Ottomans than under the czars. He also asked the Christians, both Greeks and Armenians, in each town he arrived at whether they'd been ill-treated by the Turks. Oh no, they invariably responded, not here but - and they would name a town further on where such and such had happened. When Burnaby got there, the named town's Christians would give a similar answer as the last. His lodgings, whether provided by Muslims or Christians, were almost invariably filthy and the infections he picked up occasionally laid him low for a day or two, despite an obviously iron constitution, as they did more often his invaluable servant Radford, a trooper of his regiment whose blunt observations on the natives are models of political incorrectness.

So much for history. Underlying this record of decline lay economic causes, as Turkey failed to match European innovations. It had, just to start, no banking system, the mechanism of investing money to make more money, to put back profits to make more profits, until the Ottoman Bank was founded in 1856 - by European investors. It had no universities and its education was, essentially, religious education. The base of a literate, skilled workforce did not exist. As has been noted, Turkey missed the Industrial Revolution and so could only export raw materials. And if it borrowed money, it couldn't pay it back, for the infrastructure to make investments generate returns simply was not there. McCarthy seems to regard the fact that Europeans made the most of their advantages as a sort of economic warfare, but trade is not plundering (which was how the Ottoman Empire paid for its expansion) and no businessman wants to kill a customer. Countries in a similar position have modernised: Russia had come a long way since the seventeenth century, when it was at much the same stage as the Empire was; Japan, with perhaps the greater advantage of isolation from external threats and a more homogeneous population, had eagerly taken up the challenge in the late nineteenth century. Even China, which had to be prised open with an Opium War, and didn't want to trade at all, ended up doing so and Shanghai arose out of a swamp for that purpose. By the end of the century, Turkey was modernising and, quite probably, but for the relentless hostility of Russia, might have succeeded.

Unfortunately for Turkey, in 1907 Britain and France, until then its protectors, effectively switched sides. France saw Russia as a necessary ally against Germany in the east, with Britain another in the west. Britain and Russia settled their rivalries with regard to India, and the needs of Turkey were ignored; inevitably it turned to Germany. Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria took advantage of the situation in 1913 to occupy and divide up most of Turkey in Europe between them, complete with a most brutal ethnic cleansing. When the Great War broke out the next year, Turkey, in retrospect, should have clung at almost any cost to a policy of neutrality. But diplomacy, which should have been working overtime under the circumstances that were to lead to the Great War, did not seem to be working at all and certainly not between between Britain and Turkey, who had no reason to be enemies. Russia too had enough on its hands as it faced both Germany and Austria-Hungary on its western border. Even Germany would not think much gained by having Turkey as an ally. In fact, the Turks must take much of the blame for their involvement themselves. More precisely it should be fixed on their irresponsible Foreign Minister, Enver Pasha. First he failed to conciliate the British by interning two German warships that had escaped through the Dardanelles, and then allowed them to bombard Russian Black Sea ports. He then lost 75,000 men when he crazily mounted a midwinter offensive against the Russians in Eastern Anatolia.

The war ended in defeat for the Turks just before it did for the Germans. They had fought well and by defeating the British at the Dardanelles and holding up their advance into Mesopotamia, had prevented aid reaching the Russians, so assisting the collapse which brought about the Bolshevik Revolution. In the period of chaos that followed the war - including an incursion by the Greeks who had sat it out, more vulture than predator - the absence of a Russian military presence was of incalculable benefit to the Turks. The eastern border had been recovered after the Russians soldiers had simply deserted from the front there. Now under the breakaway leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), they cleared up southern Anatolia of French-backed Armenians and then turned to expel the Greeks, ending with a holocaust at Smyrna (Izmir). In 1922 the Grand National Assembly abolished the sultanate, and the Ottoman Empire came to an end. The Arab provinces were lost - almost certainly without regret - and became problems for the French and British. The war and its aftermath had been devastating:

"Slightly more than 300,000 Anatolian Greeks had died [out of 1,254,000 as of 1912], slightly less than 600,000 Armenians [out of 1,493,000], and almost 3,000,000 Muslims [out of 14,436,000]. . . it would take generations for the people and the land to recover."

Three generations and more have passed since that time, which makes McCarthy's last sentence something of a rhetorical flourish. The standard of living is certainly higher than it was in 1914 and the population, at 70 million, more than four and a half times what it was then - an investment in human beings (as Julian Simon has taught us) that no European nation is willing or able to make. Modern Turkey is the creation of Kemal Ataturk, if of anyone, and in considering other national leaders of equivalent power - Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Peron . . . down to the shudderingly ghastly examples of recent times, from Idi Amin to Saddam Hussain - can anyone fail to be impressed by his moderate use of it or the success of the result? Well, of course, more than a few can. Turkey is now a candidate for membership of the European Union, entry into which, more than anything else, would give it the international imprimatur of being a civilised state. There are, not too surprisingly, misgivings in member nations which even political correctness cannot stifle. Just a few facts will be enough to show why: Turkey will be the largest state in the EU; its entry will bring the Muslims in the EU to 20%; this percentage will increase; we don't know how Islam will develop - if it's 650 years behind Christianity, the correlation isn't comforting.

Turkey is still a problem for Europe. It is the most civilised, secularised Muslim nation there is. Will letting it in be admitting a Trojan horse? Will keeping it out turn it into an enemy? Professor McCarthy's book does not answer, or even put these questions, but it is an excellent introduction to the history of our large Muslim neighbour.

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Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modern World 1588-1782
Peter Padfield
John Murray, 1999 (Pimlico paperback 2000)

I enjoyed this book a lot. It briskly and entertainingly filled in some huge gaps in my historical education, combining the reasonably familiar with the utterly unfamiliar.

I learned of crucial sea battles of which I had never previously even heard the name, some of them fought only a few dozen miles from the coast of my own country, in parts of the sea I had never heard of. For example, do you know what and where 'The Downs' is? Maybe you do. I did not, until now.

Peter Padfield starts his story with the launching of and failure of the Spanish Armada and ends with the success of the American Revolution two centuries later. These are the battles he highlights: Spanish Armada, The Downs, Sole Bay, Beachy Head, Barfleur/La Hougue, Malaga, Finisterre, Quiberon Bay, Chesapeake Bay, and The Saints.

Of all of those, I only really knew about the Armada. In 1588, Spain launches a huge fleet of huge ships, full of soldiers as well as sailors, whose job is to achieve sea supremacy in the English Channel and escort an army from the Continent to England, to subdue English Protestantism. But the soldiers never get to fight, because the English ships, more manoeuvrable and with better guns and gunners, refuse to close and fire at the Spaniards from a distance. The Armada is not destroyed by the English, but it fails to make an English invasion possible, so by the time it is scattered into the North Sea and beyond, it has already been defeated, in the sense of prevented from achieving its purpose.

The result of the defeat of the Armada is not the triumph of England (as had been implied by omission by my school teachers), but on the contrary, the emergence into their century of maritime dominance of the Dutch United Provinces, the first great Europe-based global maritime trading power of the modern era (unless you prefer to start with Venice).

The Downs (1639). The Spanish launch another Armada (a complete surprise to me, this one) to crush the United Provinces. The Dutch navy defeats it, off the stretch of sheltered water between the Goodwin Sands and the coast of Kent, known as 'The Downs'. The British, behaving like some UN peace-keeping force, try to chase everyone out of their 'territorial waters', but are ignored.

Sole Bay (1672). England, the Catholic-inclined version of it ruled by Charles II, is in alliance with France against the Dutch. There is a naval battle off the coast of East Anglia. The Dutch do not lose, which means that they win, because England then backs out of the war.

William of Orange masterminds a coup d'état known here as the 'Glorious Revolution' (1688), and installs himself as King of England. My teachers made it sound as if the English elite suddenly decided one day that they wanted a different king, found William of Orange in a mail order catalogue, liked the look of him and had him delivered the next day, in a state of great amazement and gratitude. IN fact, William bossed the entire operation, albeit with plenty of English support. It is worth noting that William achieved a successful cross-Channel invasion of England, so all that stuff about England not having been invaded since 1066 is quite wrong.

Although Protestantism is supreme in England, in Scotland and Ireland there is everything to play for. At Beachy Head (1690), the French defeat an Anglo-Dutch force, but then fail to exploit their victory by making the difficulties that they might have made for William while he is busy subjugating the Irish. At Barfleur/La Hougue (1692), the Anglo-Dutch alliance reverses Beachy Head, and for the time being the French abandon any plans to topple William and reinstate his predecessor James II. But for the next century Britain and France confront each other.

Malaga (1704) is a draw, but strategically it means that Britain keeps Gibraltar, and remains at large around the coasts of France, blockading and preying upon French trade, protecting British trade. At Finisterre (1747) the French try to break the British blockade and to launch an invasion of England, but fail. At Quiberon Bay (1759) a similar plan fails again. The British remain the masters of the sea.

At Chesapeake Bay (1781) and The Saints (1782), the British again clash with the French. They lose at Chesapeake Bay, which for some reason means they do not get to keep America, but win at The Saints, which means that they remain top dogs in a general global maritime sort of way. If Padfield explains the causes and effects of these two battles properly, I missed it. He merely says what happened on the day, and announces that those were the consequences.

What makes this book so special and so entertaining is that it is not only about naval warfare. It is also about the way it is paid for and the reasons it was fought. Sea and land are bound together into one story.

Maritime supremacy starts with trade, loosely defined in a way that most emphatically and enthusiastically includes piracy, that is, stealing the gains of other people's trade.

A bunch of traders, like those in the United Provinces, start doing global business, with merchant ships, and by stealing other people's merchants ships, and get rich. Others naturally want to steal their ships and their markets, so they build a navy to protect their ships and their markets. The resulting Dutch maritime supremacy results in further massive trading success. The point is: merchant ships first, then war ships.

Only countries whose economies are built on maritime trade ever get to achieve maritime supremacy. This is because the other kind of potentially dominant countries, the great land based continental autocracies, cannot, when push comes to shove, be bothered with the huge expense and huge complexities of both building and then maintaining and making use of huge fleets of war ships. They are too busy creating and maintaining huge continental armies. Also, although their ships are often very fine from the design point of view, the autocrats tend not to be able to come up with such good guns to put on the ships. They do not have the industry.

But above all, they do not have the will. Their merchant adventuring enemies do have this will. When a war goes badly for the autocrats, they cut back on naval expenditure. When war goes badly for the sea traders, they spend more on their navy, because without naval success, all is lost.

Naval success breeds more naval success. When the British are blockading France throughout the eighteenth century, they get to master all the many problems of warfare at sea. These are not just fighting skills on the day, important though those are, but such things as supply and cleanliness, and above all, the basic ability to sail a ship on that most unpredictable and treacherous of surfaces, the sea. When the French fleet does break out, its sailors have been in port for the last year, and lack to skills to win. The British, on the day of battle, have been in effect preparing for nothing else for the previous few months, years and decades.

Continental navies have other problems. They get orders from sea-ignorant land-lubbers who think that fleets can be ordered about on the sea like soldiers on a parade ground. Go up to the left hand end of the Channel, turn right, sail to Calais, halt, escort an army across the Channel, yes sir, one two one two. But of course fleets typically cannot bring off such parade ground manoeuvres. Successful admirals must be well-trained, given strategic objectives, and then, during the actual campaign, trusted to do their best in whatever turn out to be the circumstances.

Interwoven with Padfield's descriptions of sea battles, each with its diagrams with lines of tiny little shapes waddling towards one another, and descriptions of cannon balls wreaking havoc and decapitating people and causing anyone left alive to be ankle deep in blood, is another narrative. The sea-dependent powers are actually run by merchants and their cronies, and these merchants demand the necessary legal and political framework within which they will be allowed to make their deals and their killings. Hence the emergence of modern constitutional government. Parliaments curb royal despotism, because royal despotism is bad for business.

It would be pleasing to think that these merchant adventurers, first in Amsterdam, and then in London, and later in the USA, favoured low taxes, Samizdata style. Alas, no. The merchants are prepared to pay quite high taxes to win their wars (half of a killing is still a killing), and are politically able to demand that others, much to their disgust, join in with paying these taxes too. And given that this system, for all its widespread unpopularity, does at least work, this means that merchant governments can also borrow more, and at more favourabe interest rates. than can their enemies.

For meanwhile, in France, the government is crippled by its inability to extract taxes from the church or from the nobility, and instead taxes only the politically impotent traders and impoverished workers, industrial and rural. This not only eventually results in the French Revolution; it also in the meantime makes major wars against Britain impossible to finance for long enough to win them.

Padfield waxes lyrical at the modernity and prosperity first of the Dutch and then of the British – the Dutch Golden Age, Rule Britannia, etc.. He notes the rise of the liberal spirit, and of liberal philosophers who codified and rationalised it, like Locke and Hobbes.

But – and it is a big and admirable but – he notes how very imperfectly these self-styled free peoples managed to embody these principles in their own conduct.

The matter of taxation I have already referred to. The biggest blot on the historical record is of course slavery and the slave trade. You can point out all you like that liberal consitutionalism was not the only political system of, say, the seventeenth century, that practised and profited from slavery; they were all at it. True, they all were. And equally true, it was the liberal constitutionalists of Britain and America who eventually decided to get rid of slavery, and they duly did, pretty much. But before they did that, they profited from it mightily. Their first reaction to slavery was not to recoil from it in moral horror; it was to get it organised and internationalised, and more profitable, and hence inevitably to make it a much bigger trade than it had been before. Only later, when they felt they could afford to, did they get rid of it.

The other great exception that Padfield points to is the treatment of the men upon whom all this liberty and prosperity ultimately depended, the sailors themselves. The British were eventually able to make the life of a sailor in the Royal Navy actually better than the life of a contemporaneous land-based labourer (dead sailors, after all, do not fight so effectively), but that took a long time. As with the moral glories of the anti-slavery campaigns, the age of relative comfort at sea, now enjoyed by crews all of whose members have volunteered, was preceded by a far longer age of extreme naval discomfort, and what was for all practical purposes slavery as complete as that endured in the plantations of the West Indies or of the southern states of America. Many a sailor in the Royal Navy embarked upon his service to the crown by being press-ganged – forcibly captured, in plain English – and from then on life was horrible until he died, which he did quite soon, usually horribly, either from some ghastly death in action, or from some equally ghastly disease brought about by the prolonged deficiencies of the naval diet.

Nevertheless, although these liberal constitutionalists may have been decidedly imperfect in the application of their liberal principles, they did at least they proclaim them. The standards these people set, even if they only imperfectly lived up to those standards themselves, eventually became the standards against which the affairs of all of mankind are now judged. Are the people free? Are they passably comfortable? Can they get rich? Are they happy? It was the maritime supremacists who put these principles on the map, so to speak. They created a momentum not only of material progress but also of moral progress which shows no sign of being halted.

Padfield's book has a happy ending, not just in the form of the success of the American Revolution, with all its portents of freedoms and prosperities to come, but with the publication in 1776 of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

Throughout the period of mercantile national rivalry, the merchants of both sides tended, despite all their blockading and market capturing, tended still to trade with one another. Simply, it made no sense not to. Both parties gained. What Adam Smith did was nail this principle down in a big, fat and important book. Trade is not a fixed-sum battle which you won or lost with war ships. It is in everyone's interest. For people to get rich, it is absolutely not necessary for them to steal either each other's ships or each others markets. All can gain.

He also did much to free the slaves, by arguing that free men are more productive, and hence more profitable to live with than slaves.

At its best, Padfield's book is wonderful. At its worst it is somewhat confusing, with rather too abrupt switches from the details of a sea battle to the alleged (but sometime insufficiently explained) consequences of that battle on land, in the form of another set-piece description of something like the Glorious Revolution or of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. His ambition is splendid, but his execution imperfect. In this respect his book resembles the story it tells. Above all, why no detailed discussion of the Athenians, the Venicians? Or of the Americans, once they had got into the stride of being a major naval power? But better a book you want to be longer than a book you do not see the point of because it is not saying anything, or is saying something pointless, or wrong, or saying it badly. I loved this book, and enthusiastically recommend it to, well, anyone who thinks they might like it.

I learned all kinds of little titbits, especially about the technology of naval warfare. I did not know, until reading this, that the English had better guns and gunners than the Spaniards at the time of the Armada, while nevertheless both then and for many decades after that having much to learn from the continentals about ship design and construction. I knew nothing, until now, of 'carronades', which are – for all you ignoramuses who still do not know – miniature canons which the English were very good at mass producing (unlike the French), and which had the great advantage that they were light enough to put lots of them on the top decks of ships without capsizing them. And I knew nothing of the naval significance of copper (another English industrial ace). Copper bottomed ships are better because they are barnacle-free, hence smoother, and hence faster.

And, in general, I knew very little indeed about the exploits of the British eighteenth century navy against the French. All that blockading of the French coast in those times came as a huge surprise to me. For me, the British Navy of that time was, you know, 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, preceded by a great fog of Hornblower-modified ignorance. Admirals Hood, Hawke, Anson – even the wonderfully named Sir Clowdisley Shovel – were for me mere names, if that, until now.

The title I have chosen for this posting comes right at the end of the book, when Padfield describes the kind of Americans who agitated for a complete American break from Britain, and the kind who argued against that. Plenty of colonists were, of course, opposed to this break, and regarded the merchants who financed the effort to achieve it and the firebrands who argued for it as motivated by mere greed.

Here is Padfield writing about how the US Constitution got ratified:

In the subsequent public discussion and pamphlet war over whether the constitution should be ratified by the states, there were striking similarities with the fierce debates in the English parliament at the time of the foundation of the Bank of England soon after William's 'Glorious Revolution'. Then the landed classes feared the merchant/financial interest would take over government and preside over a rising spiral of deficit financing for its own advantage, raising taxes to service the ever-mounting debt and spreading government into ever greater areas of English life. Their fears had not proved exaggerated. It is doubtful if Americans, who had just thrown off the shackles of the resulting mighty fiscal-military machine, recognized the precedents, but it was again the great landowners, joined by small farmers and small businessmen, a great many in debt to their wealthier fellows, who provided the opposition to the proposed federal constitution, discerning behind it the designs of the commercial and moneyed interest and fearing tyranny by an aristocracy of merchant wealth.

No doubt the motives of those in favour of the constitution were not so self-interested as they were painted by the opposition: there was boundless idealism and optimism for a republic created on a clean slate with all history and the latest Enlightenment ideas as guides, granting power not to hereditary nobles, but to the people. For all that, the 'Federalists' were concentrated in the seaport cities and were led by wealthy men of business and finance who attracted to their cause the professional, skilled and unskilled classes dependent on commerce and even those farmers outside whose livelihoods were bound up with city and international markets. Indeed, the dispute over the constitution was characterized by a member of the New York ratifying convention as 'between navigating and non-navigating individuals'. It was the 'navigating individuals' – whose concerns, it will be recalled, had sparked the original rebellion against British rule, and who had influence over the press and in the legislatures — who eventually won the vote in a surprisingly low turnout, and the new constitution was ratified by the majority of states in 1788. The next year ten amendments were passed to give American citizens statutory rights which the British had acquired in common law or by Act of Parliament: freedoms of religion, speech and the press; rights of peaceable assembly; security against unreasonable searches of the person, home or effects; trial by jury; the right not to be a witness against oneself, nor to be oppressed by excessive fines, excessive bail or 'cruel and unusual punishments'.

So the liberalizing inspirations of the great trading cities of the United Provinces, transferred to England under William of Orange and spread under the shelter of British trading and naval supremacy to the North American colonies, were inscribed in the constitution of the infant United States of America.

So too, but without formal adoption, were the commercial and colonizing compulsions. The establishment of land-speculating companies, often subscribed on both sides of the Atlantic, and the westward migration of settlers had preceded the American Revolution; in those colonies where the Crown set limits to westward expansion, it had contributed to the desire for independence. Native tribes such as the Cherokee and the Creek in the south had already ceded vast tracts of territory as payment for trading debts they could never otherwise have met, and with the coming of war these had allied with the British to prevent further encroachment. It might be said that they were the true losers at the Peace of Versailles, yet in the long run, whatever the outcome in 1783, it is impossible to imagine any native tribes long resisting the expansionary forces and materially powerful system – not to mention the smallpox and syphilis – of the white men and women who had arrived on the commercial tide from Europe. Ruthless exploitation of less materially endowed peoples and their land and every living creature within their power was as much the mark of trading strength and merchant power as were liberal values.

Of these values, freedom was sovereign. …

That quote captures pretty well what this book is all about. In it you get both Padfield's excitement about the political principles upon which naval supremacy conferred victory, together with a lively sense of the disappointments and miseries this caused to those on the receiving end of the raw power that both caused and was then further unleashed by these principles. You see the same principles springing to life in one location, and then being as it were passed on, like an Olympic torch, to the next bearers of the flame. Who will be next, I wonder? And what will their 'ships' be, exactly? What will be their 'sea'?

For me, then, the perfect book. And all the more so because you can sum it up as the history of the ideas that Samizdata exists to spread to all corners of the earth and beyond, and of a large chunk of the physical circumstances that gave birth to them. Strongly recommended. And I got it in a remainder shop for a mere £5.99. Trade. I love it.

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The Mughal Empire
John F. Richards
Cambridge University Press, 1993.

The Great Moghuls
Bamber Gascoigne
Jonathan Cape, 1971; 1976.

The New Cambridge History of India is a massive project still in progress, stretching from Mughal times to the present - 30 volumes in all. From the General Editor's Preface it is not at all clear what is to be done with pre-Mughal India. The Mughals and their Contemporaries is Division I of Four similar Divisions and The Mughal Empire is just one volume (here in pb), of the 9 of which Division I consists.

The Mughal line (is "Mughal" the form which is now currently correct, rather than "Moghul"?) - Babur (1526-1530), Humayun (1530-1556), Akbar (1556-1606), Jahangir (1606-1627), Shah Jahan (1627-1658), Aurungzeb (1658-1707) - was from first to last aggressively expansionist, with large numbers of men permanently under arms, on which most of its income was spent. The conquered lands were fertile and well-populated and their exploitation well organized to be profitable. The economy was a monetary one, taxes paid in coin stimulating an agricultural surplus to pay them with, with a net flow of gold and silver from trade with the north and increasingly by sea with the west. Although paper as a essential bureaucratic adjunct had been in use as far back as the 11th century, printing seems to have made no appeal to the Mughals, except possibly to Akbar who, unfortunately, was illiterate, the only Emperor who was.

The foundation of this centralised economy, which Richards analyses in considerable depth, was undoubtedly laid by Akbar, the most interesting of the Mughals and the one most open to innovations and ideas. To a large extent, almost all of India had already been penetrated by Muslims; in the previous century the Sultanate of Delhi had, for a few decades, ruled almost the whole subcontinent before it disintegrated, in the manner Indian empires always seemed to do. Thus when the Mughals arrived, most of Northern India was still ruled by Muslims, everywhere in a minority and increasingly so further and further south. Babur, in fact, established himself in northern India, by defeating the Sultan of Delhi at Panipat.

While never openly abandoning Islam, Akbar seems to have become less and less attached to it, and more and more interested in Hinduism and also in Christianity, keeping several Jesuits in attendance at court. He was obviously aware that to ensure a harmonious state, the Hindus must be conciliated and integrated as far as possible into the ruling class. He removed their discriminatory taxes and gave high army commands to their aristocracy. With the later Mughals this policy steadily lapsed, until with the last effective emperor, Aurungzeb, it was explicitly abandoned. Not only were the Hindus thoroughly alienated but Sikhism, which had arisen as a sort of simplified Hinduism influenced by monotheistic Islam, became more militant in response to the new Islamic intolerance. The result, as far as the Hindus were concerned, was their revolt as bandit-like warriors, the Marathas, under Shivaji and his descendants. For much of the period raiding and plundering were the only tactics they could employ, but these contributed to the difficulties of revenue collection that the state depended on. They have also contributed considerably to Hindu political mythology at the present time. The Sikhs, though often defeated and their leaders killed, were never suppressed.

The Mughal state required a strong autocrat at its head, however important its servants might be. Though Humayun and Akbar seem to have succeeded to their thrones with little conflict, after them the process was always disputed; Jahangir was a troublesome and impatient heir; his eldest son, after two rebellious attempts, was blinded, while Shah Jahan emerged successful after a series of sanguinary battles and assassinations of his brothers. A similar state of affairs arose before his death, when Aurungzeb not only defeated his competitors, but displaced his father, whom he kept in a comfortable palace prison for the last eight years of his life. While previous emperors had been weakened by their addiction to wine - often with added opium - and many of their sons had died from its effects, Aurungzeb's Islamic austerity ensured he survived to an active 90 years of age. At the same time his religious rigidity, coupled with a long life, ensured rebellions amongst his subjects (as recounted) and difficulty in making further conquests in the peninsula's deep south, where he was militarily bogged down for the last 20 years of his reign, allowing the consolidation of European footholds, notably the British possessions of Bombay and Madras. On his death the now-normal succession battles took place but the cohesion of the empire was now insufficient, parts of it were becoming independant, and the "winner", Mohammed Shah, exercised little power and even the dates of his reign (1719-1748) are not given by Richards. "After 1720 the formerly centralised empire continued as a loosely knit collection of regional kingdoms, whose rulers, while styling themselves imperial governors, offered only token tribute and service to the Mughal emperor at Delhi (p. 297)." Delhi itself suffered a devastating sack and massacre by the Persian monarch Nadir Shah in 1738.

I would have expected a Mughal Family Tree, particularly to keep track of all the claimants at each succession-crisis, but for some reason Richards, unlike Gascoigne (or Keay in his A History of India) does not supply one. There are 5 pages of glossary to help with the multitude of military and administrative terms guaranteed to bemuse the ordinary reader.

It has to be said that for this "ordinary reader" at least, Gascoigne's book is superior to Richards'. This is not merely because it is magnificently illustrated - many of the photographs were taken by his wife Christina - which might make anyone mistake it for a mere coffee table book. Nor can it be entirely due to the resources of Granada Television, which gave them the opportunity to travel around the subcontinent for six months. The numerous establishments and people thanked for their cooperation merely emphasises the enormous work the author must have done to assemble what are, in effect, the six biographies of the "Great Moghuls", each page having at least half a dozen references to the bibliography listed at the end. This book, first published in 1971, and also issued in paperback, now seems to be out of print, but is probably obtainable, as was my own copy, second-hand.

Inevitably it tells the same story that Richards does, but noticeably with added detail that brings the subject that much closer. Thus, for example, Richards notes that Humayun "met a fatal accident on the steps of his library in the fortress at Delhi." Gascoigne not only takes twelve lines to recount this unlucky episode that ended a blatantly unlucky life, but supplies a photograph of the hazardous stairwell down which the unfortunate emperor tumbled when he turned at the muezzin's call to prayer, tripping on his robe, falling headlong down the stone steps and striking his right temple on a sharp edge.

Similarly Gascoigne gives more details about the Moghul proneness to alcoholism, generation after generation from Babur on, though if there is any genetic Mongolid tendency it must have been completely diluted by outbreeding. All of Akbar's sons were alcoholics, including the heir, Jahangir, who made no bones about it, but rather unfairly penalised courtiers with hangovers after his parties. Several princes of later emperors died of drink, to some extent mitigating the competition for the succession. It would be interesting to know to what extent alcoholism was a problem over India generally and to what extent Islamic prohibition had any effect on lower class Muslims. As noted above, the last "great" Moghul, Aurungreb, took the prohibition seriously, unfortunately along with other more bigoted and fanatical injunctions and beliefs. The Islamic basis of Mughal rule may have promoted equality of opportunity amonst believers, but ultimately was unable to develop politically into a social system capable of confronting the rivals from the west.

The biographical basis of Gascoigne's history brings out the military nature of the regime, in which the higher up a courtier managed to rise, the more likely he was to see active service. Even Abul Fazl, Akbar's biographer, yearned for and attained it, becoming so proficient that Jahangir, as yet only the heir, thought it best to have him ambushed and murdered, "as he cooly admits as much in his own autobiography." For all the Moghuls left personal memoirs or diaries, with the exception of the illiterate Akbar, who today would probably be diagnosed and excused as dyslexic, but who certainly saw to it that his life was chronicled, and illustrated, in the Akbar-nama. He was, in fact, very much the patron of writers, though one can ascribe to a sense of humour the task he set one severely orthodox scholar of translating the extremely lengthy Sanskrit epic Mahabharata into Persian. The beauty of Moghul manuscripts and of their illustrations by the court artists is truly astounding - but it should be remembered that these were single copies and for privileged eyes only. Printing never came to this Moghul world.

Perhaps inevitably violence pervades this history, to a much greater degree than in the subsequent two hundred years of British dominance, which pacified the whole subcontinent with far less loss of life, to say nothing of the lack of succession disputes. While in some ways the Moghuls penetrated more deeply into Indian life than did the British - they certainly left more of their genes there - the British legacy has been the more radical, perhaps largely due to the fact it took place during the Industrial Age, when technology, typified by railway-building, could make for more efficient rule, much of which was concerned with the benefiting of the population rather than its repression or exploitation. Even the anti-imperialist George Orwell (died 1950) had to concede (I don't know where) that, for its native peoples, India would be a better place to live in than China during the last hundred years or so. Nor would the conditions in the subsequent fifty years after his death, could he have foreseen them, have changed his mind.

As so often nowadays, in both books the maps are inadequate. One would think that, with their magnificent colour photographs, the Gascoignes might produce some correspondingly fine coloured maps - but no. A large outline, with hatchings indicating Moghul conquest, some mountain shading, with an inadequate number of place names in very small type, is all that is given - in black and white. The territorial boundaries of vassal or independent states are not indicated. The maps of the New Cambridge are better, all being taken from An Atlas of the Mughal Empire (Habib, 1982), but the major map of the Mughal Empire, tucked away on an early page, is cramped because of its scale and difficult to refer to because of its position. The day of fine fold out maps, placed within and at the end of a book, characteristic of The Cambridge Ancient History, appears to be over.

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Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty
Isaiah Berlin
Chatto & Windus, London, 2002

The Roots of Romanticism
Isaiah Berlin
Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1999

Berlin's stock is probably drifting down, as is the way of things after an author's death. This may be why the transcripts of these dozen lectures have been remaindered to the PostScript shop. A contemptuous review in this August's The Oldie (which may be getting nastier, or I more sensitive) of a volume of Berlin's Letters may also be indicative - Berlin's work is all cod-Macaulay, he's the most celebrated windbag in history, responsible for Stalin's persecution of Anna Akhmatova and for failing to cop Burgess and Maclean and Anthony Blunt. So he can't be much good, can he? But oh yes he can.

"Fifty years ago [in 1952 - begins the Editor's Preface to Freedom and Its Betrayal] when the six hour-long lectures in this volume were delivered, they created a broadcasting sensation."

To anyone who can remember what broadcasting was like fifty years ago, and it was, of course, entirely by the BBC, this is perfectly believable. I never heard them, and a recording of only one survives, but anyone who has heard Berlin's wonderful spoken delivery, as I have when his later Mellon Lectures, The Roots of Romanticism, given in 1965, were re-broadcast in 1989, recordings of which are accessible, can believe it too. Berlin prepared his lectures with great care, first as complete works, then boiling them down to notes and finally to headings, then delivering them extempore in rapid-fire mode. Whether by design or not his method of composition employs consecutive adjectives, similes, near-synonyms or other modifiers that elaborate and as it were surround each point as it is made, at the same time illuminating it and yet introducing that element of redundancy which helps the reader stay on track while the vehicle containing the subject bounds and bounces exhilaratingly and unstoppably on.

Needless to say, this idiosyncratic sort of lecturing, which I hope is apparent in most of my quotations (for a more extended example, see under "Maistre" below) aroused suspicion of showmanship. This was largely allayed by the revised text normally subsequently issued, proving that what had sounded interesting to listen to was just as stimulating to read, though, as Hardy says, "revision can sometimes have a sobering effect on the extempore spoken word".

As Berlin himself said, "I am by nature a correcter and re-correcter of everything I do," and he did not like his work to go out in unfinished form. The two series of lectures printed, the first from transcripts, the second, given thirteen years later, from recordings, are exceptions to this procedure, the first being half-superseded and half-forgotten, while the second Berlin hoped to replace with a larger, more ambitious work. Only after Berlin's death did Hardy feel free to issue them.

Berlin's BBC producer in 1952, Anna Kallin, assumed, as seemed very reasonable after the success of the broadcasts, which had provoked a considerable correspondence in The Times and resulted in a first leader, when The Times, its letters and its leaders really mattered, that he would be a natural as a Reith Lecturer, when that really mattered. She found to her embarrassment however that her superiors disagreed, though Berlin himself took no offence. It is not likely that, perhaps for copyright reasons, any of the dozen lectures were reprinted in The Listener, the long-defunct BBC weekly, or Hardy would have mentioned the fact.

The six enemies are Helvetius (1715-1771), Rousseau (1712-1778), Fichte (1762-1814), Hegel (1770-1831), Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and Maistre (1753-1821), but the romantic portrait on the cover is of none of these; this conscientious reader had to reach page 127 to find out who it was. Though perhaps a sly joke on the part of Berlin's editor, the devoted Henry Hardy, the all-too-frequent lack of information on the outside or inside of a book about illustrations on its jacket seems to be almost a convention - and a very irritating one. As for liberty, of these six, two - Helvetius and Maistre - are avowedly hostile, two - Rousseau and Fichte - avowedly its advocates (but what advocates!), while two - Hegel and Saint-Simon - wish to trade it in, in different ways, for security.

Of course, had he but world enough and time, the true interested intellectual such as our Oldie reviewer would read all the works of these authors, for preference in their original languages, German or French, make up his own mind as to their value and assess their impact on their contemporaries and successors. As it is, Berlin, who certainly gives the impression of having done all this, tells us what these thinkers, who seem to be a real bunch of queer fish, have prescribed for keeping society in order.

Helvetius, who turns out to be the spiritual father of Jeremy Bentham, promulgator of utilitarianism, believed that "education and laws can do anything", a notion not without its believers today. When the right people (i.e., scientists) had been installed to instil the right education, and his being the age of the benevolent or potentially benevolent despot such a project did not seem impossible, the concept of choice became the obviously meaningless one between the plainly good and the plainly bad, and liberty disappeared along with it. This extraordinary sort of reasoning - which is not entirely extinct - was the result of the success of Newton and others in solving problems in physics, coupled with considerable advances in mathematical theory. All that was needed, it seemed, was to apply the same sort of methods to human problems. And, just as in mathematics or in physics, "all questions have true answers, all true answers are in principle discoverable, and all the answers are in principle compatible, or combinable into one harmonious whole like a jigsaw puzzle." In sober fact, as Berlin has often pointed out, every human ideal (aka the solution to the world's problems) has come into collision with every other - liberty with equality just to start with.

Berlin's epigraph for his lecture on Rousseau is a quotation from one of Dostoevsky's characters: "Starting from unlimited freedom I arrive at unlimited despotism" and to show how Rousseau manages to do this is one of Berlin's most elegant descriptions and should be read unspoilt by an advance notice. Similarly, "Fichte was always saying that liberty was the only subject with which he was at all concerned", but in the process of elaborating the concept, at a time when Prussia was completely under the heel of Napoleon and an individual could do nothing about it, this became a matter for larger units, "society", and ultimately German nationalism. Hegel rather tends to explain away freedom by likening attempts to change the status quo with trying to change the laws of mathematics - from which it is a short step to wanting to change any laws and something equally ridiculous. Saint-Simon, Marx's forerunner (and a better prophet, according to Berlin), emphasised fraternity: "love one another," he said to his disciples on his deathbed, echoing Jesus perhaps (though Berlin does not say so). Liberty, "always disorganising", he dismissed as having "become a matter of indifference to the lower classes". "What they want is boots, and this cry [says Berlin] for bread, boots and not a lot of liberty and liberal slogans then becomes the staple refrain of all the hard-boiled left-wing parties up to Lenin and Stalin." Security and liberty are uneasy bedfellows, and Saint-Simon had no qualms about identifying who knew best how to arrange them - himself. Maistre is Berlin's last enemy of liberty, the most uncompromisingly authoritarian, and "a very frightening figure to many of his contemporaries". A paragraph descriptive of how he was seen by them can be given to illustrate Berlin's lecturing style:

"Maistre is painted, always, as a fanatical monarchist and a still more fanatical supporter of papal authority; proud, bigoted, inflexible, with a strong will and an unbelievable power of rigid reasoning from dogmatic premisses to extreme and unpalatable conclusions; brilliant, embittered, a medieval doctor born out of his time, vainly seeking to arrest the current of history; a distinguished anomaly, formidable, hostile, solitary and ultimately pathetic; at best a tragic patrician figure, defying and denouncing a shifty and vulgar world, into which he had incongrously been born; at worst an unbending self-blinded die-hard pouring curses upon the marvellous new age whose benefits he was too wilful to see, and too callous to feel."

Now read on!

Consistent with the topic of the lectures, there are few examples of sweetness and light. But a definition of "liberty" by Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) does remind us that during the period (1819 to be precise) there were commonsense views on the subject, as a good in its own right, with no claims that it would lead to heaven, or fears that it would lead to hell, on earth. Unfortunately this is a position impossible to hold with the passionate intensity and determination exhibited by its enemies and their followers, and though he does not admit as much, Berlin, like Constant, can only warn, not inspire. In an informative article in this autumn's issue of The Salisbury Review, Norman Barry gives a description of Constant's libertarian philosophy, but who can help but agree with him that Constant was far too optimistic, naive in fact, about the connexion between technological and moral progress. Constant thought that man had learnt from the excesses of the French Revolution not to repeat them. Sad to say, he had not.

"Whenever anyone embarks on a generalisation on the subject of romanticism" remarks Berlin, on the opening page of The Roots of Romanticism "... in Wordworth and Coleridge, let us say, as against Racine and Pope, somebody will always be found who will produce countervailing evidence from the writings of Homer, Kalidasa, pre-Muslim Arabian epics, medieval Spanish verse - and finally Racine and Pope themselves." In a sense, before the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, there may have been romantics and romanticism, but they didn't know it, or what it was. Berlin strikes out on his own line: before this time, the courage, constancy and persistence of persons held to be deeply in error in, generally, their religious beliefs evoked no sympathy and little respect - witness, say, Lancelot Andrewes' attitude to and treatment of a Puritan locked up in a filthy gaol. But now "What people admired was wholeheartedness, sincerity, pureness of soul, the ability and readiness to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was. No matter what it was: that is the important thing." Carlyle was a text-book example of this. Thus: "The importance of Muhammad is his character and not his beliefs." In fact, "Carlyle . . . does not begin to suppose that the Koran contains anything which he, Carlyle, could be expected to believe." Indeed, for better or worse, when some institution - the Catholic Church or the Ancien Regime - "has lasted its time . . . something equally powerful, equally earnest, equally sincere, equally deep, equally earth-shaking must take its place." This might well be the case, but a value-judgement? Not his department.

The effect of opening this door wide to let in anyone who felt strongly about anything was that an extremely mixed and contradictory bunch poured through. They had nothing in common; one eminent critic despaired of reducing them to order, another shrugged off the attempt: "The whole pother . . . amounts to nothing that need trouble a healthy man," both attitudes Berlin deems "excessively defeatist". Having set out the problem in his first lecture, he spends the remaining five investigating historically how the Age of Reason was followed and supplanted by the Age of Romanticism, "the greatest transformation of Western consciousness, certainly in our time."

The tenets of the Enlightenment were that, using the tools of logic and reason, the world was ultimately knowable, understandable and the ways it operated similarly consistent with each other and that this applied to human nature and behaviour. And reformable? A tall order certainly, and an enormous task unable to be comprehended by most minds, perhaps, but what else "would produce equally splendid and lasting results in the world of morals, politics, aesthetics, and in the rest of the chaotic world of human opinion, where people appeared to struggle with each other, and murder each other and destroy each other, and humiliate each other, in the name of incompatible principles. This appeared to be a perfectly reasonable hope, and it appeared to be a very worthy human ideal. At any rate this is certainly the ideal of the Enlightenment." This hope, this ideal was to be shattered by the Romantics.

It all began in Germany, Berlin claims. This was, of course, not yet a country, and barely an idea. As a result of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) it had been left depopulated and disunited, its culture was provincial compared with that of France, towards which its intellectuals felt a deep inferiority mixed with intense resentment - even Frederick the Great, its most successful monarch, despised the German language - and its musical superiority unnoticed and unackowledged. (There is an interesting footnote on Berlin's correspondence provoked by a protest on his treatment of Bach). Because of their general political helplessness, artists, poets, dramatists, musicians and clergy had retreated into "an intense inner life", "a very grand form of sour grapes". Since the external culture was rational, they would be irrational; since it was irreligious, they would be pietists and since French intellectuals were well-born, theirs were of humble origins. These are sweeping statements, made more so in summary, and the reader must examine Berlin's evidence and arguments himself to see how well they stand up.

Berlin parades a number of examples in his third lecture, The True Fathers of Romanticism. First, "the obscure figure of Georg Hamann [1730-1788] . . . the first person to declare war upon the Enlightenment in the most open, violent and complete fashion", in some respects very similar to our own William Blake (1757-1827). Then there was Goethe, whose Sorrows of Young Werther is supposed to have made suicide fashionable for lovesick young men, but Goethe lived long enough (1749-1832) to declare, "Romanticism is disease, classicism is health," and perhaps if others - Shelley, Byron and Keats - had lived as long they might also have felt the same way (like Wordsworth?). Definitely there is Herder (1744-1783), "one of those not very many thinkers in the world who really do absolutely adore things for being what they are . . . not for being something else . . . the originator of all those antiquarians who want natives to remain as native as possible, who like arts and crafts, who detest standardisation - everyone who likes the quaint . . . the father, the ancestor, of all those travellers, all those amateurs, who go round ferreting out all kinds of forgotten forms of life, delighting in everything that is peculiar, everything that is odd, everything that is native, everything that is untouched." It cannot be often that Berlin fails to find le mot juste - "something - I do not quite know what name to give it - much more like populism", but the word he failed to find in 1967 had not yet been invented - multiculturalism, perhaps the worm in the bud of Western Civilization.

In his lecture The Restrained Romantics Berlin picks what must seem three odd examples: Kant (1724-1804), Schiller (1759-1805) and Fichte (1762-1814), the last familiar to us as one of his enemies of liberty. "Kant hated romanticism. He detested every form of extravagance, fantasy, what he called Schwarmerei, any form of exaggeration, mysticism, vagueness, confusion. Nevertheless . . ." and Berlin goes on to explain Kant's contribution to the movement, a desire, which he believed to be entirely a rational one, to give the human will full freedom. "The dramatist, poet and historian Friedrich Schiller is as intoxicated by the idea of will, liberty, autonomy, man on his own as Kant was. . . . He constantly speaks of spiritual freedom, freedom of reason, the kingdom of freedom, our free self, inner freedom, freedom of mind, moral freedom, the free intelligence - a very favourite phrase - holy freedom, the impregnable citadel of freedom; and there are expressions in which instead of the word freedom' he uses the word independence'." His plays are full of heroes - and heroines - who perform irrational and wicked acts - it is the intense passionate activity that is important; its immorality is relevant only for the difficulties it makes. According to Fichte, "man is a kind of continuous action - not even an actor. . . . A man who does not create, a man who simply accepts what life or nature offers him, is dead." We have come some distance from the passivity and torpor from which the Romantic movement is supposed to have started.

"Fichte ends as a rabid German patriot and nationalist", Berlin states, using him as a bridge from the previous lecture into the next, Unbridled Romanticism, in which he plays a full part. Again, Berlin chooses an odd trio as exemplars, following the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845) who wrote "most authoritatively [that] . . .the three factors which most profoundly influenced the entire movement, not only aesthetically but also morally and politically, were, in this order, Fichte's theory of knowledge, the French Revolution and Goethe's famous novel Wilhelm Meister." This lecture is easier to read and enjoy than to summarise its message. Fichte, to whom he has already given a great deal of attention, Berlin cannot regard favourably. The French Revolution began as a project of the Enlightenment but "was a failure, in the sense that after it, fairly conspicuously, the majority of Frenchmen were not free, not equal, and not particularly fraternal." Its "unintended consequences . . . fed the streams of all kinds of theodices: the Marxist theodicy, the Hegelian theodicy, Spengler's theodicy, Toynbee's theodicy, and a great many other theological writings of our time." As for Wilhelm Meister, "The romantics admired this . . . because it was an account of the self-formation of a man of genius . . . presumably the creative autobiography of Goethe an an artist." And it is unlikely that Goethe was pleased about this.

In his final lecture The Lasting Effects Berlin attempts "to say, however rash it may seem, what the heart of romanticism appears to [him] to be". It is a long and complex explanation, impossible to summarise; anyone can understand his wish to work further on the subject. And the effects? Yes - it did lead to Fascism: Communism, on the other hand, would be a long blind alley, like the French Revolution, leading from the Enlightenment. But Berlin finds a more cheerful outcome, so that one emerges into the sunlight with his last three paragraphs, of which I quote the last in full:

"The result of romanticism, then, is liberalism, toleration, decency and the appreciation of the imperfections of life; some degree of increased rational self-understanding. This was very far from the intention of the romantics. But at the same time - and to this extent the romantic doctrine is true - they are the persons who most strongly emphasised the unpredictability of all human activities. They were hoist with their own petard. Aiming at one thing, they produced, fortunately for us all, almost the exact opposite."

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Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible
Adam Nicolson
HarperCollins Publishers 2003

A claim on the dust jacket states:"The King James Bible is the greatest work of prose ever written," and the message of the book, while not repeating it, is an elaboration of this claim; Nicolson, though not quite a believer or an unbeliever, is obviously besotted with the King James Bible, often called The Authorised Version, though it was never officially authorised by King or Parliament. It is now rarely to be found in the pews and on the lecterns of most churches, and hardly ever heard in public worship, where its language, already deliberately archaic even in its predecessors, has also been discarded and God, just like everyone else, is addressed as 'you'. If Christians are a minority in the English- speaking world, then KJB readers and users are a minority within a minority. Does this matter? The Centenary of its publication in 1611 is approaching and is unlikely to be celebrated, or commemorated by as much as a postage stamp, the excuse being that this would be 'controversial' or 'divisive', in the way that 1588, 1688, 1603, 1605, and 1707 were or will be. Adam Nicolson has written a fine book, of interest to all of us brought up on the King James Bible, quotations from which resonate in the memory, even when not at once identifiable, while those from all other subsequent translations set the teeth on edge. Here we are told part of the story - for most of it is lost - of how this seminal work was produced.

Why lost? The Translators (then and now capitalised), organized into six 'companies' of nine men, left few clues as to their working methods, their deliberations, discussions or disagreements and the manuscript sent to the printers has disappeared, possibly burnt in the Great Fire of London in 1666 (p. 225). Just as the whole scaffolding to build a great edifice is taken down and dispersed, so notes and drafts of the great translation ended up in the wastepaper basket, with some intriguing exceptions, and the fifty workers (four short of what there should have been) got on with their lives afterwards, leaving no memoirs, let alone diaries, of what it was like to have been on the project and not dreaming they had written the world's bestseller, the Bible to dominate the English-speaking world for four centuries and help shape the English language. Only a few, fascinating scraps remain. Like the copy of the Bishops' Bible (the text the Translators were supposed to revise) which the Bodleian bought from one of them (or someone) for 13/4 (pre-decimal for 2/3 of a pound), with his suggested emendations for the new translation marked in it. Or John Bois, the rather humble, impoverished but very learned Translator, who took notes of the revisers-translators' discussions of the complete work and whose notebook has somehow survived - everything in it written in Latin, bar Greek, of course. This leads Nicolson to speculate whether the discussions were carried out in Latin.

It is almost certain that had not King James desired it, 'his' Bible would not have been produced, and England, and Scotland too, would have made do with one of the versions already extant, either the 'official', Elizabethan Bishops' Bible of 1568 or the Geneva Bible of the late 1550s, favourite of the Puritans and heavily annotated politically - and subversively so in the opinion of the King, a good reason for replacing it; he banned its printing in England in 1616, though it continued to be produced on the Continent. It is fair to say that this was not his only reason. After he came to the throne he made a real attempt to promote peace and unity in his kingdoms. He ended the war with Spain, which had dragged on irrelevantly, but was unable to unite Scotland with England into a single Kingdom with one Parliament (the English objected). He also attempted -he was, after all, its Head - to reconcile the two factions within the Church of England, though this meant retaining the penal laws against Roman Catholics, now, however, less strictly enforced. The King was used to the Puritan faction; he had been up against its like all his life in Scotland, where he was certainly not the head of the Church, with its lack of bishops, its Presbyterianism and its Calvinism. The reconciliation was only partially successful; bishops were non-negotiable ("No bishops... no king"), and hard-line opponents were excluded from the start from the Hampton Court Conference, designed to bring concord.

Indeed, with the king bringing out all the disagreements, to some extent fudged by Elizabeth, the Conference was a stormy affair and seemed to make things worse. But his wish to have a new version of the Bible prevailed, and even though Bancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury had been an opponent of the idea, he took charge of the operation to bring it about, perhaps to ensure the Puritan element was excluded. Even so, men with Puritan leanings were included amongst the Translators.

Bancroft's instructions are still extant; a copy of the first of its two pages is printed as an end paper (why not the other?) and Nicolson discusses each fifteen of their headings. As for the translation itself, the Bible, including the Apocrypha, was divided up into six sections for the six 'companies' of nine to translate - and there, for the next four years, the information largely runs out. The first instruction directs that the translation should be founded on the Bishops' Bible, for it had been far from the intention of anyone for almost the last eighty years to make a translation de novo. The Bishops' Bible was descended, through the Great Bible commissioned by Henry VIII in 1539, back through Coverdale to Tyndale, who might have translated the whole Bible if he had not been caught and burnt in Flanders. In fact, the translators looked at all the versions that had been produced, including (without acknowledgement) the one produced by the English Catholics in Rheims and Douai in 1609. This backward gaze was to invite an archaic style and there is every reason to believe that this was accepted as desirable, and the Gothic font of the early editions deliberate.

Departing from Tyndale's spare, vernacular style, the Jacobean verges on the rhetorical and orotund, or, as Nicolson prefers to put it, majestical. But can one, if brought up on it, subject it to any sort of literary criticism? Nicolson emphasises very much the reverence for the original texts, translated with far less freedom than was countenanced in rendering the secular classics into English, where even the translator's own views might be allowed to obtrude. Yet this did not mean literalness, or always using the same English word for the original one in different contexts.

Perhaps from lack of information about the procedures and meetings and discussions that the Translators must have endured, Nicolson instead describes some of them, in order to give us an insight into their characters and ways of thinking. It would have been nice to have had more portraits; those he has included are most interesting. Unfortunately, none of the eleven men in the painting reproduced on the back of the dust jacket is identified (though one is plainly Robert Cecil) in a picture entitled "The Somerset House Conference, 1604", a Conference not mentioned in the book and possibly a mistake for the one at Hampton Court. This is entirely in keeping with the cavalier and slipshod way dust jacket pictures are generally presented by publishers. In this fine, but anonymous work, all have turned to face the painter except two who sit opposite each other, in mild confrontation, the only ones with their right hands just resting on the rich table covering, meticulously painted. Were the two sides 'Establishment' (obviously on the right, with Robert Cecil at the front, notepad and inkstand in front of him) and 'Puritans'? And why was this picture not included in the book itself?

All fifty Translators (there were a few drop-outs from the projected fifty four)are listed by their 'companies' at the end of the book. Most had comfortable ecclesiastical positions; eight were or became bishops, eight were heads and twelve were professors of university colleges; others had, or were given, prebenderies or vicarages. The actual funding of the project is uncertain, but it seems to have been understood that the actual Translators did the work as part of the duties implicit in their positions. The printer could be expected to make a profit from his work, having paid £3,500 for the privilege, but in fact he went bankrupt. James's chief minister, Cecil, probably eased the matter of expenses; he was excellent with what would now be called 'stealth taxes', but James was almost equally prodigal with what he secured.

The Translator Nicolson obviously found most interesting is Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster Abbey, later successively Bishop of Ely, Chichester and Winchester, whose manifold and often contradictory qualities are listed like a threnody from page 26 to 27; at once sensitive, even saintly, and yet callous, he could regularly spend five hours every morning in prayer (and in tears), but sneer at a stubborn Puritan, incarcerated in a filthy dungeon, who would later be executed, obviously with his approval (p. 92). Known for the wonderful prose of his sermons (see p. 191, for the passage borrowed by T.S. Eliot), he was just the man to make the new Bible "shine as gold more brightly, being rubbed and polished", as the Preface to the finished work, The Translators to the Reader, probably written by Miles Smith, puts it. For the Translators were careful not to impugn any previous translation, probably one reason why all were revisions. Nicolson suggests that Andrewes may have revised the bulk of the first twelve books of the Bible: "Most of our company are negligent", he wrote dismissively, and Nicolson produces some evidence to back this (p. 192).

The only lay Translator was Sir Henry Savile (price of knighthood: £1000) who was lucky to survive his complicity in the Earl of Essex's rebellion at the end of Elizabeth's reign. He was very much a Renaissance Man and, as such, unscrupulous as well as learned (he produced, with help, the definitive edition of St Chrysostom, at enormous cost, which did not sell well), with an eye for a good billet - Eton, despite the fact that the Provost was supposed to be a cleric - and at the same time an unreliable patron, as John Bois, the Latin note-taker mentioned above, found out. By another quirk of survival, we know more about Bois than of most of the other Translators, for a close friend wrote a memoir of this absent-minded husband, devoted father and financially careless brilliant scholar, and Nicolson uses it to illuminate one niche of the environment in which the translations took place (pp. 203-215).

Early in 1609 all the nine sections were brought together for revision by twelve unnamed scholars, meeting in the new Stationers' Hall, for whom Bois was the note-taker. There is evidence, though from a later source, that the whole Bible was read through: "one read the translation, the rest holding in their hands some Bible, either of the learned tongues, or French, Spanish, Italian, etc. If they found any fault, they spoke up; if not, he read on (p. 209)." Nothing could make clearer that the sound was as important as the sense. Perhaps this procedure also accounts for the fact that two years passed before a complete manuscript was ready for the printer.

It might be expected that after all the care taken in its production - "three hundred and fifty scholar-years" Nicolson estimates - it would be a great publishing success, but this was not the case. Only after the Restoration in 1660, almost fifty years later, did it come to take its place as the only Bible in English that all Protestants read. Even the Translators were too accustomed to the Geneva Bible: Andrewes' sermons are sprinkled with quotations from it and Smith (or whoever wrote its Preface) did not quote from the Bible he was presenting to the Reader, but from the Geneva, though in mitigation it may be said that he would not have a copy of the new text readily available. Likewise, a generation later, Archbishop Laud, scourge of the Puritans, used the same Geneva Bible they favoured. There seems to have been no definitive first edition and careless printing ensured that editions were produced littered with misprints, the most notorious being the 'Wicked Bible' where the Seventh Commandment enjoins "Thou shalt commit adultery."

Nicolson obviously has little time for subsequent translations, but, though he gives examples from both earlier and later versions to point the KJB's superiority, he has to admit that Jacobean scholarship was sometimes inadequate, particularly for tackling the knotty prose of St Paul, and that superior original manuscripts than those used have since come to light, or were even available at the time. Oddly, he stigmatises the Revised Version, produced in 1885, claiming that "it introduced a string of Jacobethanisms which had not been in the 1611 text", though the words he lists are all well-represented in Cruden's Concordance of the KJB, published in 1737.

The Bible, however translated, has not made a successful transition from a religious to a literary work, though there have been several attempts using the KJB, with titles such as The Reader's Bible and The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature. Though probably unknown today, Arthur Mee's lavishly illustrated Children's Bible, is a fine example of editing, pruning the KJB's 775,000 words down to 250,000. Nor is it likely that the Bible could be taught as an example of Eng. Lit. without there being a demand that other religious works should be admitted for 'balance', though probably nothing would be able to compete with it for narrative interest and comprehensibility.

Other books I can recommend on this topic are In the beginning: The story of the King James Bible by Alister McGrath; The Making of The English Bible by Benson Bobrick; and David Daniell's massive The Bible in English.

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In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage
J.E. Haynes & H. Klehr
Encounter Books, San Francisco, 2003

"We should recognize the issue of communism and Soviet espionage has become an antiquarian backwater. After all, the Cold War is over." With these words, a typical leftish US historian, Ellen Schrecker, recommends that a whole sector of an historical era should be ignored and work on it effectively closed down. "It is time to move on," remarks another academic, using the modern terminology that neither denies nor accepts responsibility, but leaves a mess behind for someone else to clear up. Now historians are, by definition, paddlers up backwaters, investigators of things that are "over" and move in, not move on when invited to examine data never before available. When World War Two ended historians started, not stopped, writing about it, just as an unending stream of books about Napoleon has continued in the nearly two centuries since he was bundled off to St Helena. The idea that, just as enormous quantities of material from Soviet and other archives are being released, work on them should be called off is so ludicrous that it could only have been suggested by those who feel the foundations of their beliefs and attitudes crumbling beneath their feet. However, though public apathy is what they would like, the hard facts, and writers such as Haynes and Klehr, have forced some response.

According to the authors of In Denial, the two examples quoted are not isolated oddities, but characteristic of the mindset of a large, perhaps predominant section of US academic historians. Certainly those they cite, or otherwise mention, whom I list at the end of this review, make up a considerable body. They also must include at least the majority of the editors of The American Historical Review and The Journal of American History which rarely publish articles critical of Communism, or have done for the past 25 years at least. Yet these two must be distinguished from Radical History Review which avowedly "rejects conventional notions of scholarly neutrality and objectivity' (p. 44)". The Encyclopedia of the American Left omits such matters as the large subsidies the Soviet Union transmitted to the American Communists, specifically for subversion (pp 70-72), the evidence that Alger Hiss spied for the Soviet Union (p. 106), indeed that American Communists had anything to do with espionage, even after opened Soviet files had massively documented the fact that this was so. After all, if something is in print in an accepted reference work, as the Encyclopedia is, it becomes history - an interesting example of history being written by the losers, for a change. Why, though, did the editors of the "highly prestigious", 24 volume American National Biography for its entry on the Rosenberg spies commission a Communist academic who then, not surprisingly, brushed aside recent confirmatory evidence of their guilt as "discredited" (p. 104)?

Just as with the denial of its acceptance of Soviet subsidies, there has been a strong attempt by leftish historians (termed by Haynes and Klehr "revisionists") to absolve the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) from the accusation that its policy slavishly followed that of the USSR. In fact, any sign of independence was smacked down by Stalin himself (p. 135) and the leaders who claimed their position by right of election were expelled at his orders from the CPUSA, which published the reason for it in a pamphlet. The Party's endorsement of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact was unconditional and it opposed bitterly all attempts by Roosevelt to help Britain during the year when we stood alone (p. 133). Perhaps insufficient study has been made (I for one am not aware of any) of British Communist resistence to our own war effort during this vital period.

As evidence mounts of subversion and spying by American Communists on behalf of the USSR, some of their defenders have moved from denial to approval, if not always of their actions, certainly of their motives, while any attempt to stop them, let alone punish them "is part and parcel of vile McCarthyism (p. 207)." The Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White (the last two very high White House officials) are now defended as pure idealists who wanted to make the world safer by sharing secrets with the Soviets - a one-way traffic, of course. Longtime defenders of the Rosenbergs "have reacted to the new evidence with a confused mixture of denial, acceptance and defiance (p. 198)". In New York there is even an Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies, appropriately filled by one Joel Kovel who proclaims that the United States is the "enemy of humanity (p. 211)". White is, so to speak, being whitewashed in a forthcoming book by, it is disconcerting to read, someone who has got about as far up as it is possible to get in the directorship of a number of historical institutions (p. 212). Sometimes defenders want to have it both ways - Alger Hiss wasn't guilty (he still has defenders of his innocence, the case for which Haynes and Klehr still have to demolish on pp. 152-162), but if he was, it was only "in technical violation of the law (p. 195)". Other, now forgotten persons - such as Lauchline Currie (as highly placed as Hiss) and Theodore Hall (as important a spy as Klaus Fuchs) - get the same treatment. In case anyone thinks that the authors have limited their examination of American Communist spies to those discussed above, I have added a list of all (or perhaps I should say most) they have at least mentioned.

What is it that motivates people obviously intelligent enough to enter elite universities, pass their degree exams, research and write theses and books and gain tenured positions, and yet defend a political philosophy justifying regimes responsible for millions of deaths, aggressive wars, and a command economy inadequate for their needs? Is it too simple a solution to suggest that these are people so conscious of the the shortcomings of their own society that they idealise another? Thus "I wanted the Soviet Union to be a successful experiment in socialist democracy and so I checked my critical faculties . . . I still need that belief even if the particular vision I embraced has turned to ashes, (p. 42)" explains "post-Marxist feminist" Gerda Lerner, emeritus professor of History at the University of Wisconsin. But, though a refugee from Nazism and disillusioned with Communism, this has "done little to mitigate her loathing for the United States" and she has compared "life in America to living under Adolf Hitler." Incredible though this must sound to most people, it must be taken seriously as evidence of a certain state of mind. Unfortunately we are not given the parallels between her experiences in Austria and in America which might justify it. Others want to make America responsible for all the deaths caused by war since World War II, though including those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki for good measure (p. 49). That the Americans initiated none of these wars seems to be no excuse, nor is the far greater death toll brought about by Communist governments by engineered famines, labour camps and straightforward terror and genocide set against this so-called American guilt.

With nothing left to believe in, the default position of these leftish academics and intellectuals is a sort of nihilistic anti-Americanism. "We need a civil war, class war, whatever, to put an end to US policies that endanger all of us," declared Professor Robin Kelley after September 11th (p. 49). Who is going to fight whom with what is not explained. Presumably another American Civil War, by this logic, will persuade Al Qaida that terrorism is unnecessary, since America will destroy itself. Over here, Scott Lucas, hired to teach "American Studies" at Birmingham University, by his own confession taught "anti-American studies (p. 48)". He has not been alone, of course; anti-Americanism is perhaps America's largest intellectual export - and it is entirely negative. Its missionaries have no substitute to offer; if successful it would leave a moral and political power vacuum which only Islamic fanatics seem willing, if not able, to fill. Is that what those "in denial" want to happen?

The Academics etc:

Leslie Adler, Herbert Aptheker, Rudy Baker, Alexander Bittelman, Ethan Bronner, Michael Brown, Paul Buhle, Nicholas Callather, Michael Carley, Peter Carroll, David Caute, Blanche W. Cook, Bruce Craig, Marion Davis, Michael Denning, Eugene Dennis, Frederick V. Field, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Barbara Foley, Isaac Folkoff, Eric Foner, William Z. Foster, Grover Furr, Dan Georgakas, Marvin Gettleman, J. Arch Getty, Jacob Golos, Robert Griffith, Ruth Hall, Michael J. Heale, Gerald Horne, Jerry F. Hough, Peter M. Irons, Maurice Isserman, Edward Johanningsmeier, Michael Karni, Aaron Katz, Robert D.G. Kelley, Robin Kelly, Bernard Knox, Gabriel Kolke, Robert Korstat, Joel Kovel, Aileen Kraslitor, William Kunstler, Corliss Lamont, Gerda Lerner, Nelson Lichtenstein, Robbie Lieberman, George Lipstitz, John Lowenthal, Scott Lucas, Paul Lyons, Norman Markowitz, Robert Meeropol (ne Rosenberg), Mark Naison, Victor Navasky, Anna Kasten Nelson, Fraser Ottanelli, Herbert Packer, Michael F. Parrish, Thomas Paterson, James Patterson, William Pemberton, William Reuben, Alfred Rieber, Michael Rogin, James Ryan, Roger Sandilands, Bernice Schrank, Ellen Schrecker, Bernard Schuster, Samuel Sills, Gregory Silvermaster, Malcolm Silvers, Mark Solomon, Athan Theoharis, Robert Thurston, Brian Villa, Theodore Von Laue, Alan Wald, Max Weiss.

The Spies:

Iskhak Akmerov, Jacob Albam, Johanna Beker, Joseph Bernstein, Lucy Booker, Raymond Boyer, Harry Bridges, Earl Browder, Morris and Jack Childs, Judith Coplon, Lauchlin Currie, Laurence Duggan, Noel Field, Klaus Fuchs, John Gates, Eve Getsov, Harold Glasser, David and Ruth Greenglass, Gus Hall, Theodore Hall, Maurice Halperin, Alger Hiss, Felix Inslerman, Philip Jaffe, Joseph Katz, Charles Kramer, Harry Magdoff, Carl Marzani, Floyd Miller, Victor Perlo, Jozsef Peters, John Reed, Vincent Reno, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Andrew Roth, Alfred Sarant, Saville Sax, George Silverman, Robert Soblen, Jack and Myra Soble, Henry and Beatrice Spitz, Lincoln Steffens, Arthur and Martha Dodd Stern, William Ludwig Ullmann, Julian Wadleigh, Donald Wheeler, Harry Dexter White, Milton Wolfe, Ilya Wolston, Mark Zborowski, Jane Foster and George Zlatowski.

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The Bourgeois Epoch
Richard F. Hamilton
University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Born to Rule: British Political Lives
Ellis Wasson
Sutton Publishing, 2000.

Like most people, I have never read a word of Marx, but that does not make The Bourgeois Epoch any the less enjoyable, especially since it tells us that not just were his predictions hopelessly wrong (as everyone knows), but that his historical research was negligible and that his analyses of the revolutionary crises of his own time, of which there were quite a number, were inconsistent, not only with each other, but with the actual facts as they happened. The writings which Hamilton analyses are ones written ad hoc between 1848, a year of revolutions and attempted revolutions, and when The Communist Manifesto was publshed, and 1851, when Louis Napoleon ended the French Second Republic with a coup d'etat.

Marx attempted to interpret history as a sort of economic jungle-warfare conducted between distinct classes. There is a sense of unreality here, when it is realised that what we think are great movements, events and landmarks, such as the Renaissance, Reformation, the discovery of the New World, the rise of nations and struggle for domination, even the not so long ago Napoleonic War, Marx regarded as irrelevancies and unimportant surface phenomena compared with what was really going on. And what was that? The aristocratic feudal order was being replaced by the the Bourgeois Epoch, the rule of the bourgeoisie. This, by its capitalist system would propel the rest of the population into a proletariat, which, driven into increasing misery, would revolt against it and take over. The prospect of this was, in the words of The Communist Manifesto, "a spectre that [was] haunting Europe". Except, as Hamilton points out, there was no true proletariat, in the industrial sense of large numbers of factory-workers, on the Continent at the time. Marx and Engels were mesmerised by what was going on in Britain, where there were factories and an industrial proletariat, though not one that had any strong propensity to revolution. France, and Paris in particular, was still at the "artisan" stage, small workshops with a boss and a few employees.

Hamilton remorselessly and elegantly dismantles Marx's whole construction. In the first place, as he reiterates again and again, the bases for his theories are entirely assertions, without any foundations in research. Thus to Marx (and Engels) England, the most developed industrial country, must have had a bourgeois revolution, and since its Civil War ended by deposing and executing its monarch and abolishing the House of Lords and the Church of England establishment, that would be it. There was, of course, the Restoration in 1660, which brought back the monarchy, the House of Lords and the Church of England, and the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, which replaced a Catholic with a Protestant King. These events do not seem to have affected Marx or Engels, and rightly so - for the Civil War was not a bourgeois revolution. "The rich merchant oligarchies in the cities were either cautiously and selfishly neutral or sided with the King as the protector and patron of their political and economic privileges."

If Marx had examined the structure of British governments throughout the next two centuries, he would have noticed to what extent the aristocracy remained in control. This was because they knew the ropes; an actual bourgeois exception, Bright, brought into Gladstone's cabinet, purely as a political makeweight, was a misfit and a disaster. The middle class, in fact, was quite content to have a governing class running the country and leaving them alone to make their money. Perhaps the clearest statement to this effect was made to the French historian Hyppolyte Taine by "one of the greatest industrialists in England". This anonymous tycoon said bluntly: "It is not our aim to overthrow the aristocracy: we are ready to leave the government and high offices in their hands. For we believe, we men of the middle class, that the conduct of national business calls for special men, men born and bred to the work for generations, and who enjoy an independent and commanding situation." This was a state of affairs about as far from class warfare as it is possible to conceive. Moreover, unlike today, there were no sources of career politicians, top civil servants and diplomats (who had to be, of course, fluent in French) other than the richer landed gentry.

This evidence of Marx and Engels' lack of research is matched by similar evidence on their analyses and explanations of (to British readers) the less familiar goings-on on the Continent, mainly in France, which provides rich material in the way of revolutions and coups from 1789 (the bourgeois revolution) to 1851. Hamilton does not give their reactions to the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871, a far bloodier event than any he deals with.

From the tortuous interpretations that Marx is forced into to explain one crisis after another and their different outcomes, numerous categories and subdivisions of his economic classes, once so simple as a mere two ultimate antagonists, bourgeoisie and proletariat, come out into the light. Thus the bourgeoisie proper (or haute bourgeoisie) is subdivided into the "industrial" and "financial" bourgeoisie. But just as the bourgeoisie has its poorer, weaker element, the petty bourgoisie, the proletariat is found to be contaminated by a sort of scum or dross, the lumpenproletariat. These are both categories into which Marx put something that didn't behave as it should. The fate of the petty bourgeoisie is to be degraded by ruthless competition into the proletariat, but before this happens, Marx assigns it a number of different political alliances, according to what he thinks (usually wrongly) happened during each crisis. The lumpenproletariat is a mere receptacle for abuse. The same applies to the peasantry who dwell in "the idiocy of rural life", and for which Marx can find no meaningful role, though it constituted the majority ("the missing majority", notes Hamilton) of the population under consideration, except in Britain.

Then there are the categories to which Marx seems to have been indifferent or even blind. First there were the thousands of bureaucrats who kept the wheels of society and the state turning, more or less regardless of what government there was, as long as they kept their jobs. Then the Army and the Police: these obvious implements of coercion and suppression are not treated as sections of society, or even discussed as mere agents of a ruling class.

Finally there were the intellectuals, "the missing coterie", as Hamilton puts it, of which Marx was preeminently one. Again, these could be subdivided: one the mere tools of some interest-group or class, and another, "free-floating", objective and above the battle. Thus, at a stroke, these generators of ideas, agitators and propagandists are removed, either to be dumped in the class to which they belonged, or absolved from the responsibility of having anyone pay any attention to them and act on their suggestions or conclusions. Since Marx believed that what was going to happen was inevitable, obviously forecasting it would make little difference, nor would explaining it after it had happened. Did he ever ask himself why he bothered to do one or the other? For a most sinister irony was the result.

Unfortunately Marx's faulty reasoning, so unsparingly laid bare in this book, produced a programme sufficiently simple and convincing to promote and excuse the hatred and violence it demanded to bring about its consummation, "the dictatorship of the proletariat", a phrase so obviously meaningless as to be accepted only by the wilfully intellectually blind.

Marx would have been forced to revise his views or radically alter his definition of the bourgeoisie if he had been aware of the facts about the British ruling class painstakingly unearthed by Ellis Wasson, and set out in his Conclusion at the end of his book Born to Rule:

For more than three centuries [from about 1550 to 1900] landed families dominated the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Parliament had been the perfect mechanism to embody and enhance their authority and status. The upper chamber provided both a guarantee that important families would have an automatic place in the legislature and offered a goal to which those on the make could aspire. The lower house ensured that the elite remained alert to interests other than their own. The electoral system, even when actual polls were rare, meant that those born blue-blooded had to complete for places and the door to the inner sanctum of the elite was kept open to the unpedigreed with energy, intelligence and money.

Wasson demonstrates that, for most of our Parliament's existence, it was the larger landowners that occupied seats in both the lower and upper houses and that families could maintain their hold on them for centuries. Although he deals exhaustively with all the elites of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, it is inevitably England whose elite provides the most continuity in the completed United Kingdom. Dividing families into those with more than and less than six members over the period, it is quite apparent that the six-plus category wins easily - 75.4% to 24.6% for the period 1295-1994, with 8,142 MPs from 368 families. That this gives an average of 22 members per family shows that Wasson's division into more or less than 6 is realistic, not contrived: the other category, with 2,658 MPs for 1,119 families, gives less than 2.4 MPs per family. Note that the "successful" (by nearly ten times) were only one-third the number of the "unsuccessful" families.

There is no doubt that the Elite, closely related to the aristocracy, ran the country. They appropriated parliamentary seats almost as of right, with a mixture of deference and bribery securing the allegiance of the usually very small numbers of electors. Eldest sons of peers would regularly sit in the Commons until they succeded their fathers in the Lords. From the mid sixteenth century, it became apparent to the rulers and would-be rulers that a seat in the Commons was an important indicator of their status as well as a possible route to influence, power and riches - and the House of Lords; it signified to others who they were. Perforce the monarch picked his counsellors from them as well as from the Lords.

How exclusive was this Elite? Lawrence Stone, in An Open Elite? emphasised the rarity of penetration. Wasson, who criticises Stone's sampling methods, finds it much less so and that the lower gentry, from which the Elite was ultimately recruited, much more open with money, of course, being the key. Although land was the greatest source of riches - even in Victorian times finance and manufacturing came much lower down - business and trade were not spurned as sources of income by the elite.

Ultimately, beginning with the great Reform Act of 1832, decline set in. Even so, it took a long time and two more reform Acts to end aristocratic dominance. During most of the nineteenth century, aristocrats were in the majority in British Cabinets, and they held the higher posts. The "last aristocratic majority served under the bourgeois Gladstone" in 1892, though until 1914 aristocrats in the Cabinet were still around 40% - and Cabinets were getting larger. But by the next century, with the urban enfranchisement becoming preponderant, the aristocracy's ties to land effectively homogenised it and delivered it to one party, which was, of course, the Conservatives. And these, of course, could not always be in power.

Wasson claims that the British governing class was an elite consisting of surprisingly few families over time that operated and displayed its power through Parliament, and this is what defines it while other "repeated attempts to identify with precision the dynamics of the membership of the ruling class have failed". The fact that there is now no governing class as Wasson defines it, interested in keeping a tight grip on its family seats, may account for the ease with which the powers of Parliament are being eroded today.

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The Keys to Eygpt
Lesley Adkins & Roy Adkins
Perennial, 2001.

Empire of the Plains:Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon
Lesley Adkins
Thomas Dunne Books, 2004.

These two books together give an excellent picture of two pioneers in the decipherment of long-lost writing. In a more exact sense, Jean-Francois Champollion was the true pioneer, first in the field, working alone, in chronic poor health and constant poverty, exacerbated by an unstable political environment and, although achieving world recognition, dying young. Rawlinson consciously aimed to emulate Champollion's achievement in deciphering hieroglyphics, by doing the same for cuneiform. He was, in contrast to Champollion, fortunate in his financial circumstances and in having an iron constitution, sufficiently robust for the environment in which he worked which, though certainly itself politically unstable, was in marked contrast to that back home in Britain, which had a government tolerant to the point of indifference as to what one of its representatives in the Middle East actually did. Both had state-funded jobs and both worked at their problems in what might be called their spare time. The academic world of Champollion was, however, state-dependent; Rawlinson's was not.

The last dated hieroglyphic known was carved in 394 AD. It is surely an indication of the intellectual blind spot of the classical world that the writing and language of Ancient Egypt were available during the heyday of the Roman Empire, but that neither can have been of sufficient interest to its scientists and scholars to provoke study, interpretation and preservation. Alexandria was the cultural capital of the Western world from, say 250 to 50 BC, but there is no evidence that it left a legacy that included the millennia of Egyptian civilization. So all that has survived to help us understand it are some bi- or trilingual inscriptions, the most famous of which is the Rosetta stone. It is always nice to hear again the story of its discovery by the French and its acquisition by the British, and another account of Napoleon's misconceived expedition to Egypt.

Jean-Francois Champollion, who was to decipher hieroglyphics and is the subject of The Keys of Egypt, was born at the end of 1790, probably the most unfortunate time for a Frenchman, liable to be swept up by the conscription just when things were starting to go downhill with the Napoleonic regime. In fact he was so precocious that his connexions got him off time and again from Army service on the grounds that his ability was needed academically. Despite this ability, he had a very difficult time making a living by it. The only jobs to be had were state-funded, and most of the time when he was making his way the state was at war.

During all the years while he was too young to start on the hieroglyphic problem, nobody came anywhere near solving it, and from the account presented here, no one else managed to do so afterwards. It may be possible to except the Englishman Thomas Young, who claimed to have taken "the first step", but if it is granted that Champollion did the same independently and that Young never managed to get any further, there are (despite the blurb on the dustjacket) no rivals to Champollion's right to be regarded as the sole decipherer and translator. For this purpose he had to familiarise himself with Coptic, an obsolete but preserved language, descendant of Old Egyptian, distantly related to the Semitic languages, which of course he was also familiar with. All these languages were originally written down without vowels; we shall never know what the spoken language of the hieroglyphics sounded like.

The early notions about hieroglyphics, derived from inscriptions on monuments transported to Rome or from other sources, were fanciful to the point of absurdity, even to linking them to Chinese. Oddly, the Chinese cartouche format for name stamps did suggest a correct hypothesis for their presence amongst the hieroglyphics - that they contained royal or sacred names, leading to the key that began the discovery by revealing that some symbols were alphabetical and that others, which were limited in number, therefore had auxiliary functions. The authors give little in the way of description of the technical follow-up to this.

All of Champollion's work to accomplish this was conducted under difficulties; always in poverty, often in poor health, both of which by weakening his constitution can only have contributed to his early death at 41, in 1832. He was fortunate in having a very supportive elder brother, Jacques-Joseph, who outlived him, dying in 1867, aged 89, and who was considerably luckier career-wise than Jean-Francois. Neither seem to have been able to keep their heads down politically, becoming strong Bonapartists just as Napoleon's cause was in decline. Unfortunately Grenoble (intriguing to find this is a worn down form of Gratianopolis) where they were living, was on Napoleon's triumphal route from Elba to Paris in 1815. Not only did it rally to Napoleon but stayed loyal to him after Waterloo; it even had a brief rebellion against the Bourbons, in which both brothers were implicated and were lucky enough only to be condemned to a brief exile to their small native town, Figeac, as a penalty.

Both mananged to retrieve their positions and Champollion finally, working of course in his spare time, solved the problem completely in 1822. Even after his recognition, which in many quarters was extremely grudging, his work was impeded by his having to undertake academic duties. As for the work itself, he was really the only person who could copy down and read with fluency the inscriptions and papyri he had to visit. Not only was this exhausting but it was constantly being interrupted by persons whose status he had to defer to by explaining what he was doing. Life might well have been easier for him had he accepted a professorial chair in Turin. One odd feature of his work was that the time scale it revealed clashed with that of the Bible, an incompatibility that not even the academic world, let alone the Church, was ready for. He did in the end gain Bourbon favour through an aristocratic patron and was able to organize and lead an expedition to Egypt, where he seems to have travelled everywhere possible (as far as the 2nd Cataract) and worked there like a demon from August 1828 to January 1830. Debilitating though this was, it seems more likely that it was the uncongenial climate and living conditions of Paris to which he returned that killed him.

Rawlinson's task, in Persia and Mesopotamia (now Iran and Iraq) was rather different from Champollion's. The somewhat mind-boggling evolution of cuneiform, where a single syllable (say ur) could be written with eight different ideograms, instead of being rationalised into one, and its use for different languages, rather as Latin script is today, is given a chapter of its own in Lesley Adkins' Empires of the Plain. Purists might regard Old Persian cuneiform as somewhat spurious, since it was invented by the imperial will of Darius the First, came close to being an alphabet and though found in inscriptions, rarely appeared on clay tablets, the medium for common writing. In fact, according to the entry in my 1929 Enclyclopaedia Britannica, such clay tablets were merely for the masons to transcribe. Old Persian cuneiform was, however, invaluable as a starting point for decoding more complex writing in other languages, the most fruitful example being the large and long trilingual one cut high up in the rock face at Bisitun, forever to be associated with Henry Creswicke Rawlinson. It had been made purposely inaccessible by the rock below it being cut away after it was finished, to avoid its being desecrated, though rendering its actually being read impossible without considerable risk to life, triumphantly surmounted by Rawlinson's nerve and climbing skill, dramatically described by Lesley Adkins in the opening pages of her book. There is no discussion of the purpose of these inscriptions, which no one could, in practical terms, get close enough to read (the symbols are only an inch or so high) and only a scribal elite could read anyway. Were they set up just for gods to read, or for posterity?

Rawlinson was born in 1810 and went to India as an East Indian Company cadet in 1827. He seems to have been highly qualified, physically and intellectually, to flourish there, excelling in sport and easily passing language exams but was moved to the periphery of Eastern affairs, first to Persia, where he trained the Shah's troops and encountered the antiquities, including those at Bisitun, which directed his life's interest, and finally at his own wish, to Baghdad, in the Ottoman Empire, perhaps the best place to keep in touch with the excavations being carried out by Layard and others, and with Bisitun, just over the border.

Military activity, though not his prime concern, was far from absent. As the British Resident he played a major part in the defence of Kandahar in 1840 - if Nott, its garrison commander, had been appointed to Kabul instead of Elphinstone, the disaster that was the First Afghan War would almost certainly have been avoided. As it was, Nott rejected orders from Elphinstone in Kabul to evacuate Kandahar and successfully defended it, while Ghazni negotiated an evacuation on terms which were violated and its garrison (including Nicholson, as detailed in Soldier Sahibs) harshly treated as prisoners. Rawlinson so impressed the Viceroy, Lord Ellenborough, that he offered him a plum job as Resident in Nepal, but Rawlinson, explaining "to the astonishment of my friends," that he wanted to continue his studies in cuneiform, which had been in abeyance during his three years in Afghanistan, took the lower-paid post of Political Agent in Turkish Arabia, based in Baghdad. This was certainly a backwater and in a ruinous state, with few remnants of its past glory. For some reason which is not made clear, although he had now been away from England for 15 or 16 years, he was not given leave to return there until 1849.

The long career of Rawlinson as inscription transcriber and translator now began in earnest, for his official duties do not seem to have been that onerous and there was also time for hunting. He became acquainted with Layard who, though kept very short of money and official sanction by Canning, the Ambassador at Constantinople, was digging up ruins, some with libraries of clay tablets. Correctly starting with the Old Persian inscriptions from Bisitun and elsewhere, Rawlinson could, after the symbols had been identified from correctly giving them values derived from proper names, use Sanskrit grammar to help translate them. By 1846, this research was ready for publication by the Royal Asiatic Society, though it got lost in transmission for a time in Constantinople. It sounds an impressive and lavishly produced work of 71 pages with eight fold-out sheets of lithographs of the monument, the sculptures and the cuneiform inscriptions at Bisitun.

It would be unjust not to mention other scholars back in Europe who were also attempting to decipher cuneiform, though with little material at their disposal until Rawlinson supplied it. In this, Rawlinson's situation differed markedly from Champollion's, who never had any real competitors. For example, as far back as 1802, before Rawlinson was born, Grotefend in Gottingen had begun to decode an inscription reported from Persepolis, extracting values for signs from presumed royal names. Much was faulty and progress lagged until Rawlinson came up with the materials and the mind to match. Perhaps the most unfortunate of the home workers was the Irish Anglican clergyman Hincks, poor and isolated in the back of beyond, and who, though probably Rawlinson's intellectual equal, lacked his resources and connections while depending on him for the texts to decipher. His photograph, giving him an almost grotesque appearance, compounds this negative impression of him. Unsurprisingly, relations between the two were prickly, though probably mutually stimulatory. Layard, in his Nineveh and Babylon (1867), pays him a generous obituary tribute. Another worker with a grievance was Hormuzd Rassam, a Christian Arab who worked as an archaeological assistant to Layard and Rawlinson and ended his days in England in neglect.

When he at last managed to get leave, after twenty-two years in the East, Rawlinson arrived in England as a scholarly and social celebrity, with his lectures packed, and even chaired by Prince Albert. He seems to have thoroughly enjoyed himself. After two years he returned to Baghdad; he had hoped that he would have been made Minister to Teheran, but instead someone quite unsuitable was appointed whose alienation of the Shah and his Prime Minister may have brought about an unnecessary war between Persia and Britain. But in 1855, after a fall from his horse and a return to England, Rawlinson retired from the East India Company, which at that time still governed India and appointed its representatives. In 1859, after a stint as an MP, he was appointed Envoy to Persia, but resigned the next year in disgust when, contravening the proviso he made when taking it, the post was removed from the authority of the India Office to the Foreign Office.

In 1862, at 52, he at last married and fathered two sons, both of whom became distinguished soldiers, though Adkins, apart from a mention of their activities as young men in India, gives no account of their careers. That the elder, Harry, became the general that delivered the knock-out blows to the German Army in 1918 surely deserved a few lines, while the younger, Alfred (Toby) seems to have had an enjoyable time in the Near and Middle East during and after World War I, his experiences just before and after its end being lightheartedly recounted in his Adventures in the Near East, 1918-1922, a "good read" I can thoroughly recommend.

Rawlinson himself, hard-hit by the death in 1889 of his wife Louisa, 23 years his junior, died in 1895. A Memoir by his brother was published in 1898.

And what about cuneiform itself, so laboriously deciphered? "There is a desperate need for basic and intermediate books about cuneiform," writes Dr. Adkins plaintively, introducing her list of recommended reading. It would be churlish to ask, "To read what?" The Epic of Gilgamesh is the only work I know of that's been published, and that in translation by Penguin Classics. Obviously field-workers (such as Lesley and her husband Roy) should be able to learn to read the various languages that were written in it and I wonder how they manage to do it if they depend on the rather unsatisfactory manuals listed, most out of print. Do the academic presses have cuneiform fonts? Are there computerised versions? There were, it is true, originally around 1200 separate signs, dropping to around 600, but this does not seem an insuperable number, especially when compared to Chinese. Perhaps the original type for both Old Persian and Akkadian cut for Rawlinson by Harrison & Co. to the design of Edwin Norris in 1846-7 is still available for modern typography; "they are," said Rawlinson, "remarkable instances of the ingenuity, and I may add taste, of a British printer."

The chapter on cuneiform by C.B.F. Walker in J.T. Hooker, Reading the Past, Guild Publishing, 1990 is informative, comprehensive and straightforward. Likewise is Layard, in the Introduction to his Nineveh and Babylon, mentioned above, and Johannes Friedrich, Extinct Languages (1957/1989). The Conquest of Assyria by Mogens Trolle Larsen brings in practically all the dramatis personae, all given equal treatment.

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As regular Samizdata readers will know, many of the authors here have been enthralled by the development of a nascent commercial space flight industry, given a vital kick-start by the X-Prize and demonstrated in thrilling fashion by Bert Rutan's Space Ship One.

As I said at the time, the cultural Luddites in our midst will mock, but ventures like this inspire the open-minded, scientifically curious and plain ornery speed freaks like yours truly. They show that the boundaries we accept as given are anything but. The demonstration that private enterprise can produce real results in space flight is an important one, and I reckon that a growing competitive market in this area should help bring long-term costs down and free the industry from the dead hand of NASA and other state institutions with multi-billion budgets and limited visions.

In the years leading up to the first phase of manned space flight, there was a good deal of fiction pointing to some of the ideas and developments which later translated into fact. Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein and Poul Anderson are among those who spring to mind. But I had not come across a lot of recent fiction (ie, written in the past 20 years) which had played with ideas of how space flight would be borne on the wings of buccaneering free market capitalism. Well, in the past couple of years, I came across two good books, one I regard as solid, if perhaps a little wooden in its style, and another which simply blew me away with its sweep, drama and all-round believability. The first is Firestar, by Michael Flynn and the second, and in my view better, book, is Kings of the High Frontier, by Victor Koman. The Koman book is my favourite.

What is depressing, given the present amount of crud sold in bookshops these days, is that Koman's book is not easily available. The publishers thought fit to produce a small run. Considering the revival of interest in space flight which I detect at the moment, and the deeds of the SSI flight, this book deserves a bigger audience. I have contacted the publishers to make this very point. Perhaps if they don't want to produce more, then another publisher with more flair will take up the challenge. Screw Harry Potter and nonsense about wizards - this is the real stuff of real, achievable adventure.

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The nuances of Japan's langauge can be found even in the title of this book, as Hagakure can be rendered as 'hidden leaves' or 'hidden by the leaves'. But this collection of 300 musings and anecdotes, of the 1,300 taken down from the retired samurai retainer Yamamoto Tsuenetono (1659-1719) are close enough to give the Western reader a taste of the ethical ideas, philosophy and moral ideas of the Japanese samurai class.

In 1660 the Shogun prohibited the practice of tsuifuku where a retainer committed suicide at the death of his master. So when Yamamoto's Master died, he retired to a Buddist monastary, and younger samurai gathered to hear his views. They were transcribed, and these were collected as a book, some excerpts of which can be read here.

They are, to say the least, radically different to anything in the Western moral tradition. This is not a book of essays, many of the precepts are but a paragraph in length, and deal with the ways of the samurai. What preoccupied them was war and death, and the correct way to inflict and recieve them. It is, to our eyes, a gruesome code.

The samurai were the warriors who served their Lords, the daimyo, who were the real rulers of Japan, under the Shoguns and Emperors. Yamamoto Tsuentono devotes much of his work to the conduct and behavior of the samurai retainers. He extolls an ideal of absolute unquestioning obedience; to me it seems like voluntary slavery. And death, of course, is the ideal. The retainer should consider himself as a dead man walking, and should also be ready to die even at his own hand, should his Master require it of him.

Nakano Jin'emon constantly said, "A person who serves when treated kindly by the master is not a retainer. But a person who serves when the master is being heartless and unreasonable is a retainer. You should understand this principal well."

But of course, the main business of the samurai was to inflict death, and this they did on a constant basis. The 'Way of the Samurai' is a military code, designed to discipline men into serving as soliders in a hostile, pre-technological environment. Notions of class and honour evolved into concepts which overpowered other sentiments. Yamamoto scorns women and the 'lower classes' when he thinks of them at all. For him, life is death, service is freedom, and killing is love.

This is an important document for the historian who turns to look at Japan. This moral code enabled the conquest of Japan and the destruction of its original inhabitants, over 2,000 years ago, and seems to have evolved until the end of the pre-technological age. As new precepts and ideas emerged in this culture, they survived by winning victory, or were killed in battle, so a form of social Darwinism dominated. For the Japanese were constantly fighting each other.

One meme that did survive was the need to be adaptable to new military ideas. So when the West impinged on the Japanese culture with a decisive technological edge in the 1850's, the Japanese ruling class embraced the new concepts quite quickly, and within 50 years had totally discarded their old techniques for new. However, they had not changed their ideas on how wars should be fought- they felt that the old ethical considerations and ideas of valour
and honour were quite adequate for the new age.

This is why the brutal ideas of the Hagakure survived into the 20th century. In reading this book, one can see the ideas of the old samurai in full view against the might of Western industrial power. But it was decisively defeated by the US with their own ethical code, and since then, the Japanese have eschewed war for other pursuits. A reading of the Hagakure is enough to remind any reader that this is something we should all be thankful for.

Concerning martial valour, merit lies more in dying for one's master then in striking down the enemy.

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Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth
Heidi Postlewait, Kenneth Cain and Andrew Thomson
Miramax Books, 2004

It is a shame that many readers will dismiss this book as outlandish or flippant simply because of its, uh, provocative title. Much of the press the book has received has been related to the "expose" angle of the book, with its promise of seamy tales of corruption, incompetence, sexual license and even drug abuse by UN officials. This is also a shame, because the book is so much more than an expose. If you have already made up your mind that the UN is hopeless, this is NOT the book to pick up in the hopes of gloating over UN policy failures in Rwanda, Bosnia and Haiti. Instead, Emergency Sex is an incredibly moving book and an addictive read, documenting tragedy, love, heartbreak, adventure and the friendship of the three co-authors.

The authors take turns telling the narrative, but their gifted writing meshes together so seamlessly that one often forgets whose turn it is to develop the story further. The authors met in Cambodia in the early '90s, as part of a team that was monitoring the election there. Heidi joined the UN after leaving her husband, a successful Manhattan modeling agent, in search of adventure. Ken, youngest of the trio, hires into the UN as an attorney after graduating from Harvard Law School - he is the book's most intriguing character, vacillating between cynicism and naivete, at times brutally critical of the UN but at the same time remaining on board with the program. And finally there is Andrew, the New Zealand-born doctor who went to work at a Red Cross hospital in Phnom Penh after meeting a survivor of the Khmer Rouge holocaust while in med school.

As it turns out, the Cambodian election is cake - the work is easy and uneventful, the election successful - and the trio, emboldened by the experience, move on to other peacekeeping assignments, where their fortunes change dramatically. Heidi and Ken go to Somalia and come under siege, Andrew goes to Haiti where he is a helpless and frustrated observer in the face of Haitian macoute warlords. When Heidi and Ken lose a colleague in Mogadishu, their disenchantment grows.

The authors, especially Ken, offer critiques of UN policy along the way. At times this is a matter of expressing subtle frustrations over bureaucratic pettiness, but at times much more substantive:

On April 6, 1994, one week after US forces withdrew from Somalia, a plane carrying the president of Rwanda was shot down over Kigali and massacres of Tutsis and moderate Hutus began within half an hour. UN peacekeepers withdrew while a radical Hutu militia, the interahamwe, engaged in an orgy of killing over ninety days at a rate three times that of the Holocaust ... when it was over, 800,000 had been slaughtered. Having failed to intervene in genocide on the ground for the second time in two years, the UN again choose to prosecute it in court instead, creating the second war crimes tribunal since Nuremberg.

In Bosnia, where the UN enabled genocide by declaring Srebrenica a "safe zone" for Bosnian muslims and then refusing to defend the city once Milosevic called their bluff, soft-spoken and taciturn Andrew makes perhaps the most vitriolic indictment of UN policy in the whole book:

One day someone at UNHQ will commission an official report about this disaster, replete with mea culpas and lessons learned. But for me there's only one lesson and it's staring right at me every day as I eat lunch: If blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run. Or else get weapons. Your lives are worth so much less than theirs. I learned that the day we were evacuated from Haiti.

But the book is challenging and heartrending more than it is overtly political. The most challenging moments in the book come as Dr. Andrew exhumes a mass grave in Rwanda, serving as the head of a UN team that is examining the site for forensic evidence to be used at the upcoming genocide trial. At this site, several thousand Tutsi women and children had crammed into a church, having been promised safe haven there by the local Hutu governor. Once the church was full, the Hutu militants locked the door, killing the entire congregation over the course of several days and burying their remains in a mass grave outside.

The sight of the church trashed and splattered with blood finally shakes the once-indefatigable Andrew, a deeply religious man:

After many hours I decide God was here, maybe not far above where I'm sitting now, watching and listening. He heard all the desperate prayers, from the kids and the half-dead women, from the believers, the doubters and the nonbelievers. Because everyone was praying for something, if only a quick death, facing a machete through the head.

And God just pissed all those prayers back down to earch, leaving everyone to die. This can't be the God I prayed to as a missionary kid, or at the communion rail as a medical student. This was a pitiless stranger and to pray to him up here in this bell tower would be absurd.

Meanwhile, Andrew must cope with a cynical local priest, who has been left in charge of what is left of the church grounds. The priest, seeing UN presence and UN money, is desperately trying to turn a profit from the examiners' presence, first insisting that the UN crew pay rent (in cash, to the priest himself, of course) then conjuring up an elaborate idea to turn the church itself into an extravagant memorial. Then, finally, the doctor has seen enough:

From near the bottom of the grave, we pull out the body of a young male dressed in full priest's regalia. If this is the man we've heard about, he was with the people in the church, comforting the soon to be dead and refusing offers to be evacuated by boat at night to safety across [Lake Kivu.] Instead he chose to stay until the end. We treat him tenderly as we strip the body, wash the brilliantly colored robes, and dry them in the sun. Two priests, same church. One pays with his life, the other wants to be paid for the exhumation. The wrong man is in that body bag.

But throughout it all, while they face mortal peril, unearth the most horrifying of atrocities and do a slow burn over UN blundering, they remain focused, hopeful, and loyal to each other. And the book has more than its share of uplifting, tender and even humorous moments. A group of Somalian teens ask Heidi whether she knows Bob Marley, the one cassette tape in the whole town. When she claims jokingly that she does, they ask whether she has, you know, made love to Bob Marley.

In the end, all three return to private life, all with mixed emotions about how they spent their youths. Andrew returns to Cambodia and builds a home on the Mekong River; Heidi takes an office job at the UN headquarters; and Cain is now a writer / scholar.

This is a brilliant book, one of the best you will read this year. That Kofi Annan apparently wanted the book suppressed is disappointing -- and really, apart from the drug and sex revelations, there is little in this book apart from routine criticism of UN policy. Peacekeeping missions failed in the Balkans and in Somalia? We already knew that. The UN would not stand up to even the most amateurish militants in Rwanda, standing by while slaughter raged? We already knew that. Heck, even Kofi Annan has admitted these things.

Emergency Sex is a tremendously challenging, but hugely rewarding book, and one that people of all ideological persuasions will be able to appreciate, because it is funny, sincere, and brutally, devastatingly honest. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

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Useful Idiots
Mona Charen
Regnery, 2003

It must have struck many people besides myself that anti-Americanism, so much a world-wide sentiment and problem, is, to an extent it is hard to quantify, an American export. No nation, surely, has produced such a large volume of self-criticism, proceeding through self-denigration to self-hatred. Is it surprising that the rest of the world has listened to, copied, and amplified the message? Yet it was not always so; indeed Americans fought both World Wars and the Korean War with little dissent. Television may have been the ultimate morale-breaker in the Vietnam War, but why did those responsible use it for this purpose, even turning good news into bad, as with the crushing of the Vietcong "Tet offensive"? This book doesn't give the motivations, just the facts.

"Lenin is credited with the prediction that liberals and other weak-minded souls in the West could be relied upon to be 'useful idiots' as far as the Soviet Union was concerned," states the author and I have been unable (like her, I suppose) to find any source for Lenin's insight in the handful of books of quotations I have consulted; it would be interesting to know to whom it was first contemptuously applied. If the function of a useful idiot is to support a cause detrimental to his best interests, then the definition is perhaps a little imprecise, for few, if any, of the useful idiots described in this book have received their come-uppance. But then, their cause didn't triumph. Or didn't where they lived; elsewhere, it was a different matter.

For most of the book Communism was the cause to which the useful idiots gave aid and comfort and here the author might be accused of making the category rather too inclusive, from fainthearted opponents to blatant advocates. The study also is confined almost entirely to America, so that many, perhaps most, names will be unfamiliar to readers elsewhere. They must also get used to the nomenclature; it may jar that "liberal" does service for an inclusive left, perhaps because the name has no historical political ancestry in the US, and socialism has never been successfully sold to the working class, or otherwise become an OK word.

Even to those most eager for its fall, the collapse of Communism came as a surprise. Rather as one who, pushing hard at a door, falls flat on his face when it is suddenly opened, western leaders seemed more disconcerted than overjoyed, worried at the sudden fragmentation of their giant opponent. As for the leftist intellectuals, some tended to claim that this proved the USSR had never been a menace (Strobe Tallbott) and that it certainly wasn't the US that was responsible for ending the Cold War (Frances Fitzgerald) - though former top Soviet officials have said they thought it, and Reagan's policy in particular, was (p. 116). Others said that everyone had really been united against Communism all the time: "One of the greatest sources of our strength throughout the Cold War," declared President Clinton in 1997, "was a bipartisan foreign policy . . . politics stopped at the water's edge (p. 10)." From someone who had crossed the water's edge to avoid the draft, this was pretty cool. As well as being, of course, completely untrue.

In fact the national consensus against Communism lasted into the sixties, perhaps being a little dented by distaste for Senator McCarthy's investigative methods and then by Fidel Castro's gradual revelation of himself as a Communist, which could, of course, be ascribed by his defenders to American "hostility". Nixon and Kennedy competed with each other to take a hard line against Communism, Kennedy giving the famous pledge at his Inauguration in 1961 that the US would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to ensure the survival and success of liberty (p. 24)." It was Kennedy, making good his word, that took America into Vietnam, Johnson his successor who mismanaged both war and diplomacy into a hopeless stalemate and Nixon who finally resolved matters as best he could. He got no thanks for this and the Watergate scandal empowered the mischief-making propensities of the media. It was not impossible now for a journalist to imagine that with a little luck, a lot of hard work, and a cooperative judiciary, he could destroy a president. This was quite a subversive baton to pack into his knapsack. There was no baton for the preservation of the status quo.

It was during the Vietnam War that the useful idiots increasingly had their impact and "that the consensus against Communist expansion was permanently shattered . . . American liberals - as distinguished from the hard Left - became not just neutral about Communist expansion, but contemptuous of cold warriors (p. 28)." Unfortunately liberals included most academics and much of the media. Because conscription (the draft in US parlance) was in operation and students were subject to it, it was not difficult to persuade them that the war was immoral as well as dangerous (when the draft was abolished, student protest ceased).

After 1968, when the Republicans took over the Government, the Democratic Party as a whole could, and did, turn against the War, with its leaders becoming defeatists, followed, if not led, by a defeatist media, willing to put the worst construction on every military episode and certainly not doing anything to keep up the morale of the fighting soldiers, most of whom, like most of the country (as polls howed) were willing to fight until victory was gained. Although Chasen names several writers, journalists and others - Susan Sontag, Ramsay Clark, Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Mary McCarthy, Frances Fitzgerald, Jonathan Schell - it was probably the mass of run of the mill journalists that did the damage.

There had now developed a vociferous and influential left-wing constituency that, far from being worried about an American and South Vietnamese defeat, strongly desired the Communists to win. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, one of the most distinguished Democrat senators lamented: "I do not want to see the Democratic Party become a party which gives any aid and comfort to people who applaud Vietcong victories or wave Vietcong flags", now standard behaviour at anti-war rallies. "But Jackson's was a lonely voice in the Democratic Party (p. 42)". After American forces had been withdrawn, the Democrat dominated Congress refused all aid to South Vietnam; "Edward Kennedy [brother of the dead President] mobilized a 43-38 Senate vote to forbid the expenditure . . . it needed to survive (p. 49)".

The antiwar consensus in the Democratic party was sufficiently strong for "John Kerry, tall, handsome and highly ambitious" to reassess his attitude and jump on its bandwagon, though perhaps without looking very carefully at the "veterans" he was associated with, whose lurid stories of atrocities, which he then retailed, have never been confirmed while some have been falsified; the account here of his political debut (pp. 44-46) and his anti-SDI activities (p. 164) long predates, of course, his presidential bid.

In the aftermath of the North's victory and occupation of South Vietnam (remnants of the local Vietcong guerillas, crushed during the Tet Offensive, were marginalised) a few of the antiwar activists had misgivings as "Boat People" fled the unified country, and large numbers (between 200,000 and 1,000,000) of the defeated or liberated, including discontented Vietcong, were sent to "re-education camps", while some 65,000 were executed (p. 49). Joan Baez, the Quaker pacifist singer, a rally fixture, appealed to 350 activists for signatures to a very moderate appeal to the North Vietnamese - she got 83, and a large volume of abuse. Jane Fonda, her "particular hope", refused: "I worry about the effects of what you are doing," she replied; it might encourage people "who continue to believe that Communism is worse than death (p. 53)."

Thus the liberal left saw no reason to change its mind and, in a sense, have kept it unrepentedly in Vietnam War mode ever since. It remained so even after the horrendous genocide by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, something that Democrat Congressmen (Carr, Dodd and Downey) and Sydney Schanberg, a journalist on the spot who later actually witnessed it, denied could ever happen. And when it did, their explanation was simple: the US bombing had driven the Khmer Rouge crazy, which accounted for their behaviour more than one and a half years after it had stopped! In fact, the Khmer Rouge were attempting to imitate Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward - but this time it was going to work. William Shawcross is one of the few to retract the "America started it" excuse for their atrocities, which he made in his book, Sideshow.

The election of Democrat Jimmy Carter as President in 1976 set the seal on near-defeatism as a United States policy. In the four years of his presidency Communist regimes were established in Cambodia, Laos, South Yemen, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Grenada, Nicaragua and Afghanistan (not the Soviet occupation), all, needless to say, undemocratically. All these he seems to have accepted with resignation until he was shocked by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. This was just after he had seen his attempt to show his disapproval of the Shah result in the installation of a rabidly anti-American Islamic regime in Iran.

This Communist advance was not exactly the "domino effect" the US had feared, which was probably something like Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, in that order of risk. But the catalogue is bad enough, and though the misery entailed in the imposition and maintenance of Communist rule cannot be held as directly the responsibility of the United States, even in the case of the first two, its acceptance of defeat in Vietnam, and its subsequent withdrawal and passivity, encouraged Communist insurgency worldwide. "The fact is," said President Carter's Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, as he contemplated the mess, "we can no more stop change than Canute could still the waters (p. 82)." Interfering to prevent Communist takeovers would only make things worse. With these signals to go by, the USSR could assume it was being given carte blanche, and it took it with both hands (pp. 84-85). Besides, what political and economic alternatives did America offer? Left-liberal intellectuals were not exactly champions of laissez-faire capitalism; their sophisticated view was that the US and USSR were in a state of "convergence". The eminent economists Paul Samuelson, Lester Thurow and John Kenneth Galbraith, for that matter, were all confident that the Soviet system was delivering as well and as much as that of the United States (pp. 104-105).

Chapter Four gives an account of the long love-affair between American left-wing writers, artists, journalists and intellectuals and the USSR, from its beginning right up to the end and from Lenin to Gorbachev. Much of this is the usual chilling stuff, though that does not mean it is necessarily familiar. Just one grim story: the hope of Paul Robeson, the famous black singer, that Communism would abolish racism led him, as he confessed, to do nothing to save his friend Feffer the poet from Stalin's anti-Jewish persecution (p. 95). On the other hand it is almost amusing to discover how Andropov was built up into a sympathetic figure and, when he died, hopes were raised about his successor, Chernenko. Of course, such positive assessments paled in comparison with the ecstasy that greeted the arrival of Gorbachev and made Time, in 1990, name him Man of the Decade, though he had been around for less than four years. The notion of giving the title to Reagan, who in fact deserved it, would have been inconceivable.

Chapter Five is of "Fear and Trembling": the United States seems to have started seriously worrying about the bomb ten to fifteen years after we did. In fact, however, this was the left-liberal consensus worrying about Ronald Reagan, whose term as President started in 1981 and who was taking up a completely different attitude from the last three Presidents - he "not only gave every indication of wanting to fight the Cold War; he also seemed to think the West would win it (p. 120)." To do so, Reagan had to fight the antinuclear activists and most of the Democratic Party, as well as the Russians, from the installation in Europe of Pershing missiles in response to the SS-20s deployed by the Soviets, to his floating of the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) as a feasible project. Dubbed "Star Wars", this was opposed as something which wouldn't work but would upset the Russians, presumably because they would think it could - reasonably so, in fact, because they had something rather like it, built in contravention of treaty agreements, defending Moscow. That Reagan won through we know from other sources was due to his own persistence, despite the opposition of his opponents, but also the misgivings of some of his own advisers.

Leaving the main arena, Chasen proceeds in Chapter 6, "Each New Communist is Different" to investigate the reactions of "political pilgrims" (the phrase is taken from Paul Hollander's book of that title) to various Communist utopias. Perhaps the most unbelievable is Robert Scheer's endorsement of North Korea, though admittedly as long ago as 1970 (p. 172). However, the section on Cuba and Castro (pp. 173-187) must run it a close second. The reports on the regime, for and against, are so incompatible that either one or other must be incredible; Chasen naturally has a long list of enthusiastic visitors whom she would classify as useful idiots and opposes them by others who report what a run-down, oppressive place Cuba is. Che Guevara, icon on a million sweatshirts, caused I.F. Stone, after meeting him to gush that "he looked like a cross between a faun and a Sunday school print of Jesus [and in him] one felt a desire to heal and pity for suffering". Would he and Guevara's many other admirers have changed their minds if they knew that in his will he praised the "extremely useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless and cold killing machines (p. 176)"? Or if they knew of the deeds that matched these words? How Janet Reno, with President Clinton's acquiescence, returned the five year old Elian Gonzalez to Cuba and how questionable the process was, is recounted at length (pp. 236 - 245). That was in 2000 - has anyone followed up how the little boy is getting on?

When a Communist coup ejected the democratically elected government of the small Caribbean island of Grenada in 1979 and a thousand Cuban troops came to stay, there was, of course, no US reaction. However, four years later, when the economy had been ruined (as usual), one Communist faction had murdered and replaced the other as the government, there was general chaos and shooting in the streets and there were 750 American medical students on the island (why?), President Reagan ordered in the marines who tided up the place in short order. Does one need to say that critics at home (the usual suspects) and abroad sounded off? Comparisons were made with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (Ted Weiss) and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (New York Times) and Poland (Carl Levin). The Grenadians and the medical students were, of course, relieved and delighted. However, it all died down and perhaps not one person in a million in America knows the state of affairs in Grenada today.

Nicaragua and, by extension, Central America, was much less a flash in the pan. As in Iran, President Carter hoped that the destabilization of an autocrat, in the case of Nicaragua, Somoza (our sonofabitch, as a previous President had defined him) would result in the dawn of a new age of human rights. The Sandinistas, Communists who replaced him as a result, were just as bad in a different way. Despite generous funding by the Carter administration to start them off, the Sandinistas resolutely turned away from the US and with Cuban and East European help, built up an army of 75,000, larger than that of Mexico. All this met with the approval of the American liberal left (too many to list again here), some, such as Warren Christopher, even members of the Carter administration itself, others like Tom Harkin, Matthew Martinez, Patrick Leahy, Claiborne Pell and Edward Kennedy, Democrats in Congress. A blind eye was turned to the persecution of opponents and minorities such as the Moravian and Meskito Christians and, because of an alliance with the PLO, the Jewish community. Radio stations were closed, and strict censorship imposed on the main newspaper La Prensa, which had opposed Somoza. A guerilla opposition, the Contras, emerged, some of whose members had been Sandinistas; despite President Reagan's pleas, the Democrat-dominated Congress refused them even non-military aid, resulting in the President's attempting a clandestine method of helping them which came badly unstuck. The happy ending came unexpectedly in 1990: the Sandinistas deceived themselves into believing that a submissive meant a supportive population, called an election and lost it, hampered from rigging it because large numbers of observers flooded into the country to monitor it. Some were American left-liberals, who had come to celebrate a Sandinista victory and found that things had gone seriously wrong - "meaning the opposite", as the right-wing gadfly journalist P.J. O'Rourke, who witnessed their discomfiture, mordantly put it. Charen tells us that, as of writing, Nicaragua remains free and democratic.

And after the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union - what? Our useful idiots can still be depended upon to find something to praise in Cuba, and to applaud the decision to deport a five year old there (the picture of his siezure at gun-point "warmed my heart" said New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman). But China? But does anyone there truly believe in Communism? Vietnam? North Korea?

But why bother with these when there is 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq? From the same crowd came the same response to the destruction of the Twin Towers: America was much worse: "The US has taken the lives of literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocents, most of them children . . . " (Joel Rogers), "The US is is a leading terrorist state" (Noam Chomsky). It seemed that every violent death anywhere was America's responsibility, plus "the policies that are a leading factor in the death of maybe a million civilians in Iraq and maybe half a million children" (Chomsky again, before Iraq War II, of course). However, at least one thing seems to be clear: we are not being asked to adopt, or even approve of, Muslim fundamentalist beliefs. There was no question of Susan Sontag donning a burqua. But then, it would be doubtful if she would have been happy writing to order in Ho Chi Minh City, or have settled down in an artists' and writers' colony in Moscow. It was not that there was anything to approve about Islam, with its bigotry about women, abortion and homosexuality, to mention just three of the sacred cows of the liberal left. America, however, was to blame for having provoked the resentment of these people. It had let the genie out of the bottle. There was nothing one could - or should - do about the genie, but it was in order to bash the bottle opener.

Open societies - and pace our useful idiots, the United States is probably the most open in the world - permit almost unrestrained abuse of anyone by anyone. In fact in the US anyone can tell lies about a public figure, who is unprotected by the libel laws unless he can prove malice was the motivation for them. Under these circumstances, and understandably, it is easier to attack the near at home than the far away, the known than the obscure, the rectifiable local abuse rather than the distant atrocity. Add to this that the comfortable get bored, the young rebel, minorities are informed of their grievances and women ask "Why can't I be more like a man?" Most people are content or look for opportunities to improve their lot; a very few look to a political solution. Unlike many other countries and societies, the United States has no one else to blame but itself if there is anything wrong with it. Is this, in the end, why so many of its elite have turned against it?

Naming Names

On my way through the book I have noted the names, no doubt missing some, of the "useful idiots" - more than 250 in all - so why not set them down, in alphabetical order, for easy reference? Some, of course, are more idiotic than others, for the net has been widely cast and is rather narrow-meshed. The index of the book (in which their names might have been starred to help) will allow the reader to find to what extent the author's classification is justified. She must certainly have allowed many to remain in obscurity. Many Church organizations, both Catholic and Protestant, could be added to the list, though it is doubtful if their benign views of their country's enemies would be representative of a majority of their memberships.

It is amusing to reflect that if this list were widely publicised, it would be as widely stigmatised as a "blacklist" and "McCarthyist".

Bob Abernethy, Madeleine Albright, Bill Alexander, Muhammad Ali, John Ward Anderson, Susan Anspach, Bishop James Armstrong, Ed Asner, Joan Baez (though she had misgivings after the Boat People started leaving Vietnam), Michael Barnes, Richard Barnes, Harry Belafonte, the Berrigan brothers, Seweryn Bialer, Jim Bitterman, Robert Blake, Abraham Blumberg, Sydney Blumenthal, Edward Boland, Heirich Boll, David Bonior, Cathy Booth, Barbara Boxer, Jackson Browne, George Brown, Zbigniew Brzezinski, McGeorge Bundy, Helen Caldicott, Joan Brown Campbell, Stokeley Carmichael, Bob Carr, John Chancellor, Noam Chomsky, Warren Christopher, Connie Chung, Frank Church, Ramsay Clark, Paul Cleary, Clark Clifford, Eleanor Clift, Hillary Clinton, William Sloane Coffin, Richard Cohen, Stephen Cohen, Robert Coles, Joseph Contreras, John Conyers, David Corn, Julio Cortazar, Katie Courie, Alan Cranston, George Crockett, Walter Cronkite, David Crosby, Joseph Davies, Angela Davis, Karen De Young, David Dellinger, Ron Dellums, Colleen Dewhurst, Russell Dilley, Julian Dixon, Christopher Dodd, Dusko Doder, Phil Donahue, Byron Dorgan, Michael Douglas, Tom Downey, Michael Dukakis, Walter Duranty, Mervyn Dymally, Paul Ehrlich, Linda Ellerbee, Henry Fairlie, Richard Falk, Mike Farrell, Vic Fazio, Jules Feiffer, Geraldine Ferraro, Frances Fitzgerald, Jane Fonda, Barney Frank, Betty Friedan, Thomas Friedman, Carlos Fuentes, John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Garcia, Todd Gitlin, Richard Gizbert, Henry Gonzalez, Bill Goodfellow, Ellen Goodman, Vivian Gornick, Richard Gott, Gunther Grass, Graham Greene, Dick Gregory, Bryant Gumbel, Lee Hamilton, Armand Hammer, Dashiell Hammett, Tom Harkin, James C. Harrington, Michael Harrington, Ruth Harris, Gary Hart, Mark Hatfield, Tom Hayden, Lilian Hellman, Hendrik Herzberg, Abbie Hoffman, Stanley Hoffman, Al Hubbard, Steve Hurst, Julian Huxley, Jesse Jackson, Bianca Jagger, Peter Jennings, Tamara Jones, Robert Kaiser, Gary Kayima, George Kennan, Edward Kennedy, John Kerry (yes, him), Barbara Kingsolver, Jerry King, Ted Koppel, Jonathan Kozol, Kris Kristofferson, Cardinal John Krol, Admiral Gene La Rocque, Diane Ladd, Corliss Lamont, Saul Landau, Brook Larmer, Owen Lattimore, Vint Lawrence, Pat Leahy, Barbara Lee, Mike Lee, John Leland, Mickey Leland, Max Lerner, Julius Lester, Carl Levin, Anthony Lewis, R.W.B. Lewis, Stuart Loory, Norman Mailer, Ed Markey, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Matthew Martinez, Mary McCarthy, Cynthia McFadden, George McGovern, Mary McGrory, Matthew McHugh, Robert McNamara, Barbara Mikulski, George Miller, Mark Crispin Miller, C. Wright Mills, Parren Mitchell, Jessica Mitford, Walter Mondale, Robert Morris, Lance Morrow, Bruce Morton, Edmund Muskie, Graham Nash, Mary Rose Oaker, David Obey, Phil Ochs, Thomas (Tip) O'Neill, Tim Padgett, Wolfgang Panofsky, Claiborne Pell, Byron Pitts, Don Podesta, Katha Pollitt, John Quinones, Bert Quint, Ed Rabel, Charles Rangel, Marcus Raskin, Dan Rather, Barry Reckord, Robert B. Reich, Elliott Richardson, Alan Riding, Paul Robeson, Walter Rodgers, Joel Rogers, Suzanne Ross, Carl Sagan, Edward Said, Harrison Salisbury, Paul Samuelson, Sydney Schanberg, Robert Scheer, Jonathan Schell, Sergei Schemamm, Carlotta Scott, Pete Seeger, George Bernard Shaw, Gail Shehy, Bob Simon, Upton Sinclair, Michelle Singletary, Samantha Smith (aged 10!), Wayne Smith, Steven Solarz, Susan Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Pete Stark, Ronald Steel, I.F. Stone, Oliver Stone, Meryl Streep, Richard Strout, William Styrom, Kathleen Sullivan, Donald Sutherland, Strobe Talbott, Evan Thomas, Richard Threlkeld, Lester Thurow, Robert Toricelli, Mary Travers, Paul Tsongas, Ted Turner, Anne Tyler, Peter Van Sant, Cyrus Vance, Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, Michael Walzer, Harry Ward, Maxine Waters, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Ted Weiss, Victor Weisskopf, Dessima Williams, Edmund Wilson, C. Vann Woodward, Jim Wright, Andrew Young.

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Often libertarians (and pro freedom folk in general) cite writers who are not libertarians at all - a good example being the number of times I have heard the name of Tom Paine being cited as a great defender of freedom (Tom Paine the ardent welfare statist and defender of confiscatory taxes on landowners, who [like so many of his kind] used the words "freedom" and "liberty" endlessly).

However, sometimes libertarians (and other folk) will cite a something that is a great work - but a work that is full of danger for the reader.

Such a work is Jose Ortega Y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses. This is great work and such people as M.J. Oakeshott and F.A. Hayek were right to praise it - particularly for the examination of the origin and nature of the "mass man" that one finds within the work and for its examination of the importance of the mass man in the modern world.

Few people (thankfully) read a great work and assume that all the opinions in it must be true, but a lot of people read what they (rightly) consider a great work and assume that the factual information in it must be true.

This was the danger I was reminded of when I recently reread this work - I came upon very many errors of fact. I do not know whether I was too ignorant to recognise these errors when I read this work as a child, or whether my memory has so far decayed that I can not remember reading the errors - but be that as it may, my purpose here is to warn readers to trust no piece of information they find in this work.

The book in front of me ("The Revolt of the Masses" having been originally been published in Spanish in 1930) is the Unwin Books Forth Impression of 1972 and (for reasons of space) I will, mostly, present errors I have found in Chapter XIV "Who Rules the World".

Page 105 - Russia cannot be Marxist (in 1930) because the pre Soviet Russia had no industry. Actually Russia in 1914 was the forth-greatest industrial power in the world and had the highest growth rate of the great powers.

Page 106 "America has not yet suffered; it is an illusion to think that it can possess the virtues of command" and "America is only starting its history. It is only now that its trials, its dissentions, its conflicts are beginning". The author appears to have forgotten about such things as the American Civil War (in which more than half a million people died out of a population of, I believe, about 30-35 million people).

Page 114 the fallacy that it is just the "size of the market" that lead America to being more prosperous than Europe. Yes European free trade would help (sadly the EU 'single market' is not free trade, it is endless regulations), but as for "No one doubts that a car designed for five hundred or six hundred million customers would be much better and much cheaper than a Ford".

Well just as when J.S. Mill says that "no one doubts" or "no one disputes" (normally when he is about to praise some bit of statism in "Principles of Political Economy") these words are a bad sign. America was not just more prosperous than European nations in the 1920's because of a large internal market - the United States had much lower levels of government spending and taxation (and, in many ways, regulation) than almost all European nations in the 1920s - the author, Jose Ortega Y Gasset (who I shall henceforth refer to as O.Y.G) either does not know this, or forgets to mention it.

Page 126 footnote 1. "It is well known that the Empire of Augustus is the opposite of what his adoptive father Caesar aspired to create. Augustus worked along the lines of Pompey, of Caesar's enemies".

This refers to the theory that O.Y.G. supports that Caesar wished to do away with the idea of an Empire centred on a single polis - political community (civitas), the city of Rome.

Perhaps this was Caesar's intention - although he did spend vast amounts of wealth (plundered by conquest) to win the favour of the Roman mob. But the Empire of Augustus was not centred on the institutions of Rome - it was centred on Augustus. Just as the Empire of Caesar (as O.Y.G. knows) was centred on Caesar.

There is no evidence that Caesar was going to create institutions for a wider nation - for example federal institutions such as the ones the Lycianian Federation of cities in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) had possessed for centuries, let alone a federation of nations not cities. Caesar was a de facto Monarch (as Augustus and those that followed him were) and he was a Monarch by usurpation - and Pompey seems to have rejected his chance to go down the path than Caesar and then Augustus trod. Yes Pompey died (as did Cato the Younger and the rest), Caesar and Augustus are also dead - all men die, but not all men die traitors to the Republic.

O.Y.G. says the Republic was corrupt, which it was (although not as corrupt as he claims - with no election unrigged and no law case honestly decided), but he claims that Caesar was a visionary without providing evidence that Caesar had a vision for other than his own power.

Augustus may have shown some polite respect for the outward forms of the Republic - but the principle of his rule was the same as Caesar's (not "the opposite" of it), and under rule of the Emperors the state expanded and civil society decayed - as O.Y.G. knows (see pages 92-93). Hardly what Caesar's enemies had in mind.

On page 123 we are told that Caesar was "very nearly the opposite of Alexander" because Alexander choose the Asiatic East and Caesar choose to build a new nation based on "the Germans and the Gauls" as well as the old Romans.

Actually Alexander choose to fight Persia because it was the long standing enemy of Greece (not because of his spiritual kinship with Eastern despotism - although such as a kinship may have existed). Caesar went North ("West" if you wish) because the Rome various disputes in the East had already been the concern of Pompey - Gaul was the only area of opportunity that Caesar could get from the Senate.

Certainly Caesar did far more than deal with border raiding and sign treaties, but he hardly built a new nation. He used some Germanic tribes (rather than making them a nation) to help in the conquest of the Gauls - and he did this (with slaughter on a vast scale - even by the standards of the time) not to build a new nation, but rather to gain land and loot to support his political ambitions. Yes Caesar's policy in Gaul was different from the policy of Pompey in the East - but not in the way O.Y.G. thinks.

And when Caesar gained power he allied with Cleopatra (producing the son that was intended to rule after them?) and planned an invasion of Parthia (which did not take place, due to his assassination) - hardly a lack of interest in the East.

On page 140 we are told that in (pre Soviet) Russia there was "no bourgeois" and (in the footnote) that this "ought to be enough to enough to convince us once and for all that Marxian Socialism and Bolshevism are two historical phenomena which have hardly a single common denominator".

Not just absurd, but highly convenient for people who might wish to pretend that the Soviet Union was not "proper socialism".

I could go dealing with errors, but I will end with a "cheat" (i.e. an error not taken from chapter XIV). In a footnote on pages 76-77 (chapter XI) we are told that the reason that the English aristocracy is not degenerate like other European aristocracies (no evidence is produced for either claim - either that the European aristocracies are degenerate or that the English aristocracy is not degenerate) is because England was not "superabundant" as other European countries were. After all the "fundamental fact is forgotten that England was until well within the eighteenth century the poorest country in Europe".

The reason this is "forgotten" is because it is false.

Interestingly O.Y.G. actually seems to be half aware of his lack of respect for truth. As he says on page 55 (footnote 2) the "paucity of Spanish intellectual culture is shown, not in greater or less knowledge, but in the habitual lack of caution and care to adjust one's self to truth that is usually displayed by those who speak and write".

This is important as O.Y.G. explains in the text of page 55 - the "varying degrees of culture are measured by the greater or less precision of the standards".

I will not comment about Spanish culture (I do not know enough about it), but O.Y. G. is correct. All societies produce theories (or rather have people within them who produce theories), but not all societies (or rather people) respect fact.

For example a man may believe (rightly or wrongly) that the United States is controlled by a Zionist conspiracy, but if such a man says "after all the President is Jewish" he should respect the fact (when it is pointed out to him) that Mr Bush is not a Jew. If a theorist does not respect facts then he is a barbarian - "Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made" (page 55).

A great and intelligent man (and O.Y.G. was such a man) has a heavy responsibility to check his facts, so that (as far as is in his power) he avoids misleading people who read his works.

When a theory can be strongly argued against do not present it as obvious fact that no intelligent person could doubt, and avoid making statements of fact that are just not true.

And for a reader - never think that because a work is great that you can trust the facts given in it. One must check for oneself.

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A History of the American People
Paul Johnson
HarperCollins, 1998

The Myth of the Robber Barons
Burton W. Folsom, Jr.
Young American Foundation, 1991 (3rd edition 1993)

Paul Johnson's A History of the American People is a long (814 pages + notes and index, but no separate bibliography) but extremely well-structured book, so well-sustained that it is almost a page-turner. The author is openly partisan - i.e., holding to what was, by and large, the American consensus until the end of the Eisenhower era - and he opens his history by confessing its writing to have been a labour of love. There is no nonsense about starting it any earlier than the arrival of the first English-speaking settlers in 1580. Not being able to make a comparison with any other complete history of the US, I have to judge it in absolute terms.

The book is divided into eight parts, on chronological lines; there are no separate sections for the arts, sciences, social trends, or the like; all are integrated into the narrative, as are also the personalities, thumbnail biographical sketches and moral and political judgments. A painter himself, the author has much to say about US landscape painters of whom I had never even heard; perhaps significantly, Warhol, Pollock and Lichtenstein (to name those that come to my mind) are not even mentioned.

Johnson's thesis is that the US has flourished as a result of capitalist economics and minimalist government, on a strong religious substratum, combined with an integrationist policy based on the English language. All these prerequisites are now being damaged by various interests, but particularly by the media and academia. He makes the point: "All nations are born in war, conquest and crime, usually concealed by the obscurity of a distant past. The United States, from its earliest colonial times, won its title-deeds in the full blaze of recorded history ..." and it has continued the practice. As Johnson believes, the judgment on the US must be regarded as favourable, and something must be put down to its starting down the right path, for which the Founding Fathers cannot take all the credit; much must go the Mother Country, England. Johnson, like practically everyone else, tends to judge in absolute terms; I can see he considers there would be no contest if comparisons were made with other colonial ventures. The whole of Latin America is bemused and exasperated by its failure and America's success, even to the appropriation of the continental name by the United States.

A review I can't find (I think in the Spectator) said that as Johnson's history up to, I think, 1900 was uncontroversial, it would examine only his treatment of this century. This is certainly where he would get into trouble, with his support of Nixon and Reagan and his damning of Kennedy (whom he criticises for his handling of the Cuban crisis), Johnson, Carter and Clinton. Johnson finds Teddy Roosevelt sympathetic. Perhaps the most intriguing revelation here is that he found too little to do as President, an insight into how much Government was still a hands-off one in the early years of the century. He is also much more critical of Franklin Roosevelt than is modish (though far from damning), writing down his New Deal, his handling of foreign affairs and his gullibility towards Stalin. Truman is lauded and his origins, complicated as these were with the corrupt Pendergast machine, examined to free him from guilt by association. Bush Sr. is seen as a poor successor to Reagan (here the dangers of co-opting as running mate one's opponent in the primaries emerges) and it is significant, and sad, that Margaret Thatcher, still present to urge him to expel the Iraqis from Kuwait, had beeen ousted before she could encourage him to finish the job and occupy Baghdad.

Johnson also tends to exonerate the great entrepreneurs, the so-called "robber barons", having perhaps read Folsom's book on the subject. He emphasises the endowments of the rich to the arts and other public benefactions (Carnegie virtually gave away all his money) and ascribes the Great Crash more to Government interference that made things worse than to the "failure of capitalism". He judges favourably the two Republican Presidents of the 1920s, Harding and Coolidge, but characterises Hoover as an interventionist bungler. He is critical of "judicial activism", which goes back to Franklin Roosevelt (though he was thwarted by contemporary feeling) but fails to tackle the Sacred Cow of the Constitution. Considering the vogue for written constitutions, perhaps more could be made of the hazards of having a document of any sort whose meaning can be interpreted in any fashion by a coterie of unelected lawyers. An excellent book.

Folsom's The Myth of the Robber Barons is, by contrast with Johnson, quite short (134 pages + 36 of notes) and thus easy to read through off and on within one day. This is an expansion of
the author's Entrepreneurs vs The State; the third Edition is dated 1996.

Folsom runs through the classic age of US tycoons, from Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877) to Andrew Mellon (1855-1937); in theory, all could have known each other - though this is not mentioned. Folsom's interesting thesis is that the most successful men accomplished what they did without subsidies from the Government, and often in competition with others who received them - this especially applied to the railways - something not generally acknowledged, or perhaps noticed, by historians.

Mellon seems one of the first to have realised, in his capacity of Presidential financial adviser, what governments find hard to believe and unwilling to learn or even remember: that lowering tax rates can generate them more income than raising them. He pointed out that between 1916 and 1921, after tax rates had been raised between these dates, the number of tax-filers with incomes over $300,000 fell from about 1300 to about 250 and the share of the national tax they paid fell from about one-sixth of the total to one one-hundred-and-twenty-seventh. Not only had the rich effectively disappeared and hidden their money, but had rendered it unavailable for investment. Mellon lowered tax rates for all taxpayers with the result that that the rich paid more and everyone else paid less. Though the statistics are there to prove this happened, the college text-books of a whole string of historians - Blum and Schlesinger's, Garraty's, Bailey and Kennedy's, and Unger's - all say exactly the opposite, as Folsom cites, with long quotations. Obviously the results of Mellon's strategy are so counter-intuitive that they are simply denied.

The whole book is full of interesting personalities; almost invariably the second generation did not match up to the first (unless father and son started in partnership). Some - Carnegie, Rockefeller, Mellon - were philanthropists on a massive scale. One at least, Schwab, could be a spendthrift as well. Rockefeller seems to have been the best-adjusted to his success, though perhaps some might regard his deep religious faith as a kind of self-administered brainwashing.

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The Lesson of This Century
Karl Popper
Routledge, 1996

This collection consists of two interviews with Giancarlo Bosetti in 1991 and 1993, who also supplies Introductions to them, and two earlier talks, given in 1988 and 1989. I assume (though this is not made explicit) that the interviews were conducted as well as published in Italian; the talks must have been originally given in German. Routledge, the publisher, gives information, and a picture, of Popper, but says nothing of Bosetti; if a book can be under-edited, this is it. Interesting as these interviews and articles are, could his publisher not have found more for us?

The title of the book is unexplained, and may not be either Popper's (this is a posthumous collection; he died in 1994) or Bosetti's. It may be in the nature of a warning, for Popper reiterates his injunction "Once More Against Historicism" (pp. 40-45), a slippery and subtle concept which as I understand it, goes something like: "Because I know where I am and how I got here, I know where I'm going and how to get there." This might be all very well as a working idea if confined to the study; unfortunately, with Karl Marx, it got out, to be believed and acted on, even though his prophecies - immiseration of the proletariat and the resulting violent overthrow of capitalism - were falsified in his own lifetime, with many others since. As Popper says: "We can certainly learn from the past, but we can never project it to anticipate the future (p. 41)". Karl Marx could not foresee the motor-car, and we can't see the next revolutionary innovation, just as, Popper might have said, nobody foresaw the computer and the Internet.

Chapter 1, "Pacifism, War, the Encounter with Communism", I see as a sort of supplement to his autobiography, Unended Quest. Popper's involvement with Communism, specifically, with three older friends, began just after World War I and was followed immediately with disillusionment: "I trusted them. But very soon I found that a telegram from Moscow was enough for them to turn them 180 degrees ... (p. 15)." Popper did, however, by his own admission, remain a socialist for several years after this but finally, he writes in Unended Quest, quoted here (p. 5), "I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality ... and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree." Here, it seems to me, Popper lets his either-or idealism run away with him, for in the real world complete freedom is too big a burden for the individual to handle, let alone want to, and the welfare state represents a trade-off between security and liberty, while the argument about socialism has moved to the pragmatic one of economic efficiency. Despite fears of a slide from democracy to tyranny via socialism (as voiced in Hayek's Road to Serfdom), the fact that this has never happened suggests that a balance between freedom and equality is possible. Indeed, Popper understands "Absolute freedom is nonsense ... [because] ... We need a society in which the freedom of each person is compatible with the freedom of other persons (p. 35)".

Popper does not see in the collapse of Marxism the triumph of some other doctrine. This negative position is, after all, what he has proclaimed in The Open Society and Its Enemies: no blueprint can be made for a perfect society, and any Utopia is a dangerous illusion. Nor does this mean a willingness on his part to stand back and expect market forces to solve the world's problems. Where he thinks government intervention is necessary, it should intervene. In both series of interviews he is obviously very much exercised on the need, in 1991, for some sort of international action in Bosnia. "What is happening in Bosnia is proof of the failure, the cowardice, the blindness, of us in the West. It shows we do not want to learn what this century should have taught us: that war is prevented by war (p. 49)." This reaction may seem shrill and exaggerated today, especially when Popper combined it with a fear of a nuclear risk. Most of us have forgotten the sequence of events in Bosnia which gave rise to Popper's exasperation, but the fact remains that intervention (mainly by the US) did take place, with beneficial results. Rwanda, East Timor and Kosovo have had their crises since he died, but it is hard not to believe he would have favoured intervention in each case, and the pattern would also lead one to suppose he would support the US policy in Afghanistan and Iraq.

After this, it may not come as a surprise (in Chapter 7, "Television Corrupts Mankind") that Popper interested himself in the possibility of censoring television in order to protect children from unsuitable material, particularly scenes of violence. Although some sort of legislation seems to have been attempted in Germany, it is certainly an attempt that has had little success, and even Popper might have despaired if he had foreseen the enormous expansion of visual imagery available from videocassettes and DVDs and the perverted use of computers and the internet for the propagation of paedophilia. Popper's attitude towards legislation therefore seems less "hands off" than experimental: "let's try it; see if it works." After all, he was more sympathetic to the notion that any improvement would be brought about piecemeal and by accretion rather than by some visionary social engineering. Revealingly, he says, "Unfortunately ... things do not work without paternalism (p. 9)" so I would like to know, for example, what his views were on affirmative action and the proliferation of human rights. Strong though his opinions in his later years might be, he would still stick to his quotation here (p. 57) from The Open Society and Its Enemies: "the rational approach means being prepared to admit that I may be wrong and you may be right, but that by a common effort we can draw closer to the truth."

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I used to be a singer in a rock and roll band.

Well, okay, maybe not, but I was a lead guitarist in a punk rock band. I even had my Fender copy tuned so I could play the major rock chords with a single sliding finger, just like those anarcho-punk legends, Crass.

If only our band had possessed some luck, a good manager, a driving licence between us, some money, a van, and a small pet monkey named Brian, we might have made it big. Especially if the lead guitarist had actually possessed any talent.

But, alas, this punk dream faded, as it did for a million others, and my brush with anarchy submerged itself for another twenty years. However, much to my surprise it resurfaced again last year, a little rusty but largely unscathed, when it experienced a depth charge blast from Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe's mental mind bomb, Democracy: The God That Failed.

There are few in the world who dare promote the dissolution of all forms of government, especially in the hostile spitting face of a billion state-supporting rent seekers. And of those few brave men, only a tiny handful, mostly Austro-libertarians, possess the requisite economic theory, moral strength, and political knowledge to really frighten all of those state-loving horses. Foremost amongst them is Professor Hoppe, a man in the proper Austrian tradition of being a German speaker by birth, though also a man at odds with many inside proper libertarian circles, as opposed to those Christmas-voting leftist libertarian turkeys who believe the state is the ultimate guarantor of individual rights. Which makes about as much sense as taxman with genuine friends.

Proper libertarians divide themselves into two broad camps; Minarchists and Anarchists; those who believe in a minimalist night-watchman state, on the grounds that even though the state is odious and should be limited in every way possible, it is still necessary to provide security; and those who believe that we need no odious government at all, because even security, that last bastion of the coercive apparatus of the state, can itself be provided on the open market.

However, when you educate yourself away from leftist-libertarian socialism, as some of us poor schlepps have had to do, this question of security, which divides the Minarchists and the Anarchists, is like the great family secret you can never find the answer to. It is the mad aunt in the closet, the uncle who should be kept away from his nephews, and the grandmother with the glass eye who does unspeakable things to goldfish. This question of security is simply never discussed. At least, never any place you can find it. You are either sensible, and a Minarchist, or a Barking moonbat, and an Anarchist.

Which is why I am glad that Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe has broken the log-jam and tried to answer this divisive question of security, with his editorship of The Myth of National Defense. Fortunately, as well as buying the book, you can also read the whole of its text online, courtesy of a Mises.org PDF file.

Hoppe has assembled his wide-ranging collection of essayists, and their ideas, around the following pair of double-think concepts:

First: Every "monopoly" is "bad" from the viewpoint of consumers. Monopoly here is understood in its classical sense as an exclusive privilege granted to a single producer of a commodity or service; i.e., as the absence of "free entry" into a particular line of production. In other words, only one agency, A, may produce a given good, x. Any such monopolist is "bad" for consumers because, shielded from potential new entrants into his area of production, the price of his product x will be higher and the quality of x lower than otherwise.

This is contrasted with:

Second, the production of security must be undertaken by and is the primary function of government. Here, security is understood in the wide sense adopted in the Declaration of Independence: as the protection of life, property (liberty), and the pursuit of happiness from domestic violence (crime) as well as external (foreign) aggression (war). In accordance with generally accepted terminology, government is defined as a territorial monopoly of law and order (the ultimate decision maker and enforcer).

Hoppe contends that both principles are incompatible. Either monopoly is good or monopoly is bad. It cannot be both. However, to counter this Minarchists argue that security is a special product, one which defies the first principle, because without statist coercion we would all be wolves at each others' throats in a Hobbesian world of Homo homini lupus est, suffering from a continual under-production of security. Hoppe argues otherwise, basing much of his anarchistic case on the original ideas of Gustave de Molinari, who predicted in the Production of Security what would happen in a monopolized security system:

If...the consumer is not free to buy security wherever he pleases, you forthwith see open up a large profession dedicated to arbitrariness and bad management. Justice becomes slow and costly, the police vexatious, individual liberty is no longer respected, the price of security is abusively inflated and inequitably apportioned, according to the power and influence of this or that class of consumers.

The British police, in particular, seem to have taken Molinari to heart. In large swathes of the UK they see their job as being no more than handing out crime numbers, so that victims of theft can claim on their private insurance policies. From recent newspaper reports, the British police can sometimes hardly be bothered to do even that small task. The thought of coming out of their warm cosy police stations, or comfortable motorway police cars, and actually chasing down burglars and muggers is far too much like hard work. It is much better to stay behind a desk drinking tea and processing lucrative car speeding fines. British courts are also a superlative home for the overpaid and the underworked, with the price of justice set far too high for most ordinary people, and some innocent men and women spending years banged up on remand, at Her Majesty's pleasure, while indolent government justice officers tea-break their tortuous way through endless triplicated paperwork.

Hoppe's book is divided into four sections; State-making and war-making; Government forms, war, and strategy; Private alternatives to state defence and warfare; and Private security production and practical applications.

After an introductory chapter of his own, Hoppe hands over the baton to Luigi Marco Bassani and Carlo Lottieri, for a first section chapter on the relative modernity of the state, which they claim has only properly existed since the Florentine time of Niccolo Machiavelli, rather than the dawn of time, as the state's denizens would prefer us to believe. Thus, having existed only briefly, the state is a concept which has a before. Therefore, it may also possess an after, which we can all happily work towards. They also describe how the state mainly arose as a vehicle for those who wished to become a new ruling class, after feudal times, and how, as free institutions and free markets threw off the ever-increasing strictures of the nation state, this ruling class saw its only hope for survival in the creation of supra-national bodies, such as the European Union, to use them explicitly as a means of controlling the free movements of goods, people, capital, and ideas, while still retaining full control over a coercive and parasitic stream of lovely jubbly taxation income, for themselves, their families, and their friends.

This essay is followed by The Master, the mighty Murray N. Rothbard. Hoppe reproduces one of Uncle Murray's best ever pieces, which you may have read before, on War, Peace, and the State. This lucid morality tale tells us about how and why the state has killed millions since its Renaissance inception; how and why we can tackle all of the state's arguments, which it uses to aggress against us in the form of taxation, regulation, and straightforward oppression, as it pursue its own agenda against other states; and how and why we should always try to work towards the maxim that no man should aggress against any other man at any other time, except in the case of self-defence. No anarchist, or aspiring anarchist, should ever leave home without reading this essay first.

The second section of the book then begins with what I feel is the best written essay in the book: Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's piece entitled Monarchy and War, on the dangers of modern democracy. Rather than give you a blow-by-blow account of this bitingly acidic tour-de-force, let me just regale you with a few quotes:

Democracy reappeared in a more civilised form in Athens, but when Socrates, in a truly political trial, praised monarchy, he was condemned to death. Remember also that Madriaga said rightly that our civilization rests on the death of two persons: a philosopher and the Son of God, both victims of the popular will.

Top quality.

It will be interesting to see if Mel Gibson makes his next film project 'The Death of Socrates'. I would love to see it, but I do hope Mr Gibson avoids scripting the dialogue in classical Greek.

Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is particularly caustic about the terrible effects of the French Revolution, with its introduction of mass murder, conscription, and caretaker-king democracy:

It [The Revolution] wanted to bring liberty and equality under a common denominator, something Goethe considered only charlatans would promise. Equality, indeed, could merely be established in some form of slavery – just as a hedge can only be kept even by constantly trimming it.

Now that is an analogy to cut out and keep. If you ever see me using it again at some future date, please forget you ever saw me quote it here first. Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn also thinks one of the worst outcomes of the French Revolution was its export of democracy to the nascent United States, and the subsequent goal of the United States to then make the world a safe place for this same mob rule beauty pageant, otherwise known as democracy:

It was the destruction of the Habsburg Empire that made Germany the geopolitical winner of World War I. Bordering after 1919 on only one great power—France—it was now the direct or indirect neighbour in the East of partly artificial, partly militarily indefensible states. As His Magnificence, the rector of Breslau University, Ernst Kornemann, pointed out in 1926, the time to take advantage of this advantageous situation would come sooner or later. And it came. What Hitler actually inherited from these nincompoops who had dictated the Paris Suburban treaties was not only an internal situation characterized by the economic uprooting of important social layers and the imposition of an unworkable form of government, but also a uniquely profitable geopolitical position due to the division of Austria-Hungary. If Hitler had had any sense of humor, he would have erected a colossal monument to Woodrow Wilson.

You may disagree with what Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn says about the horrors of democracy, but his writing really is wonderfully entertaining.

We then head into what I thought was the most disturbing and contradictory part of Professor Hoppe's book: Bertrand Lemennicier's chapter on nuclear weapons. After various mathematical proofs, based on Game theory, the author concludes that nuclear proliferation is a desirable thing to encourage, in terms of world peace. He also believes that the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and other members of the nuclear club, have no intrinsic right to prevent this spread of nuclear weapons.

I found this essay rather jarring, particularly after reading Murray Rothbard's earlier piece, which states that we should try to remove nuclear weapons from the world as a priority action in every possible sphere, as they are immoral weapons of evil. And even if I could force myself to believe Lemennicier's argument that various world governments should be the recipients of nuclear proliferation, one shudders at the thought of various non-governmental men, currently somewhere at large in the Hindu Kush, getting hold of such devices. Nuclear mushroom cloud over London, anyone?

I hope and pray that I and my children never live to see that day.

Gerard Radnitzky then puts a firm leather boot into the lie that democracy is more peaceful than any other form of government, decrypting virtually every war of the twentieth century, most of which involved democracies, often in the role as aggressors. This is a wide-ranging chapter which balances theory with reality, but which essentially comes at us with the premise that what democracy encourages is the creation of total war and the deliberate targeting, with lethal munitions, of other states' civilians:

The democratic method tempts you to expand collective choice, because it appears to be so simple to use and almost costless (a facile mechanical process). It invites you to sin — galloping interventionism. The consequences: Because of the redistributive bias of democratic constitutional rule, it transforms the state into a vast redistributive machinery and the society into the "churning society"—interventionism, welfarism, collectivism—with consequences that go far beyond anything known under predemocratic social choice.

After this heavy, but necessary, opening half to the book, we get to the more interesting stuff. Joseph R. Stromberg talks about mercenaries, guerrillas, militias, and the ways in which they have been combined for successful defence, as in the American Revolution against the armed might of Great Britain. Larry J. Sechrest then writes a fascinating chapter on naval privateering and its warfare for profit, which helped keep the mighty British navy at bay when the early United States spent several decades consolidating its early freedom, mostly through a successful reliance on naval privateers.

So why did privateering die out then? Stromberg concludes his chapter with the riposting answer:

The fact is that privateering disappeared precisely because it was so effective. Career naval officers feared and resented the competition it represented, and those few nations with large public navies wanted to make sure that smaller nations could not challenge their domination via the less costly alternative of private armed ships. These were the primary motives behind the Declaration of Paris, signed by seven maritime nations in 1856, which prohibited privateering by the signatories and greatly hastened its ultimate end.

Whatever the case, the knowledge I gained from this essay certainly helped make the recent Russell Crowe film, Master and Commander, far more entertaining, especially when Captain 'Lucky' Jack Aubrey argued with ship's doctor, Stephen Maturin, about the nature of warfare and anarchy, and how to fight a Boston-built privateer.

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel answers another important question in the next highly instructive chapter. If governments are so bad, why do they so dominate the world? Hummel paints an optimistic picture portraying the state as a macro parasite which grew from the revolution in agriculture following hunter-gatherer times, where large bodies of people could produce enough food to carry free riders and wipe out remaining hunter-gatherers through slaughter and the diseases induced by people living in civilised proximity. The rulers of these early states could then introduce religious or secular ideologies to maintain the organic growth of statehood, leading us towards the present day cacophony of worldwide states. However, Hummel surmises that modern states which can lower their statist free-riding burden will become dominant through their consequential wealth-generation abilities and the superior weapons systems which this will also provide. Hence, the state may wither on the vine as such advantages become apparent, especially if just one truly anarcho-capitalist state could emerge with a large enough population to hold all the other states at bay.

No doubt Hummel has the United States in mind, for this torch-bearing role. But with those rapidly growing flat-tax economies in Eastern Europe, who knows where the wind of freedom will blow next?

We then come to the book's important fourth section, where Walter Block, Professor Hoppe, and Jörg Guido Hülsmann, discuss how the private production of security could actually come to genuine fruition, in a future world based on reality rather than hope.

Block lays open the public goods theorists who insist that only states can provide defence, by taking all of their arguments apart and leaving them wanting. Hoppe then follows up with a demonstration of how reliance on the state for defence has left us in a state of perpetual war, with a continual and a permanently insecure destruction of private property, and how a system of insurance could provide us with a reliable system of both internal and external defence. He also argues why this system would lead to a far more peaceful world than the one we currently have, where airlines are stopped by the state from having $50 dollar guns on their flight decks, so a $400 billion dollar US state defence system can then fail to prevent terrorist outrages involving airliners. If you are going to read just one chapter from this book, read this one.

Hülsmann then concludes this book with how secession, down to the level of the individual, may be the method by which we can reach Hummel's anarcho-capitalist wonderland.

All in all, The Myth of National Defense is a fabulous book, and one which I can highly recommend even to confirmed Minarchists, so they can refute it at their leisure. Its one drawback is that it does lack the organic unity of the Professor's earlier book on democracy, mainly because he failed to write the whole thing himself. But just the chapter by Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, alone, makes up for this.

Is it really possible for the state to be removed from our lives and for us to survive to tell the tale afterwards? You will have to make up your own mind, but after reading it myself I can only say one thing:

Ich bin ein Barking moonbat.

Auf wieder hören...

(0) (9)

Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine
Jasper Becker
Henry Holt, 1998

"The famine of 1958-61 was unique in Chinese history. For the first time, every corner of this huge country experienced hunger (p. 99)," writes Jasper Becker, after setting the scene in the first six chapters of this truly horrifying book. Of all the world's man-made famines - and for more than the last hundred years there has been no other kind - this one was truly the most pointless. The peasants were docile, partly because there had been peace since the Communists had conquered the land in 1949, and partly because they had been systematically intimidated. If the Soviets had needed a famine to crush the Ukrainian peasants, nothing of the sort was needed in China. All the better-off peasants had been eliminated and the rest forced into communes. Despite the fact, a fact theoretically inadmissable, that these were less efficient than the family farms, they were just sufficiently productive to feed those that worked them and the cities which contained around ten percent of the total population.

The Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, having forced through collectivisation, may have decided to persist in the policy to prove Khrushchev wrong when he, in his "secret speech" in 1956, had come close to admitting it hadn't worked in the USSR. Mao in fact, decided to go even further and, preceded by a campaign to raise the peasants' hopes of a Utopian future, initiated his fantasy of The Great Leap Forward. This was something as close to irrational as the Cargo Cults of the South Pacific, where stone-age inhabitants cleared runways in the jungle and awaited the arrival of the transport aircraft they remembered from the War landing and disgorging every luxury of human existence. Though perhaps best known for the "backyard blastfurnaces" that produced useless chunks of iron from the peasants' precious pots and pans, the most destructive feature of the Great Leap Forward was the agricultural disaster produced by the nonsensical theories borrowed from Soviet pseudo-scientists such as Lysenko. The grains that were planted and the density of planting were changed according to his theories, land was abandoned for fallow, bizarre notions about the mixture of manure with rubbish and "deep ploughing" were put into operation and peasants were conscripted to build dams which fell apart and canals which leaked dry or silted up. Since all these innovations were claimed to raise productivity enormously, exaggerated statistics were fabricated and, since everyone believed them, the first harvest was wastefully consumed, though it was, in fact, lower than that of previous years, already reduced by collectivisation.

It is difficult to know how far down from the top of the communist hierarchy the ignorance extended of the true situation as this got worse and worse. As for the Party cadres in contact with the peasants, they were unable to do anything but attempt to obey orders that came down to them, to extract the government share as a proportion of the false figures they had transmitted upward. Senior Communist Party officials travelled to the countryside and discovered what was happening, but merely encountered the dogmatic denial of Mao of what they had seen when they returned. Since he could punish their disagreement with dire penalties, the more honest voiced it in only the most tentative terms, while others simply lied and the whole situation remained deadlocked while the peasants starved. How long it was before Mao's self-deception and bloody-mindedness yielded to a realisation of the facts is not clear, but at the beginning of 1961 he was blaming "counter-revolutionaries and landlords", a formula he could not even have expected to be believed for the famine he now admitted to be happening. There is not the slightest doubt that Mao was responsible for the policies that caused it and for the stubborness that delayed its cessation or amelioration. Not only did he never admit blame, but carried out vendettas against those who brought the famine to an end, one purpose of his initiation of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

There is a sense of variations on a theme as the author recounts again and again how in different provinces the peasants attempted to cling to life by eating material with little or no value as food - straw, cloth, leather, bark. Cases of cannibalism, for which there were precedents in China's history, are well attested. Yet there was grain in the state granaries and some was even exported. A special opportunity for starving to death was to be imprisoned in one of the work camps, the Laogai, China's equivalent of the Soviet Gulag, in which some ten million were incarcerated. A number of prisoners, some of them doctors, have left clinical reports of the progressive effect of starvation on the human body; these are not for the squeamish (pp. 200-210). In fact there was little difference for the peasant whether he was imprisoned or not for there was no escape for him from the countryside. The militia turned him back on the roads and he was ejected from the trains. The population in the towns was better off, for they were given rations, though these were meagre, but migration into them from the countryside was forbidden and sometimes their excess inhabitants were ejected into the countryside. The persistent horror and misery of the accounts of these famine years make this a difficult book merely to read.

The last few chapters (17-20) have some of the relief of awakening from a nightmare, though what they have to tell is grim enough. By 1961 there was sufficient party pressure to make Mao, in a series of double-talk statements, abandon his policies and allow the peasants to a certain extent to grow what they wanted. However, he remained alive for another fourteen years, never repudiated the Great Leap Forward and during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) wreaked his revenge on those who had opposed him. China's industrial and infrastructural growth stagnated; the population grew, but food supplies barely kept pace. The average peasant never recovered the standard of living of 1957 until after Mao's death in 1976. All this time other neighbouring nations were making great progress. People may think that China is overpopulated, but its density is only 10 per arable hectare, compared with South Korea's 17.3 and Japan's 23.9 (p. 262).

For years, the famine of 1958-61 was China's best-kept secret. The outside world, even Hong Kong, knew nothing of it. At the time very few foreigners were allowed in and free travel within it was impossible, as much for its inhabitants as for anyone else. 15,000 Russian technicians, on loan from Khruschev, were withdrawn in 1960. Even today, while relatively open about the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese are reticent about the famine. China has never officially acknowledged that the famine took place nor published an estimate of the death toll (p. 266)". How then did Becker come by the material for this book, apparently the first ever published (in 1996) on the subject? In his Foreword he explains his method: Advertisments placed in the overseas Chinese press in 1994 brought hundreds of responses ... I visited some of those who replied ... in Britain ... in the United States, Hong Kong and ... India, where I met Tibetans … Then ... I travelled round rural areas of Henan, Anhui and Sichuan and talked to older peasants who had survived the famine (p. xii)." After more than three decades, memories are still sharp, and the "relative freedom allowed to obscure publishing houses in the provinces in recent years has meant that a surprising amount of material ... has become available."

And how many died, the "hungry ghosts" (a Buddhist term for the most painful route to reincarnation) that fail to haunt the public consciousness? This is the question that Becker attempts to answer in Chapter 18. As has been stated, the Great Leap Forward and the resulting famine have been the great non-event of Chinese history and any analysis of the loss of life has been done by outsiders and exiles, after an examination of the grudgingly released census statistics, of the first under Communism taken in 1953, the third in 1982 and the dubious second in 1964. The result of all investigations would seem to give a lower figure of 30 million and a higher one, comprising all the "unnatural deaths" for which Mao Zedong was responsible, of 80 million, this last vouched for by an former high-up Party member, now an academic at Princeton University, as coming from an official government document (p. 274).

There are few Chinese names here that will mean much to the reader. Deng Xiaoping, the great survivor, inaugurated the economic liberalisation after Mao's death, but must take responsibility for the Tien An Men Square massacre. Liu Shaoqi deserves mention as probably the one who did most to bring the famine to an end, for which he did not escape Mao's vengeance, dying in prison during the Cultural Revolution. Zhou Enlai, for some reason probably the favourite of Western intellectuals, recanted his opposition to collectivization and served Mao faithfully, with minimum dissent, through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, dying in the same year as his master.

The information about the famine that penetrated into the outside world was meagre and contradictory. The fact that the Communist states of the USSR and China prevented anything like free reporting was so taken for granted that it did not automatically raise the suspicion that a catastrophe was being concealed. The evidence presented to China-watchers in Hong Kong by refugees tended to be discounted by the fact that China was exporting food into the colony. Taiwan might also be assumed to exaggerate any trouble on the mainland. The American press ran occasional stories of hunger and failed harvests, but it does not seem that these were connected with the lunatic policies that had brought them about. Even Joseph Alsop, seemingly the most convinced that something terrible was happening, ascribed the disasters merely to collectivization, just as had been the case in the USSR, though China, he argued, had less of a safety margin. These reports and views were ridiculed by a number of fellow-travelling journalists that the Chinese government used to dupe the outside world: the BBC's Felix Greene (brother of Graham and Carleton), Edgar Snow, long-time supporter of the regime, Wilfred Burchett and Han Suyin. A long list of eminent visitors, including Lord Boyd Orr (retired head of the FAO), Joseph Needham, Sir Cyril Hishelwood (President of the Royal Society), Herbert Read, Field Marshal Montgomery and Francois Mitterand were all blandly lied to and went away satisfied that all was well. Indeed, the Chinese government never admitted there had been a famine at all, far less any responsibility for it, and merely spoke of "natural disasters" that had caused difficulties, a pretext for accepting relief in the course of ending it. There had, in fact, been no natural disasters during the famine years and meteorological records, when ultimately disclosed, showed that the weather had been favourable throughout the entire period.

The whole catastrophe was successfully covered up, a result that deceived western students as much as it benefited communist apologists, and affected books published by both of them well into the nineties. Since all information came from government sources, even anti-communists fell for the "natural disaster" hypothesis, supposedly beaten by maintaining a strict rationing system. In the end, in a quite respectable publication, it was possible to find the statement "that Mao was the first leader to recognize the existence of the famine and to issue orders to rectify the crisis (p. 309)", exactly the opposite of what happened. After all, with little to go on, what could writers assume but that those in power would act rationally? The Great Leap Forward has often been treated positively as "therapy" or "highly educational", not at all as the imposition of nonsensical policies dogmatically claimed to increase productivity enormously, which everyone in charge was then too frightened to deny. Becker also draws the chilling deduction that the worldwide ignorance of Mao's manufactured famine has allowed his methods to be enthusiastically copied in the Third World, with disastrous results. He presents evidence that Pol Pot's genocidal expulsion of Cambodian city-dwellers into the countryside to build collapsible dams and unusable canals was inspired by Mao's social experiment, whose failure was never allowed to come to light.

It would be interesting to know more about the reception of this book than is given in quotations from obviously laudatory reviews on the dustjacket and whether there has been any attempt to refute its thesis since it came out in 1996, or further studies to confirm it.

Lastly, the book is a reminder that, however faulty the political systems under which most of us live may be, and however imperfect those who operate them, Mao's China was incomparably worse.

(4) (19)

There is little in life as popular as Terry Pratchett's Discworld book series, about the adventures of Rincewind the Wizzard and all the other assorted folk of Discworld, including of course The Librarian, and The Luggage.

I am currently working my way through the Discworld canon, having started with The Colour of Magic a few months ago. At first, as I came across the odd libertarian-leaning comment, I thought it might be interesting to record them, as I found them, and publish them all on Samizdata once I had reached the last page of the last book. But there are just far too many for that. Once you have your eyes peeled, these covert anarchistic swipes pop up all over the place like magic mushrooms in a damp autumn wood.

But some still stand out as giant white-spotted red caps, just begging for hallucinogenic consumption. I am compelled, for instance, to broadcast this following comment from Cohen the Barbarian, which I discovered this morning in the book Interesting Times.

Cohen is speaking about the subject of slaughtering in the Agatean Empire, a Discworld continent bearing an astonishing resemblance to both modern China and its bureaucratic dynastic past:

'Oh, yeah. Slaughtering,' said Cohen. 'Like, supposing the population is being a bit behind with its taxes. You pick some city where people are being troublesome and kill everyone and set fire to it and pull down the walls and plough up the ashes. That way you get rid of the trouble and all the other cities are suddenly really well behaved and polite and all your back taxes turn up in a big rush, which is handy for governments, I understand.'

Very handy.

Cohen also has little time for the tax-paying population of the Agatean Empire:

'People think that's how a country is supposed to run. They do what they're told. The people here are treated like slaves.' Cohen scowled. 'Now, I've got nothing against slaves, you know, as slaves. Owned a few in my time. Been a slave once or twice. But where there's slaves, what'll you expect to find?' Rincewind thought about this. 'Whips?' he said at last. 'Yeah. Got it in one. Whips. There's something honest about slaves and whips. Well…they ain't got whips here. They got something worse than whips.' 'What?' said Rincewind, looking slightly panicky. 'You'll find out.'

One presumes Cohen is talking about a culture of governmental acceptance, perhaps driven by a successful government-worshipping ideology. No doubt Mr Pratchett will let me know, once I push on further into the book. However, just as a clue, Cohen fills in Rincewind with a little more detail:

'Strange bloody country,' he said. 'Did you know there's a wall all round the Empire?' 'That's to keep…barbarian invaders…out…' [said Rincewind] 'Oh, yes, very defensive,' said Cohen sarcastically. 'Like, oh my goodness, there's a twenty foot wall , dear me, I suppose we'd better just ride off back over a thousand miles of steppe and not, e.g., take a look at the ladder possibilities inherent in that pine wood over there. Nah. It's to keep people in. And rules? They've got rules for everything. No-one even goes to the privy without a piece of paper.'

Sounds like a day in your average modern NHS canteen, then.

Alas, that is as far as I have reached. But just like all his other books, so far, Mr Pratchett has got me hooked. Now we could discuss whether Mr Pratchett is a closet libertarian. But unless the man himself is reading this, and would like to put me right, I think there is very little doubt about that, especially if we draw a veil over the co-written Science of Discworld books. I am personally far more struck by Cohen's observation about the Great Wall of Agatea.

Now for the whole of my life, up to precisely seven point four seconds ago, I had accepted the usual notion that both Hadrian's Wall, in the north of England, and the Great Wall of China, in …err… China, were about keeping out my ancestors, the barbarian Picts, and my more distant ancestors from my Ukrainian links, the barbarian Mongols.

But were both, instead, about keeping in the tax-paying populations of Imperial Rome and Imperial China? It has nagged my unconscious mind for years that the Great Wall of China just peters out, admittedly in a barren desert up against a deep ravine, rather than going down south to the Himalayas. As Cohen implies, would a horde of real barbarians really be unable to ride around its western edge or find a lightly-manned spot in the centre and simply climb over it? And the same goes for the Picts in ancient Scotland. For anyone who has been up on Hadrian's Wall, on a cold winter's night, it cannot be beaten for bleakness. And while those Roman legionaries from Aswan, in Egypt, kept themselves warm in the watchtowers, perhaps quite a contingent of hairy-armed Picts could have swarmed over a remote part of the wall, in the dark, and then made their way south to rape and pillage, just as they do in modern-day Carlisle, today.

But for ancient farmers and peasants, in both northern England and northern China, perhaps the thought of breaking past these stone barriers to find a non-taxed Mel Gibson-like anarchistic freedom north of the walls, or trying to encourage this freedom to come south, was a tad more challenging and the real reason behind the construction of these large and expensive border defences?

Was the imperial bureaucratic thinking, in both empires, along the lines of No Wall, No Taxes? We have the more modern creation of the Berlin wall to show us how the mind of the bureaucratic parasite can work when it is stressed by its slaves escaping. Were ancient parasitical minds any different?

In the meantime, while some of us may cogitate on that before rejecting the idea and re-accepting the orthodox position on walls keeping out barbarians, my advice is, get yourself a copy of The Colour of Magic and see how you get on. You will never see foot lockers in the same light again. Or librarians. Especially librarians.

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If you were to read a book a week, between the ages of 10 and 70, taking two weeks off a year for Christmas, give or take, this would give you an achievable target of about 3000 books to read in an average lifetime, before you would have to take that train to meet your Maker. Assuming fifteen hundred of these are strictly entertainment by Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Ian Fleming, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Frank Herbert, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Isaac Asimov et al, to get you through the night, and five hundred are by Robert Heinlein, Ayn Rand, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn et al, to blend some serious education with some palatable fiction, this leaves you with about a thousand strictly educational books to educate yourself with, about life, the universe, and everything.

Not many.

Now we could discuss what nine hundred and ninety nine of these books could be, in a must-be-read anti-statist canon. Books by Von Mises perhaps, or Rothbard, or Pinker, or Popper, or Hitler, or Marx, or even Hans-Hermann Hoppe. But there is one book which should come ahead of all these others, in my humble opinion, particularly for those who wish to understand the origins of the modern state and its calamitous works. And that book is The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli.

A major Florentine diplomat and part-time militia general around the turn of the sixteenth century, Machiavelli lived in an age of turbulence and Renaissance-inspired change, and astonished the world of international politics with his study of classical, mediaeval, and from his point of view, modern government, which he formulated in 'The Prince'. Its tenets became the substrate in which all of our own subsequent politicians have been swimming ever since, with its mixture of candour, violence, treachery, and skulduggery, a world in which a modern government can both mouth its belief in the rule of law and licence its agents to kill its enemies at will, wherever they may be, and however innocent they may be before this sanctified rule of law.

The book is simply astonishing.

I discovered it while browsing the Penguin Classics stall recently, in my local bookshop, where it cost a whole three pounds and fifty pence. I have been blown away by it ever since, almost forgetting to eat my Bakewell tart in a local tea shop as I devoured its initial pages. Almost, of course, but not quite. Just love those Bakewell tarts.

For anyone who has ever struggled to understand the power and tenacity of the modern state and the overwhelming force the modern state's politicians have over our lives, despite their legion shortcomings, numerous failures, and outright incompetence, everything becomes clear.

Machiavelli offers advice for George Bush on how he should conquer a Muslim state:

But if once the Turk has been vanquished and broken in battle so that he cannot raise new armies, there is nothing to worry about except the ruler's family. When that has been wiped out there is no one left to fear, because the others have no credit with the people.

So, capture Saddam Hussein and kill his sons. But once we achieve that, what do we do next with a former Muslim leader's country:

When states newly acquired as I said have been accustomed to living freely under their own laws, there are three ways to hold them securely: first, by devastating them; next, by going there and living there in person; thirdly, by letting them keep their own laws, exacting tribute, and setting up an oligarchy which will keep the state friendly to you.

So, set up an interim appointed government and eventual elections guaranteed to keep the interim appointed government in place, with good options on the oil supply made out to your business friends. But what do we do about a possibly resentful population?

Violence must be inflicted once and for all; people will then forget what it tastes like and so be less resentful. Benefits must be conferred gradually; and in that way they will taste better.

Ah, yes. Gradually re-establish the water and the electricity supplies, then link in the 'election' of your interim appointed government to coincide with further improvements, so as to keep this government in place and suitably disposed towards yourself.

But we should avoid blaming Machiavelli for our own modern world. It is our politicians who have created it, not this wonderful Florentine writer. He was just telling it like it was. Many of his views even coincided with our own:

The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms; and because you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow…Rome and Sparta endured for many centuries, armed and free. The Swiss are strongly armed and completely free.

His belief in the sanctity of arms would even have stood comparison with the National Rifle Association:

There is simply no comparison between a man who is armed and one who is not. It is unreasonable to expect that an armed man should obey one who is unarmed, or that an unarmed man should remain safe and secure when his servants are armed.

So next time you hear your local police calling themselves public servants, ask yourself who has the guns, and who has the power.

Machiavelli also kept little time for Utopians:

Many have dreamed up republics and principalities which have never in truth been known to exist; the gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done moves towards self-destruction rather than self-preservation.

So socialism is right out, with its insistence on some future wonder-world where all will become peace and love. Yeah, says Machiavelli. Right.

Above all though, as you speed through this short and riveting book, there is much which informs you of virtually every modern politician and his relations with those politicians around him. Take, for instance, and I wish somebody would, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, our own loveable anti-British rogues.

In the early nineties, when I was, shamefully, a Brownite, along with many in the Labour Party, it seemed inconceivable that our man would be bested by that lightweight Bambi prancing around in the guise of Tony Blair. Yet not only was our Great Dour Man bested, but absolutely shafted to within an inch of his metaphorical sporran. So how was this achieved? Now I know. Tony Blair read 'The Prince' and Gordon Brown forgot to. Take a look at this and think who it may remind you of in modern British politics:

A certain contemporary ruler, whom it is better not to name, never preaches anything except peace and good faith; and he is an enemy of both one and the other, and if he had ever honoured either of them he would have lost either his standing or his state many times over.

It gets better:

So it follows that a prudent ruler cannot, and must not, honour his word when it places him at a disadvantage and when the reasons for which he made his promise no longer exist…But one must know how to colour one's actions and to be a great liar and deceiver. Men are so simple, and so much creatures of circumstance, that the deceiver will always find someone ready to be deceived.

As well as much else to discover if you hand over your three pounds fifty pence to Penguin books, you get to find out Machiavelli even advised Tony Blair on how to react to the threat from Al-Qaeda, when they knocked down the Twin Towers:

A prince also wins prestige for being a true friend or a true enemy, that is, for revealing himself without any reservation in favour of one side against another. This policy is always more advantageous than neutrality…It is always the case that the one who is not your friend will request your neutrality, and that the one who is your friend will request your armed support.

So when America asks you to help them go to war and France asks you to desist, all you need to do is turn to 'The Prince' to find out what to do next. Marvellous.

I also know Gordon Brown has failed to read 'The Prince', because Machiavelli has plenty of advice for my favourite Chancellor of the Exchequer, which he has obviously failed to take:

He will be hated above all if, as I said, he is rapacious and aggressive with regard to the property…of his subjects.

Yes, Gordon. That's you he's talking about.

Machiavelli even outlines the entire seven years of Gordon Brown's spending programme, with its initial use of tight spending plans combined with the later unleashing of the financial floodgates, to wash the government service sector in billions and gazillions of lovely taxpayer cash:

If you want to sustain a reputation for generosity, therefore, you have to be ostentatiously lavish; and a prince acting in that fashion will soon squander all his resources, only to be forced in the end, if he wants to maintain his reputation, to lay excessive burdens on the people, to impose extortionate taxes, and to do everything else he can to raise money. This will start to make his subjects hate him, and, since he will have impoverished himself, he will be generally despised.

So Gordon, just read the Machiavelli if you want to be the Principal, or the Prince, or the Ruler. Just get out of our lives and do what the man says:

Then he must encourage his citizens so that they can go peaceably about their business, whether it be trade or agriculture or any other human occupation. One man should not be afraid of improving his possessions, lest they be taken away from him, or another deterred by high taxes from starting a new business.

If you wish to refuse this advice, Gordon, Machiavelli also knows what is going to happen to you next:

But as for how a prince can assess his minister, here is an infallible guide: when you see a minister thinking more of himself than of you, and seeking his own profit in everything he does, such a one will never be a good minister, you will never be able to trust him.

Tony Blair, the current British Prince and Discworld-style Patrician, will know what to do:

So a prince must not worry if he incurs reproach for his cruelty so long as he keeps his subjects united and loyal. By making an example or two he will prove more compassionate than those who, being too compassionate, allow disorders which lead to murder and rapine. These nearly always harm the whole community, whereas executions ordered by a prince only affect individuals.

So it's bye bye, Gordon, if you keep spoiling all of the Dear Leader's reform plans.

But Machiavelli offers more than just a wonderful analysis of political relations and how rival politicians should assess each other. He also offers lessons on how the future may go:

Here it should be noted that princes cannot escape death if the attempt is made by a fanatic, because anyone who has no fear of death himself can succeed in inflicting it; on the other hand, there is less need for a prince to be afraid, since such assassinations are very rare.

Osama Bin Laden is an educated man. I suspect he may have been reading 'The Prince', too.

All of the quotes above are just my personal favourites from the book. I am convinced you will find many of your own favourites in its slim 85 pages of quickly-read advice, written for a Renaissance ruler. It is a remarkable piece of work, driven by Machiavelli's classical scholasticism, his diplomatic successes, his military failures, his torture and imprisonment at the hands of his former master, and his eventual triumph and return to the court and inns of Florentine power.

Make sure you get George Bull's razored translation, in print form, though you may wish to go for W. K. Marriott's online version. Then get yourself a Bakewell tart and a cup of tea, before settling down to what I must now consider is the best book ever written on the nature of human political relations. Frightening.

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River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
Peter Hessler
HarperCollins, 2001

The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth
Arthur Waldron
Cambridge University Press, 1992

"If you read only one book about China, let it be this," says Jonathan Mirsky (whoever he is) on the cover of River Town, and, although I must have read fewer books on China than he has, I find it hard to disagree with him, at least if China today is the subject. Only Behind the Wall by Colin Thubron, comes to mind as a competitor, and even his more travelled account, just as China was opening up, is to some extent challenged by Hessler's journeys, done in his job vacations. But to understand China today, there is much that should be known about its past. To know the history of The Great Wall of China is to realise it was a great mistake, an exercise in institutionalised, bureaucratic xenophobia whose failure did not even teach a lesson to those who rendered it useless.

Peter Hessler was a Peace Corps worker, recruited to teach English Literature in a Teacher Training College in Fuling, a town far up the Yangtse, much of which will be flooded (to the resigned indifference of the inhabitants) when the Gorges Dams are built. The teaching medium was English, which the students had already learnt. They came directly from the peasantry (and had no wish to return to it) and were well-indoctrinated in communist philosophy and with rare exceptions did not officially question it. Communism turns out to be pretty much a veneer compared with the simple universal xenophobic nationalism manifested in, for example, the celebration of the return of Hong Kong, though Hessler comes across a realistic peasant who clearly knew why the colony was prosperous and what it would have been like if it had been Chinese for the last hundred years.

The only student who showed any open sign of dissidence was far from the brightest ("a loser"), who had, for some reason, though male, chosen a Western, female name, Rebecca (p. 176). This penchant for English names, followed, rather than preceded, by the Chinese family name, was very common. Some were conventional, like William Jefferson Foster (surely over-the-top?), Don, Jimmy, George, Anne, Linda or Daisy (for a boy), others not - such as Lazy ("I am lazy") and, after consultation, Mo Money. There are vignettes of the last three; as for Mo Money, Hessler cannot help commenting that money was a very open, even naive, measure of value. There was no concealment of what anything cost or what anybody earned - most people he encountered were surprised that he should take a job with such a small salary.

Although not part of his duties, Hessler made it his business to learn Chinese, finding that if he mastered Mandarin (officially pushed, with posters declaiming "Speak Mandarin!", a side-light on the universal comprehension of the written, as against the spoken, word) he found he could soon pick up the vernacular. Of course learning the language (and he had to pay to be taught) included learning the characters, and he was irked by a teaching method that ran entirely by reprimands rather than commendation. Let's not be too impressed: after all, missionaries had to do it, though admittedly taking much of their time over a year.

By the end of their two years, both Hessler and his colleague Adam Meier were able to sit, talk and joke in Chinese cafes, and become the recipients of confidences about their students' personal problems, though a mis-step in their recording of life in Fuling developed into a rather ugly incident (p. 380). Hessler had two advantages over the Chinese in Fuling: he was the best runner in the city and always won the annual long race, and he had a higher alcohol tolerance than any Chinese (Mongolids generally have a lower tolerance than Caucasoids), being thus able to outdo all others in the banquet competitive toasting. Sensing however the irritation this superiority provoked, he gave up both of these competitive activities. Also, running in the terrible, coal-smoke laden atmosphere was not at all good for his lungs. Most amusing story: forbidden by the College authorities to include any carols in a dramatic presentation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Scrooge appropriately greeted the substituted Communist pop-song The East is Red with "Bah, humbug!".

How much do tourists know and how much are they told about The Great Wall of China? Arthur Waldron’s double-debunking book would be a good one to read before they visit it. In the first place, the Great Wall, a name not used until relatively recently, is not a venerable structure, being mostly built during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and towards its close. In the second place, it was the product of a faulty strategy, failing in its purpose of keeping out the northern nomads. Waldron compares it to the Maginot Line, similarly incorrectly conceived and a failure.

It is interesting to know that the real problem with the nomads only began when they became horse-mounted "in the centuries just before . . . 221BC" (p. 32). This is a bit vague, but the date is the accession of the tyrannical emperor Ch'in Shih Huang (book-burner, anti-Confucianist and generally the bad guy of Chinese history). He is credited with building the first walls, but they were earth ramparts and certainly not permanent. Before and after his time, wall-building took place between the rival states of a disunited China.

In the times of the T'ang (618-906), the Yuan (1267-1368) and the Ch'ing (1644-1912), the boundaries of China were far north of any wall; in the case of the last two because these dynasties resulted from nomad (Mongol and Manchu) conquest. Earlier, the policy of the T'ang had also involved the end of wall-building. "Its fundamental strategic approach to the nomads differed from that of its predecessors" by becoming more cosmopolitan. As one emperor put it: "Since Antiquity all have honoured the Hua and despised the I and the Ti; only I have loved them both" (p. 47-8).

Yet this sensible policy lapsed whenever the "institutionalised" xenophobia of the Chinese intellectuals and literati dominated the dynasties, as when the T'ang fell and, later, the Ming ousted the Yuan. The policy of the Ming was particularly stubborn and foolish, dominated as it was by a Confucian bureaucracy for whom contempt of the nomads (the above I and Ti) was dogma. Since most wall-building took place in the Ming dynasty, Waldron concentrates on this period (pp. 72-164), from the failure of the first emperors to capture Karakorum and incorporate the steppe lands, through the debates on how to recover the potentially cultivable Ordos region, to the last attempts to wall off the approaches to Pekin, which the Manchus simply circumvented.

The attitude of continuous hostility to the nomads seems especially wrong-headed in being entirely negative, their requests for trade which would have certainly benefited both sides being flatly rejected, an attitude replicated centuries later when the completely sinicised Manchu Ch'ing rebuffed Western traders and governments. As far as policy discussion went between the rival court bureaucrats, it seems to have been confined to either advocating active warfare against the nomads, plainly too expensive, or defence. Because the walls and forts were built for permanence, stone-clad as distinct from the rammed earth of the earlier type, this too was expensive.

Waldron concludes with two chapters on the growth of modern attitudes to the wall, in fact, the growth of a myth. Oddly enough, this seems to have arisen first in the West, amongst other idealistic and ignorant nonsense about Chinese civilization propounded by eighteenth century French philosophes. It was noted that, when members of the Macartney Mission visited the wall in 1793, their Chinese escorts showed no interest in it. There is little classical literature about it, no especial name for it and, as mentioned, the so-called original builder of it, Ch'in Shih Huang, was held in odium by Chinese historians, though for other reasons. True to the tenets of the Cultural Revolution, Mao's Red Guards destroyed several hundred kilometres of it (p. 218). Yet, like other features of that period, this attitude was later reversed. "Most Chinese are proud of the Wall because they believe that it is something, perhaps the only thing, left from their ancient civilization that is truly world class" (p. 220). It is certainly an impressive human artefact, though probably not, as often stated, the only one visible from the moon.

Some readers may notice that Waldron has used the Wade-Giles romanization instead of pinyin; no reason is given but I imagine it is to be kind to those familiar with pre-1980 (?) literature and with them, as with me, it may well have made for easier reading.

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Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power
David Aikman
Regnery, 2003

"[W]e have realised the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. ... We don't have any doubt about this (p. 5)". Fifty three years after China went Communist, such is the view of a thirty-something Chinese social scientist in a top establishment in China's capital. The former Chinese President, Jiang Zeming, asked what would be his last decree if it could be enforced, grinned and (according to an anecdote which cannot be dismissed out of hand), said, "I would make Christianity the official religion of China" (p. 17).

The first remark may not come as a shock to those who know their Weber and Tawney and combine it with a thorough disillusionment with Marxism, the presumed state of our Beijing academic. The second suggests that the ex-President was aware of the political U-turn, early in the fourth century, of Constantine the Great, son of the colleague of the Emperor Diocletian, last of the great Roman persecutors of Christians.

Aikman does not ask us to regard these reports as more than straws in the wind, but his own investigations lead him to state: "China is in the process of becoming Christianised ... [i.e.] it is possible that Christians will constitute 20 to 30 percent of China's population within three decades" (p. 285). His conclusion results from an intensive period of travelling and interviewing within China during 2002 and 2003 and an interest and residence in China off and on during the last three decades, including a stint as TIME's chief in Beijing. He knows the language (though he also employs a translator) and, while plainly sympathetic to his subject, the state of Christianity in China today, is reticent regarding his own religious beliefs.

China was mainly evangelised during what has been called "China's Open Century", 1850-1950, by missionaries from Europe and North America, both Protestant and Catholic, a religious division that has remained ever since, with little interaction, positive or negative. The Protestants were less divided amongst themselves than one might suppose, since their evangelical tenets, tending to be Bible-based and fundamentalist, were held more in common by workers in the field than by their co-religionists at home. Their converts having taken on the same guise, have become united in a way the denominations that engendered them can never be. Their loose, non-hierarchical organization facilitates the spreading of their beliefs since every member, according to his or her commitment and talent, may do so. Catholics were in a more difficult position, with a need for ordained priests to minister to the lay believers. It was admitted by them that Protestant numbers had grown faster than theirs, almost certainly for this reason. It would be fair to say that Jesus in Beijing concentrates on the Protestants; the Catholics are confined to a Chapter (Ch. 11) to themselves.

Both Christian branches have been split by the attempts of the Communist Party at all levels to control them. The result for both is "official", communist licensed, "patriotic" churches and clandestine, illegal "house" churches. The dissident Protestants see the officially recognized pastors, and their flocks, as compromised by association with a party and government dedicated to atheism, often suspect them (in some cases rightly) of actually being party members and therefore not true Christians, and disagree with their tendency to a "liberal" theology. The Catholic position is more clear-cut: the official hierarchy had to repudiate its allegiance to the Pope, though it is generally understood that by now, openly or secretly, all Catholics acknowledge the Pope as the head of the Church. However, relations between the "official" and the "house" churches have not been unrelentingly hostile, and there were times when both were persecuted, particularly during the Cultural Revolution (1966-70), when all suffered alike, and all "official" church buildings were closed and given over to other uses. As for numbers, these are very nearly impossible to estimate. With 15 million Protestant and 6 million Catholic baptized members of officially recognized churches, it is claimed that "house church" membership is three to four times that. In 1949, when there was no need of concealment, Catholics were numbered at over three million and Protestants at rather less than a million. Most of the growth seems to have taken place since 1979, when persecution greatly relaxed with the rise to power of the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping.

Back in 1950, after all missionaries had been expelled, taking with them their spiritual and financial support, "to many Chinese Christians, and certainly to many foreign observers, it seemed that Christianity was going to vanish ... The assumption turned out to be wrong, but it took quite a few years before that became clear" (p. 45). They may all have underestimated the extent to which Christianity had cut its umbilical cord to "the West" and become truly indigenous. Aikman gives moving biographical accounts of several of the "patriarchs", born in the early years of the century, who were still living near its end. These men suffered greatly - some with harsh imprisonment for more than 20 years - for evangelising independently of the officially recognized, registered Three Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), which they refused to
join from a mixture of theological and political reasons. Of these the the most interesting, impressive and charismatic was Wang Mingdao (1900-91), the first of the patriarchs described in Chapter 3, whom Aitken met and interviewed in 1985.

"Understand two men, and you will understand Chinese Christianity ... Wang Mingdao and Ding Guangxun," an old Chinese Christain told another, unnamed reporter not long ago. (p.143). Throughout Chapters 7 and 8 Aikman gives considerable attention to Ding Guangxun (born 1915) the head of TSPM, who flourished at the same time as the patriarchs were suffering and seems to have been only mildly inconvenienced during the Cultural Revolution. Not unnaturally, the persecuted Christians question his Christianity and even claim he was a Communist before the Revolution, though Ding has denied it to Aikman himself (pp. 143-6). In
fact, there is little need to see Ding as in any way distinguishable from many a Western cleric - and he is, after all, a consecrated Anglican bishop. "I know that socialism is the best social system to have appeared in human history" (p. 175), he has said, an unexceptional sentiment amongst bishops here. Just as unexceptional would be, perhaps, a bishop preaching a sermon in a seminary at Easter without mentioning the Resurrection (p. 173). But in Nanjing, the students objected. On the other hand, the loose, relatively non-hierarchical relationships between believers seems to mean that there is little difficulty in yielding prominent positions to women, who tend to outnumber the men by more than two to one, though, as with most societies, Christianity as a movement remains male-dominated.

Who are these Chinese Christians? It would be absurd to say they are an organized body with uniform beliefs and opinions on everything, yet Aikman's book leads to certain generalisations. They regard themselves as truly patriotic, tending to support their government politically, with the exception, perhaps, of being very pro-American and pro-Israel. Both preferences stem from their religious, rather than their political beliefs. Their theology particularly with the "house church" Protestant Christians, is Biblical and fundamentalist, and the churches with which they are linked in the United States are their equivalents. To some extent the reason for this is that fundamentalists see evangelism as an urgent matter - to save souls from hell - in a way that their "liberal" co-religionists, with their less exclusive attitude to the matter of salvation, do not. Such help, spiritual and material, as does come from foreign Christians, will tend to come from such evangelicals, who are mostly Americans. Part of the fundamentalist package, millenarianism - the belief in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to reign for a thousand years, regarded as probably an imminent event - includes a necessary, though uncertain role for the Jews. Other features widespread amongst Chinese Christians are the "speaking in tongues" and claims of miraculous healing and exorcism. Aikman does not mention it but it seems fair to add that such Christians will reject Darwinism. If, as seems likely, they adhere to the Christian morality brought to China by the missionaries, they will also preach chastity before marriage and fidelity within it, and abhor homosexuality and abortion. All these are positions that have long been compromised or abandoned in Western Christendom, but in China would be welcomed by any government as desirable virtues, apart from, presumably, the last.

It is important to emphasise that Christians of this kind do not have a political or social programme and that their activities are directed to the spiritual salvation of themselves and of others. They would not regard it as right to manifest "respect for other religions", in our current jargon, or believe there are many paths to salvation. Aikman heard the wish frequently expressed that Chinese Christians should evangelize the Muslim world. To this end, numbers of Chinese Christians are learning Arabic. "Muslims prefer Chinese to Americans. They don't like Americans very much," explained one of them. There is a considerable Chinese diaspora and within it, Christians seem to have even more impact and gain more converts than they do back home. And some of the diaspora is in Muslim lands.

Secular readers will approach this book with a good deal of caution and finish it more informed on a subject they almost certainly knew very little about. Though scepticism about its thesis - "that Christianity will change the nature of China in many different ways over the next several decades, and in doing so will change the world in which we live (p. 292)" must be justified, it cannot be dismissed out of hand. Every Chinese, in his heart, knows that Marxism has failed, and though that may not mean he is ready to adopt another set of beliefs, many must feel there is an ideological vacuum that cannot be filled by capitalism alone. It is the awareness of this that causes some Chinese intellectuals to call themselves, or perhaps more accurately, be called by others, "Cultural Christians", about whom there is a very interesting discussion (pp. 249-252). Such persons would perhaps like to have the "unintended consequences" claimed for Christianity by Deepak Lal, in his book of that name, without subscribing to its beliefs. It would take us too far from the subject of this book to debate whether this is possible. And it should be read for simpler, more human reasons.

It is a pity that few, if any, books on China give guidance on the pronunciation of transliterated Chinese words and names. The most obvious (and unexplained) stumblingblocks are the assignment of the redundant Latin letters Q and X to the sounds Ch and Hs. A (British) academic said to me: "Those who know will know and the others will just have to muddle along with it." He also explained that the Chinese cultural authorities felt that if the transliteration got too straightforward and accurate, the Chinese themselves might ask "Why do we have to learn all these characters?" When the officially-approved Northern "Mandarin" dialect becomes universal an answer will become more urgent.

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Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora
Ronald Segal
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001

Race and Slavery in the Middle East: A Historical Enquiry
Bernard Lewis
OUP; 1994

To treat this subject it is really necessary, as Segal has done, to run through the history of Islam from Western India to Western Africa, for during the whole of the period of more than 1300 years black slaves have been acquired and traded increasingly with the spread of Islam - indeed, it might be said that one reason for the spread of Islam was trade, of which slaves were a considerable part.

In Islam's Black Slaves Segal makes very clear the difference between the Islamic trade, and the use to which it was put, and the transatlantic trade that brought blacks to the Americas. He has already written a book about the latter subject, The Black Diaspora, and it is probable that he regards it as the greater crime. Slaves in the Islamic world were much more for domestic use and while in the Americas the imports were predominantly male, within Islam females outnumbered males by two to one, probably (though this is not mentioned explicitly) because slave-raiding involved killing the men to secure the women and children (as opposed to slave-trading with the black kingdoms on the African West Coast). Segal claims, however, that though the journeys of the slave-caravans were terrible, once the slaves had, so to speak, arrived at their final destination, their treatment was relatively humane.

The whole system reflected the fact that slavery had been part of the Old World from time immemorial, with white slaves antedating black. Islam had rules about slavery; indeed, only non-Muslims were supposed to be enslaved at all, though this law was often broken, especially with regard to North African "white" Moors slave-raiding the Islamicised African kingdoms to the south. Freeing slaves was also common and while girls were sold for concubinage, their children by their masters were born free and marriage, though into a polygamous household, was frequent. Large scale use of slaves agriculturally or industrially hardly took place and seems to have been abandoned after rebellions of black (Zanj) slaves employed on the land around Basra in the ninth century. One feature not found in the Americas was castration to provide eunuchs; particularly for blacks this was a radical operation, removing penis, scrotum and testicles. One estimate is that in Ottoman times every eunuch "represented at the very least 200 Soudanese done to death". (p. 156)

There is absolutely no evidence that any opposition to slavery as an institution ever arose within Islam. The reduction and final abolition first of the slave trade and then of slavery itself came about as the world-wide dominance of the European powers, with Britain in the forefront, impinged on the Ottoman Empire, which in theory held sway politically and theocratically over the whole area involved. Segal gives the impression that during the nineteenth century, despite pressure from Britain and others, the traffic in slaves actually increased because of the general expansion of exploration and trade and the greater availability of firearms. He does not withold credit where credit is due: Lord Lugard's settling of the problem of slavery in Nigeria illustrates what could be done when the British were in untrammelled occupation of the territory. However, he cannot help adding that "freedom from slavery was not freedom as the British applied it to themselves (p. 180)." The French seemed to have had greater difficulty but the impression left is that their commitment was less wholehearted.

The penultimate chapter deals with the remnants of slavery today, or more precisely, since the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It is probably not an oversimplification to say that these occur where Arabs confront blacks. Although Segal often emphasises the non- and even anti-racist tenets of Islam, he cannot avoid stating the fact that now, at any rate, racism is rife in the Arab world, particularly in the Sudan and Mauretania, where slavery is also more or less openly in being.

The last chapter, "America's Black Muslim Backlash", should belong, it might seem, more properly to Segal's book on transatlantic slavery, where presumably it is missing. It is a sorry tale, where fantasy leads to nightmare, but at least so far the violence is more rhetorical than actual.

The forerunner of Bernard Lewis's Race and Slavery in the Middle East goes back to 1969 and its conception and gestation even earlier. First delivered as a lecture that year, an expanded version was then published in Encounter of August 1970, then, further expanded, published as a book in New York in 1971 under the title Race and Color in Islam; a French translation was issued in 1982 with more additions. What we now have is a much revised, expanded and recast work issued in 1990. This paperback was published in 1992. Notes and appendices, of impressive erudition (which I have rather skipped), are equal to about three-quarters of the text. It should certainly be give equal attention with Segal's book and there are some very fine coloured illustrations, well reproduced from manuscripts extending from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. If this review must be regarded as an appendage to Segal's Islam's Black Slaves, it is because it was written several years ago, when my notes on books I had read were briefer.

The author, a venerable authority on the Near and Middle East, using many Arab and Persian sources in the original languages, traces the connexion between slavery and status, both in theory and practice, in the Islamic world from the 7th century to the present. Until quite late in the 19th Century, when the Russians closed the Caucasus route, white slaves were imported; after this, black slaves became preponderant. On the whole Lewis demolishes the somewhat idealised (and guilt-generated) Western perception of Islamic slavery as being more benign that its Western counterpart and its culture non-racist. He demonstrates that freed blacks rarely rose to high positions and quotes anti-black opinions about it when they did. In exemplary anecdotes, even the good black is usually only a simple, pious person and sometimes his spiritual reward is to be turned white. Mention by Muslim apologists of the benefit to the black of the acquisition of eternal salvation makes me wonder how much this is, or has been, a defence of Western slavery and, indeed, what the attitude of devout blacks is, and was, to the harsh means that introduced them to Christianity, or Islam, for that matter.

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Unintended Consequences: The Impact of Factor Endowments, Culture, and Politics on Long-Run Economic Performance (Ohlin Lectures)
Deepak Lal
MIT Press, 1998

I felt I had to read this book twice to fully appreciate its message, yet it is not difficult to read, indeed to do so is easy and a pleasure. It must have been equally a pleasure to attend the lectures on which it is based. But a large accumulation of facts, each one of which can be seen to be relevant to the thrust of the book, are difficult for the reader (or anyway, by me) to hold ready to slot into a logical structure to be reproduced in a satisfying synthesis in the memory when the book is finished.

As for the "unintended consequences" of the title, these are the results of social structures, political motives and individual actions which often have quite different aims: "We have known since Adam Smith that an unplanned but coherent and seemingly planned social system can emerge from the independent actions of many individuals and in which the final outcomes can be very different from those intended. All this, I hope, is uncontroversial," writes the author (p. 7). Well, I hope so too - but "we" needed Hayek and the collapse of Communism to convince a lot of other people.

Lal seeks to find an answer to the question why the explosive development that characterised the Industrial Revolution took place in Western Europe, though he merely mentions Great Britain as its origin, without further analysis (p. 20). Why not in the other great areas of civilization - India, China or Islam? He proceeds to examine the civilizations that arose after the development of agriculture from about 10,000 BC; pastoralism as a parallel development is mentioned but left undiscussed, presumably because it is basically predatory on and if successful, assimilated into neighbouring agricultural civilizations.

Such civilizations typically reach an optimum through what Lal labels Smithian growth, where greater efficiency is generated by division of labour and by trade, capitalism being the result (according to the precepts of Adam Smith). They are, however, limited by having only human and animal power and organic, rather than mineral sources of fuel. The breakthrough to Industrial Civilization, technologically based with mechanical power and virtually unlimited energy from mineral resources, Lal calls Promethean growth and this was evolved only in Western Europe. The question is: why?

Lal surveys other civilizations, both in time and geographically, to clarify this. The answer seems to be that societies evolve to where the governing class, indeed, in a sense the whole non-producing class, including the military, the priesthood, servants and hangers-on, has achieved a state from which it cannot envisage a change for the better. Lal calls this the "high equilibrium trap" (p. 34). The ideology supporting such a society (in fact, any society) he terms its Cosmological Belief, something rather broader than its religion, though that is often its basis. This, in the case of India, is the caste system; in China, Confucianism, embodied in the mandarinate, with its contempt for trade and technology, while in Islam, the rational, secular, intellectual process has lost out against religious dogmatism. Though this summary is an over-simplification, it can be seen that in each of these societies, merchants and financiers held low status and their property (like everyone else's) had low security from the "predatory state" (another of Lal's useful concepts) which renders any capital accumulation difficult if not impossible.

There are some points that come to mind. The success of any Smithian growth may be masked as population growth, so that a larger number of people have the same (albeit low) standard of living. This was the case with both India and China. Although Lal treats India as a "cosmologically" Hindu, caste-ridden society in its failure to achieve Promethean growth, Islam, which conquered much of it, added its responsibility for stultification. He also dismisses "the nationalist hagiography that there were any prospects for indigenous Promethean growth emerging in medieval India ... blocked by British colonialism" (p. 35). China seems to have suffered from being too united, too self-sufficient (and so with scant interest in the outside world) and too successfully centralised. Thus when coastal traffic was obviated by the building of the Grand Canal, the navy was simply abolished, though it had explored and dominated the seas as far as Africa in the fourteenth century. Unlike Europe, whenever China did fragment, it either descended into anarchy until reunited, or the successor states kept the old ethos. Technologically, it could have achieved "take-off"; it had, for example, discovered coke-smelting in the eleventh century, and it produced more, and cheaper iron then than Europe managed to do until the end of the eighteenth century. This situation, "one of the great historical problems" is known as the "Needham problem", forced upon, and named after, the biochemist turned historian, whose massive, multivolume work costs more in price and time than the general reader would be willing to spend on it (p. 42). It can only have been the mindset of the Chinese governing class, a high-prestige, meritocratic, self-recruiting bureaucracy, that prevented the population it ruled, with its inventiveness, political security and size, from exploding into Promethean growth. In a later chapter (Ch. 8) Lal explains the Smithian growth of an even more isolated Japan and how its decentralised social structure prepared it for imitative Promethean growth when it encountered the West.

When he comes to consider Europe, Lal prefers to identify this ultimately successful civilization with Christendom, and Western Christendom at that, as distinct from the Eastern Orthodox branch. His search for the origins of its success goes further back than "that moment of self-generating expansion ... in the late eleventh century" (p. 81), to an imposition of papal dominance which, in safeguarding church property, altered the structure of the family from the extended type to the nuclear. "The temporary or permanent delay in marriage ... allowed the West uniquely to have some economic surplus available for investment growth, however small, which was not eaten up by population growth" (p. 87). One of the many myths that Marx and Engels helped put into circulation (p. 86) was that the Industrial Revolution brought the nuclear family into existence; in fact, it seems more likely that the reverse was the case. The evolution of the nuclear family led to Individualism, a social concept Lal considers sufficiently important to merit a whole chapter (Ch. 6), though it might be seen to be a portmanteau for all philosophical changes brought about by the Renaissance and Reformation. In a fairly long discussion (pp. 89-94) Lal also involves the Western guilt" culture as another (and related) factor in our progress to Promethean growth, for "without the fear of purgatory and the hope of the Last Judgment, the Western legal tradition could not have come into existence" (p. 94).

While such sociological factors are valuable insights, the practical, commercial reasons for the safeguarding of property rights are not emphasised, and such discussion as there is on the emergence of states solidly based on their financial and mercantile classes is relegated to a very technically-worded Appendix. Florence and Venice do not appear in the Index, or any of their rivals, and while the Spanish and the Portuguese never developed commercial empires, since their bureaucracies successfully suppressed their mercantile classes, the Dutch and the English certainly did. It may be that Lal considers these empires to be merely products of Smithian growth, with their own high equilibrium traps and the "predatory state" apparatuses for diverting profits away from further useful investment; if so, he has failed to describe and explain the Promethean growth that followed. I cannot help feeling that this is a serious omission, for it implies that Lal believes that the Western European civilization he has designated as successful moved smoothly, uninterruptedly and uniformly from Smithian to Promethean growth. This was definitely not the case, and the origin of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, precursor of Promethean growth worldwide, requires some explanation which is not given here. This is surely important even though, as Lal points out, the growth mechanism can be adapted to other societies with different Cosmological Beliefs (p. 175). And, it must be said, without undergoing the painful journey of discovery.

Leaving this aside, or taking it for granted, Lal examines the prospects for proper, capitalist advance in the economies of India and China, following the demonstrated failure of Fabian socialism in the one and Communism in the other. For this Lal borrows a catchphrase from The Economist: "commitment [by the people at the top], competence [enough educated people] and consensus [the general population willing to try or put up with change]" (p. 131). "Competence" is the only component undoubtedly present in both. Lal notes that: "It might appear that a dictatorship committed to reform would find it easier to do so that a democracy" a situation that favours China. For the political and intellectual elite of India there is a sort of nostalgic "Nehruvianism", less likely to be paralleled by nostalgic Mao-ism in China. Again, the general population in China may be open to change, while in India the horde of small bureaucrats, linked to caste and status, will be more recalcitrant in accepting redundancy. The remaining East Asian economies are dealt with only in passing.

It must be said that there are considerable, presumably deliberate, omissions. Islam does not come in for a second look after its original historical analysis, beyond Lal's pointing out that where progress has occurred - Malaysia, Egypt and Turkey - the state has been separated from religion, and everywhere there are signs of an Islamic backlash. Africa, with four references in the index to mere mentions, is not discussed at all. Latin America has produced many examples of efforts repeatedly aborted for reasons crying out to be explained or even discovered. It may be that in a book and lecture series dealing with reasons for economic progress and success, a digression into stagnation and failure would merely distract the reader from its basically constructive, even optimistic message.

Perhaps too optimistic? No misgivings are expressed about the results of Promethean growth, and by these I do not mean the jeremiads of those Lal dismisses as Ecofundamentalists. Yet success brings its problems, just as does failure. Some are hinted at, such as the claim for "rights" (p. 157) and the weakening of the concept of individualism. The modern "predatory state" can be just as predatory in the guise of the welfare state, abetted by a democratic process which tends to hoodwink the voter into believing he can get someone else to pay the expenses for his health, education and old age. It may even be that the abolition of the extended family so long ago may be exacting a penalty at last in enforcing the perception on parents that the rearing of children brings no direct benefits, resulting in the withering away of the very society, the welfare state, to which they look instead for support. An "Unintended Consequence" indeed! Remember: the Greeks had a word for it - Irony.

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Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism
Peter Schweizer
Doubleday, 2002

"It's surprising what you can accomplish when no one is concerned about who gets the credit." This lettered sign stood on Reagan's desk during his presidency and since it reflected his attitude, he cannot have worried much that his own part in the downfall of Communism has been seriously underestimated, a judgement which Peter Schweizer labours to correct in this book. For its theme, Reagan's War, was the war against communism. By leaving out other aspects and events which did not touch on it – Israel, the Palestinians, the Lebanon, the Falklands, or the home economy – an exaggerated impression may have been given of Reagan's singlemindedness. Even the inclusion of the assassination attempt, so nearly successful, is with an emphasis on Reagan's belief that he had been preserved by God to conduct this war.

Reagan began political life as a Roosevelt-admiring Democrat. He had been aware of the attempt by communists to dominate and subvert the American film industry as early as 1946 and become involved in countering it, almost certainly sidetracking his career as a film star. The Korean War (1950-3) reinforced his attitude and, while still a Democrat he campaigned for Eisenhower, though disappointed later by his lukewarm anti-communism, and even less impressed by Nixon. This was also the time when anti-anti-communism became intellectually fashionable, Reagan encountering it when he was hired by General Electric to host and act in GE Theatre on television. Travelling round the country as the company's roving ambassador to its plants and business contacts he was able to give speeches entirely based on his own views, unhampered by any kind of censorship. Schweizer distances Reagan from Senator McCarthy, who, he mentions, was initially supported by John F. Kennedy and never censured by him (p. 37). Reagan met Nancy Davis, who became his second wife (after his first wife Jane Wyman left and divorced him) through being asked to exonerate her of communist connections, apparently a case of mistaken identity.

Reagan parted from General Electric in 1962; his attacks on the Kennedy Administration were inconvenient when GE was being investigated for price-fixing by the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. Also GE Theatre was, perhaps inevitably, losing its popularity. But he was still in television theatre, and this was the year of his last movie, The Killers. It was also the year in which he met Senator Barry Goldwater, and found they had much in common, politically and in their love of the outdoor Western way of life, typified by horse-riding. Reagan's fluent speech-making particularly impressed Goldwater, as well as the Republicans who were running him for President. His uncompromisingly anti-communist speech on the eve of the 1964 election made a tremendous impression nationally, but Goldwater still lost in a landslide to Johnson.

Johnson, and Nixon who replaced him in 1968, never fought to win in Vietnam, as Reagan urged, nor does Schweizer suggest that the US public would have been willing to try. The policy of both Republican and Democrat administrations was to accommodate to the Communist powers, in the belief that both the USSR and China would wish to reciprocate, and also help them to some sort of compromise in Vietnam. In fact, the USSR planned and carried out expansion on all fronts, military and nuclear, naval and territorial in Africa and Latin America and finally, Afghanistan.

Reagan was on the sidelines nationally, but had to face local subversion during his terms as governor of California from 1966 to 1974, during riots, takeovers and sit-ins by students on the Berkeley campus. He put himself forward as a Republican candidate for the presidency in 1968, but the party preference for Nixon was overwhelming and Reagan supported him loyally from then on, and even undertook missions for him to Taiwan, South Vietnam and South Korea. He did, however, challenge Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976, but lost again. The Carter presidency that followed probably saw US international status at its nadir, culminating in the fall of the Shah of Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Reagan, who this time had won the Republican nomination fairly easily, now beat Carter soundly to enter the White House in 1981.

To put it simply, Reagan now reversed the US foreign policy of detente of more than a decade. "Going against the advice of the majority of his cabinet, Reagan commenced the largest peacetime military buildup in history." (p. 140) Schweizer does not record how he got the enormous appropriations through Congress. His strategy was not so much one of direct confrontation, as of competition: to keep up, the USSR would end up bankrupt. The bill that Reagan ran up for the USSR to pay is estimated as $36-$44bn per annum. (p. 284) "They cannot vastly increase their military productivity because they've already got their people on a starvation diet," he explained. (p. 141) This strategy, it would be fair to say, did not have popular support, and as the year 1984 for re-election came, he lost support for it from past presidents Ford and Nixon, from Republican business men and State Governors and even key members within his cabinet, but, as his National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane commented, "The president would have willingly lost the second election if it came down to changing his Soviet policy." (p. 229) Reagan so often persisted in driving through his own policies that it is difficult to see where the idea came from that he was some sort of manipulated puppet, or even went with the flow of some inevitable train of events.

If the home opposition was considerable, to the extent that the Kremlin hoped to rely on it, that of the left in Europe was nearly hysterical. From released KGB and other archives Schweizer documents how much the USSR and East European governments funded the peace movements both in Europe and the USA, as well as terrorists such as the Red Army Faction in West Germany. As a quid pro quo, as it were, Reagan saw to it that arms in large quantities were sent to the anti-communist resistence in Afghanistan. His suggestions for a Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), while mocked by the opposition at home as "Star Wars", is now known to have really frightened the Russians. That all this might have risks and that Dr Strangelove was actually living in Moscow is illustrated by an anecdote of the applause at a vodka-lubricated party there for a general's suggestion that the nuclear button should be
pressed now before it was too late. (p. 243)

Gorbachev owed his selection [as Soviet leader by the Politburo] to the pressures Reagan was exerting on the Soviet system," Schweizer claims. (p. 245) In fact, Gorbachev, recommended by the veteran Soviet politician Gromyko as a new man "with a nice smile but ... teeth of iron", failed, with his glasnost and perestroika, to reform communism and provide both guns and butter. Although the two leaders seemed to have hit it off in personal terms – "Gorbachev immediately started to like Reagan," recalled a Soviet diplomat (p. 254) – Reagan refused all Soviet disarmament offers, particularly in exchange for abandoning SDI, an irony in that the US has never followed it up.

Communism collapsed after Reagan left office at the end of 1988. In 1989 the system fell like a pack of cards; the USSR could no longer support the East European regimes and first Poland, then Hungary and Czechoslovakia and, in November, East Germany replaced their communist governments, and the Berlin Wall came down. "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Reagan had demanded, speaking at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987. In due course the Soviet Union itself disintegrated and Gorbachev was swept away in the debris of what he had tried to prop up. Doubtless in his comfortable academic position, TIME's "Man of the Decade" is explaining away the unfortunate accident that brought about this catastrophe.

Reagan is now a tragic victim of Alzheimer's dementia, a fate bravely announced by himself and given in the last document printed in Reagan In His Own Hand. It is now up to his critics and detractors (and there are plenty of these, vide the Introduction, pp. 1 - 4) to assess his record and agree with, or refute what the Chairman of Solidarity declared in Warsaw in 1989: "Reagan was the main author of the victory of the free world over the ‘evil empire'." (p. 278)

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The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers 1804–1999
Misha Glenny
Granta Books, 1999

Though well-written and well-organised, its length (662 pages +) and the nature of its subject make this a book to be ploughed through, as one switches from one depressing topic to another. Yet Glenny's attitude to it all is a little difficult to fathom. On the last page he complains of the "long periods of neglect [when] the Balkan countries have badly needed the engagement of the great powers. Yet the only country to demonstrate a sustained interest ... was Nazi Germany during the 1930s." Some model!

Certainly, left to themselves, every ethnic group (Jews excepted?) behaved badly, both internally and externally. Just how badly the book is disgustingly, though not exactly surprisingly, informative. Yet this does not seem to arouse in Glenny any doubts as to the desirability of mixed-ethnic communities. Contrast this with Spain, where the essence of the reconquest there was the homogenising of the population, with the separation of Portugal, and the imperfect assimilation of the Basques exceptions tending to prove the rule that this uniformity was ultimately beneficial. Neither the Ottoman conquest, nor its liberation homogenised the Balkans. Much of it was Slav, the exceptions being Romanian, Albanian and Greek speakers, with a good deal of intermingling, a large Jewish community in Salonica, descended from Spanish expellees, the whole top-dressed with a Turkish ruling class and military. Not that being Slav in any way prevented mutual hatred between Serb, Croat, Bulgar and Macedonian.

Glenny has chosen 1804 as the date when, with the Serbian revolt, the Ottoman Empire started to disintegrate territorially. Attempts to halt this by progressive" well-meaning Sultans failed because any liberalisation encouraged it, while the economic levers were not in Turkish hands. After relatively discrete parts of the Empire had achieved independence or autonomy - Serbia, Greece, the Rumanian principalities and Bulgaria - the rest of the peninsula was land to be squabbled over. The impression is that the Turks were not major contributors to the turmoil, nor the Islamicised Bosnians and Albanians they left behind.

It is difficult to imagine how the great powers could have intervened more effectively than they did. After all, they brought about the independence of Greece (in nuclear form) in 1830, and a settlement of the Bulgarian border at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, after Russia had done most of the fighting. Not that Glenny seems very pleased with the Congress, loading it rather heavily with responsibility for future events in Afghanistan, Bosnia and the Sudan and for the scramble for Africa (p. 150). Admittedly either Austria or Russia could have tried to establish a Balkan protectorate, but why, except to keep the other out? And Britain would never allow Russia control of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. There was nothing to be gained from a political occupation of a region where all the natives would turn hostile. Economically there were no resources to be exploited or with which to set up an industrial base. Building infrastructure, such as railways, could be, and was, seen as a strategic threat, by the Ottomans or the successor states, or both.

In each of his eight Chapter-Periods, Glenny makes a repeat visit to each separate area, discovering depression and despair in every one, with assassinations for the prominent and massacres for the common people unlucky to live on the wrong side of an ethnic line or be a minority in a particular place. The only exception seems to be Slovenia, which managed to break away from Yugoslavia without much fuss. As man on the spot, Glenny must be regarded as an authority on Yugoslav disintegration and great power intervention, yet there is something contrary-minded about his castigation of America for not intervening sooner in Bosnia and trying to do so just by bombing "without risking the lives of their service men and women" (p. 640). As with recent responses to its intervention in Iraq, the US position seems to be damned if you don't, damned if you do. Leaving aside the idea that the Americans might consider the bombing option (as also followed in Kosovo) a reasonable preference,surely the facts are that the initial EU reaction was that this was a European dispute and as such should be left to Europeans to take care of. Yet he makes no mention of the inactivity of the Dutch UN "peacekeepers" which preceded, if it did not permit, the massacre of Muslims by Serbs in the so-called "safe haven" of Srebrenica (p. 650). As for the Serbs rallying round Milosevic when he got them bombed, it must be a sign of the times that it is NATO and the Americans that Glenny seems to blame for the irrational behaviour of the Serbs (p. 658).

This is not a very gracious review for a massive, painstaking and brilliant historical survey, but it is a tribute to the fact that its judgements provoke thought and, to some extent, dissent. Incidentally, Glenny uses the presumably Slavic spelling and lettering with the appropriate diacritical marks, but gives no indication as to their pronunciation.

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Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait
Midge Decter
Regan Books, 2003

This sympathetic study can almost be regarded as a pre-emptive strike from the right from someone whose neo-con credentials are impeccable. Her personal motives or incentives to write the book are not clearly and explicitly given, but the Prelude, which comes between the Acknowledgements and the Introduction, gives perhaps a hint that Rumsfeld's appeal to women, even at age 70, might have something to do with it. Perhaps again she views him at the right distance; she has known him for several years, certainly not intimately and through official contact. The inside of the dustjacket has a sub-title, not found elsewhere: The Making of an American Icon. The man himself is not given to self-revelation and the impression is that he knows when best to keep his mouth shut - and those of any others that might be tempted to speak for him.

Born in 1932 and therefore "too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam" (p. 178), the chief influences on his early life, though indirect, were the Depression and World War II; his father, who worked as an estate agent, first for a firm, then for himself, went into the US Navy at a mature age and his mother followed him with her family to each port nearest his assignment. Donald was successful at school; though too lightly built for American football, he became a champion wrestler, continuing to be one when he followed his father into the Navy.

He went to Princeton ( "the most military of the Ivy League colleges" – p. 31) on a scholarship, studying "government and politics" and passed into the US naval air arm, also on a scholarship and hence as an officer, marrying his schoolmate Joyce and introducing her into the same peripatetic way of life his parents had had. During his years of service, 1955-7, he became a pilot trainer and then went to Washington to enter politics as a Republican, working first as a staff assistant for a member of the House of Representatives.

He was elected to Congress himself in 1962. He served for six years (3 terms) and was then invited by Nixon in 1968 to join the Executive in the White House. He was put in charge of the Office for Economic Opportunity, about as far left an organisation as a Republican could stomach and the setting up of which he'd opposed – but Nixon had, after all, been elected after the student riots and general mayhem that concluded Lyndon Johnson's presidency. Even worse was to be put in charge of a Cost of Living Council, a thinly disguised Prices and Incomes Enforcement Body, a concept to which he was totally opposed. Neither of these bodies, both totally of the contemporary Zeitgeist, would work – or survive.

Soon after Nixon was re-elected in 1972, he appointed Rumsfeld US Ambassador to NATO, who thus avoided contamination with the messiness associated with Nixon's having to resign in 1974 because of Watergate. He was recalled to the White House by Ford, an old friend, first to sort out the new presidential team, then to become Ford's Chief of Staff and finally his Secretary for Defence. He was thus involved with the policy of detente with the USSR and the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), but though loyal to Ford's initiatives, clashed with Kissinger about how far to follow them up, making Kissinger characterise him as "ruthless", i.e., someone who stood up to him and carried his point.

Carter and the Democrats came in in 1976 and Rumsfeld, leaving Washington, went successfully into business, rationalising and rescuing the pharmaceutical firm Searle. Just as going to NATO in Brussels had initiated him into foreign affairs, so did becoming Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Searle open his eyes to the realities and urgencies of civilian life. He remarks: "A government agency or a congressional committee can delay something for a week or a month or a year ... To get into a business and get a sense of the things we had been taking for granted in Congress was just fascinating" (p. 84). Incidentally, of course, his forays into the business world have left him relatively well off.

When Reagan arrived in the White House, he had employment for him, but, perhaps because Rumsfeld had ruffled Vice President Bush, only as an overseas envoy on special missions. On one of these, he met Saddam Hussain, to convey US support for Iraq against Iran, seen as the greater threat of the two to Middle East security. He made a serious bid to succeed Reagan, but gave up when he failed to gain any significant popular support. His move further alienated him from Bush Sr., who suspected him of having a hand in Nixon's appointing him to head the CIA, a position from which it was believed, wrongly, no President could emerge; there had also been the suggestion that Reagan might have looked favourably on Rumsfeld as a running-mate.

Rumsfeld was therefore excluded from the White House during the four years of the Bush Sr. and the eight years of the Clinton presidencies (1989-92; 1893-2000), though not entirely from political life, serving on two important commissions. One was on the proliferation of ballistic missiles in the post-Soviet era, the other on the dominating and monitoring of space; neither commission seems to have had much political impact, but doubtless all the facts and their implications had their effect on him. He was also successfully active back in business. Then, twentyfour years after he had left the White House, he was summoned by Bush Jr. to the same position, Secretary of Defence, that he had held under Ford. Disappointingly, we are not told why Bush Jr. selected him; it would seem most unlikely that any recommendation came from his father. He was certainly something of a new broom, intent, as newcomers are, to fight bureaucratic overproduction (the Defence Authorisation Bill, for example, comprised 988 pages, up from 75 in 1975 and 1 page in 1961), obstruction in Congress and a pro status quo military.

An early opponent of the now long abolished draft, he favoured a leaner fighting force, securing which brought controversy down on him during the Iraq War, even when it turned out for the best. It is impossible to tell how successful he would have been in his post if the events of September 11th hadn't changed the attitude of the whole country to one of urgency. Rumsfeld, who had assured the devotion of the Pentagon staff by immediately participating in the rescue of survivors of the attack there, now became a national celebrity with his Pentagon Press Corps briefings on TV after the war in Afghanistan started at the beginning of October. This war elicited minimal opposition at home (it was very economical with US manpower) and very little abroad.

Very different was the problem with Iraq, a situation left over from the Clinton presidency, and which came to the boil a year later. It was during the interminable wrangling at the UN that Rumsfeld let drop, in January 2003, the famous phrase "Old Europe" when referring to the obstructive tactics of France and Germany. In contrast to Afghanistan, in Iraq the US did most of the fighting, but, in accordance with Rumsfeld's strategy, implemented with General Franks, used only about half the troops and far less bombing than in the Gulf War of 1991. But although the war lasted only three weeks, some sections of the media still found something to carp about during most of the time.

Rumsfeld, with the prestige gained by success, has "requested Congress to grant him broad new powers that would enable him to reshape the armed forces from top to bottom ..." and Decter lists some of these, with the caveat "If Congress were to approve", on pages 203-205. She ends with a paean which is unlikely to be echoed on this side of the Atlantic and certainly not by the BBC, which every week during the conflict made a point of holding up a particular quote of Rumsfeld's to ridicule:

The popular 'discovery' of Donald H. Rumsfeld spells the return of the ideal of the Middle American family man, with all that such an ideal entails in the way of vitality, determination, humor, seriousness, and abiding self-confidence, along with protectiveness toward loved ones, neighbors, and country. In the long run, this change may well be more important to the fortunes of his country than the changes he will have wrought in the armed forces.

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Malaria and the DDT Story
Richard Tren and Roger Bate
Institute of Economic Affairs, 2000

This is a short "Occasional Paper" of about 100 pages, including Introduction and Bibliography, which I read without reviewing when I received it . After reading Robert Ross's Memoirs, Honigsbaum's The Fever Trail and Rocco's The Miraculous Fever Tree, books about cinchona/quinine and Sallares' Malaria and Rome, I thought I had better re-read it with more attention.

DDT (Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane) is the safest, most efficient and cheapest insecticide used to eradicate Anopheles, the mosquito that transmits malaria from person to person. There are three species of malarial parasites in humans, Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium malariae and Plasmodium falciparum (a pedant would add a very rare fourth), of which falciparum is by far the most deadly and essentially the cause of the problem under discussion.

Since it is estimated that a million people die of malaria every year (p. 13) the evidence given here is that, beginning in the early 1970s, the withdrawal of DDT as an weapon in the battle against malaria has resulted in the loss of lives that may be numbered by the million. In brief, where malaria has been eradicated, it is where DDT was used, in Europe, N. America and the Caribbean. Where it was almost eradicated and has made a comeback, markedly in Ceylon and India, is where DDT was first used, and then its use discontinued. If true, the delivery of this message is rather muffled by a certain lack of indignation on the part of the authors.

Environmental activists – e.g., the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace etc. – are the villains here, and it is difficult not to include Rachel Carson whose Silent Spring, demonizing DDT, was published in 1962. Despite the evidence, produced before and after this date, of the harmlessness of DDT to humans and its beneficent effect, no one amongst them seems to have changed their minds, or altered their hostility to it, while tolerating the introduction of even more dangerous, and expensive, insecticides, such as the organophosphate Malathion (p. 46). Another villain is (or was) William Ruckelhaus, head of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) "whose refusal to accept the scientific advice offered, most certainly contributed to death in malarial countries (p. 46)." Also on the list must be the ex-Norwegian PM, Mrs Brundtland, hard-line environmentalist and head of the WHO, whose "Roll Back Malaria" programme does not promote mosquito control. Two more DDT saboteurs are Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and Pesticide Action Network (PAN). Prohibitions on DDT, indeed on all persistent organic pollutants (POPs), began to be put in place by such means as the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), and various Inter-governmental Negotiating Committees (INCs), where the countries most affected were too poor to afford to send sufficient delegates (p. 50). The idiotic "Precautionary Principle" has also been destructively invoked (p. 59-61) and is refuted by the authors, though they fail to use the concept of "trade-off" – the enormous life-saving benefits of DDT against the comparatively small, hypothetical, and unproved risks.

Another feature of the 1970s, when this was happening, was concern about the rise in world population. There is more than a suspicion that malaria eradication was seen by some as merely to make the problem worse. It might be more unkind to keep people from dying from malaria, so that they could die more slowly from starvation, ran one argument (p. 41).

Though DDT resistance in Anopheles (the malaria-transmitting mosquito) does occur (one pretext for discontinuing its use), it has been noted that it still remains Anopheles-repellent, a useful feature in consideration of the fact that it is usually sprayed within dwellings, where it has in any case minimal effect environmentally (p. 47). DDT is, in fact, still effective in most places and is much cheaper than any other insecticide (p. 69), despite efforts by Greenpeace to close down production in India (p. 54).

Ignoring protests from more than 350 scientists and physicians (p. 62), the WHO and other organizations have rejected mosquito eradication, directing their efforts only to curing the sufferers by quinine and synthetic drugs and hoping, sooner or later, to protect everyone by vaccines which have been "just around the corner" for several decades (p. 33). This has been the policy since the 1970s; before then, most research went into insecticides; afterwards into drugs and vaccines (p. 92n).

The authors do not discuss the virtues of a two-prong attack, i.e., to reach the goal of breaking the cycle of infection by reducing simultaneously both the numbers of infected humans (by medication) and the numbers of Anopheles (by DDT). Obviously having both low is more likely to break the cycle than lowering only one. Fortunately, relapses do not occur in falciparum malaria, the most dangerous kind, though relapses of vivax and malariae in "cured" humans will continue to provide occasional opportunities for transmission by surviving mosquitoes, an argument for concentrating on their complete eradication.

Such was the situation in 2000. I do not think it has changed much since then.

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Small Earthquake in Chile: Allende's South America
Alistair Horne
1990 edition

This paperback edition, published 1990, seems now to have been remaindered. It is very necessary to run through the history of this book. It was first published "towards the close of 1972" (p. 344), as "Allende stumbled from crisis to crisis, walking close to illegality". What happened after that is given in a final chapter "The Deluge ... and After", pages 345 to 384, added in 1989.

It is a little difficult to assemble all the events of the book into a context so hazy in my memory, to say nothing of remembering the situation in a number of South American countries as it was 31 years ago, with a last chapter added 14 years ago. Although the book is mainly about Chile, as the title implies, there are substantial chapters on Colombia and Bolivia, Peru is more than mentioned in passing and there is something about Ecuador. This leaves Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Venezuela unvisited and undiscussed. A feature of the 1970s, much less one of today's, is the emphasis throughout the book on the population explosion. It is interesting to find that Horne's only mildly exasperating companion and one of the book's dedicatees, was Bill Buckley then-editor (I think) and certainly founder of National Review; his right-wing conservative views don't greatly intrude. The other dedicatee is the charming, ever-helpful Nena, clever enough to become Director of Chile's National Art Gallery just before the coup, and still be there at the end of the book (p. 346).

What is important about Chile (and here everyone seems to agree) is that it was politically the most stable and perhaps the most prosperous South American state, not without its poverty-stricken peasants (like everywhere else) and marginalised Indians (like everywhere else bar Argentina, where they'd largely been exterminated), but with a functioning democracy, regular free elections (though only those literate could vote - not a bad idea), an enlarging middle class and a free, diversified press with a relatively large circulation. Perhaps its most unusual feature, for a Latin American country, was the fact that the armed forces (of which the army had the least chic) did not interfere in politics.

Under these circumstances, what could seem more reasonable than a spot of land reform? Unfortunately, the person who took this on was Allende. Like most revolutionaries (though a fairly conventional politician originally and minister of health in 1940) he came from the middle class, a fact which still seemed to surprise his egregious friend and confidant, the nut-case intellectual Regis Debray, ex-friend of the defunct martyr Che Guevara, to whom he'd given just as bad advice. Allende's rhetoric and nationalisation plans scared the middle classes, who left the country in droves. He intended to carry out most of his program within the country's legal framework, which seems to have been sufficiently elastic to enable him to do so. However he, and apparently everyone else, expected this to provoke a clumsy attempted right wing coup, which he could then crush with "revolutionary violence" (p. 149). As for his democratic credentials, it is worth pointing out that he won the presidential election in a three-cornered contest with only a slender majority over the second of two other candidates to the right (36% to 35%), a situation reflected in the composition of the Legislature. Yet the impression given is that he was an improvisatory bourgeois amateur; such was David Holden's estimate, which I must have read in Encounter in January 1974, an actor in love with a revolutionary part, rather than a serious leader who knew where he was going" (p. 357).

In the 1970s, communism, let alone socialism, were far from discredited creeds, China's Cultural Revolution was not perceived to be what it was, Soviet dissidents were isolated and samizdat-dependent and, worst of all, thanks to the subversion of the US intellectual left, the Communists could look forward to winning in Vietnam. Allende made no secret of his fondness for Communist regimes, his words and actions being more extreme than the official Chilean, Moscow-oriented Communist Party. Even more extreme were the bands of black-bereted guerrilla-activist MIR (Movimento de Izquierda Revolucionardia), one of which, led by Commandante Pepe, inevitably of middle-class origins, Horne and Nena visited (Ch. 9, pp. 192-228). They were busy ejecting well to do farmers to instal landless peasants, something I distinctly recall from an article in Encounter, possibly the one cited above. Allende had instructed the police (carabinieros) not to interfere in these activities - but nor did they if the farmers managed to get enough help to counter-eject the peasants. He was also following a policy of intervention in businesses, oddly enough using a law instituted by a previous regime, resulting in effect in creeping nationalisation. Of course, as might be expected, the economy was ruined, inflation reaching 10,000% (p. 241) and the original edition of the book ends with Horne predicting disaster.

The last, additional chapter briefly describes what happened. In July 1973 there was a half-cancelled, half-cock rightist coup, but it produced no spontaneous workers' response, which emboldened Pinochet, quite late in deciding to participate, to carry out a proper one in September (p. 348), when Allende seemed to be no better prepared than in July, despite a large consignment of Czech arms from Cuba, disguised as a present of mango-flavoured ice-cream. Deserted by the presidential palace police and rocketed by the air force, the most trustworthy evidence is that Allende committed suicide with the automatic rifle that Castro had given him.

Horne is not one to canonise him, as leftists in the West have and he points out that the media castigation of Pinochet's Chile has been completely disproportionate compared with the treatment of oppression in Cambodia, Cuba, Poland or Czechoslovakia (p. 361). It is certainly dispiriting to read of the amount of bloodshed there has been elsewhere on the South American continent; "It was a long time before I was forgiven by the Chileans," Horne remarks, "for making the unacceptable comparison with Bolivia" (p. 355). The number of deaths the Pinochet regime was responsible for he puts "somewhere substantially less than 5,000" (p. 360). Nor does he think that any intervention by the CIA made much difference and perhaps was even counterproductive. Even its foreknowledge of the coup seems to have been sketchy and its expenditure on certain items seems almost laughable (p. 354). Moscow seems to have spent a good deal more. It is true that this evidence comes from an American official investigation (which "washed its dirty linen in public, in 1975, with great thoroughness") and I suppose anyone is free to disbelieve it. Considering that Army coups have happened constantly over the whole of Latin America without the CIA being always held to blame, it seems a little odd to suggest that Chile was the only place its help was needed. I personally would not regard it as matter for condemnation if the CIA had been responsible for Allende's troubles from start to finish, but the evidence from everywhere else seems to suggest that it is nowhere near that efficient.

Horne revisited Chile (having stayed away during the Pinochet regime because of his revulsion from the well-publicised instances of its use of torture) during a lecture tour he was giving in South America in 1987. Entering the country from Peru, he was favourably impressed by the contrast in cleanliness, order and signs of increasing prosperity. He gives credit in a guarded way to the adoption of laissez-faire economics pioneered by the "Chicago Boys", the intellectual offspring of Milton Friedman, some years before Mrs Thatcher took them up here. He was granted a long interview by Pinochet who gives the impression of having stayed in power, not to enrich himself, or for fear of his own future, but to ensure that Chile would not be in danger of another left-wing takeover if he left too soon.

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The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress
Virginia Postrel
Free Press, 1999

The title, modelled (unacknowledged) from Popper, equates the future with the victory of dynamism (defined as evolution through variation, feedback and adaptation, p. xviii; "a world of constant creation, discovery and competition") over stasis, the static state, or even a planned attempt at change, "a regulated, engineered world" (p.xiv). In the opening chapter the author points out that the situation is no longer a simple Left-Right alignment: Pat Buchanan and Jeremy Rifkin are both against such things as globalization, NAFTA, WTO, and Free Trade generally. Both want control over people and processes they disagree with and, disturbingly, with the Left wrapped up in Conservation and the Right in Conservatism, the similarity of the two concepts results in an alliance of people in search of stability.

The plight of the superbureaucrat, longing to administer what he knows is good for other people and thwarted by the market, is almost comically enunciated by Jacques Attali, who fears that as a result "Western Civilization is bound to collapse". There is an unwillingness to admit that freedom to investigate the unknown cannot possibly guarantee the discovery of anything in particular, only an attempt to make use of what is found.

That, hearteningly, things have changed from what they were twenty to thirty years ago is instanced by the Nixon Administration's attempts to control the price and distribution of oil and petrol and Galbraith's dictum that entrepreneurs were no longer possible. The book is very interesting and multi-faceted in a way that makes it difficult to summarize structurally and, although it is packed with illustrations and examples, I should like to have had an examination of "externalities" and whether self-correcting mechanisms exist for such problems as environmental degradation.

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The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do
Judith Rich Harris
Free Press, 1998

A really worthwhile book to have. The author is very much a free-lance, though with academic training and credentials. Her thesis is roughly that sociologists have misread the origins of child development, putting excessive emphasis on family environment, ignoring or denying the genetic element, and completely failing to identify the prime importance of the "peer group". This thesis is backed up by interpretations (more strictly re-interpretations) of large numbers of studies, making use of adoptees, identical and fraternal twins, kept together or separated, and simply family studies of sibling differences. In all of these the parental influence is, rather to the author's regret, discovered to be minimal to nil.

Why this common (sociological) misperception? The author makes the point on the last page: we keep up with our parents and family, far less so with our peers. She rights the balance of blame away from the parents, who have borne it for a long time (she names Bruno Bettleheim as a culprit, but not, I think, R. D. Laing), pointing out that just as children react to their parents' treatment of them, so it happens the other way round.

She makes much of the fact that the most notable and clearcut example of peer group vs family influence is language, especially as learnt by children of immigrants; their birth-language does not grow up to cope with their mature interests, but remains a language of childhood. This situation is paralleled by the acquisition of speech by non-deaf children of parents both of whom are deaf (only about 10% of children born to such parents are themselves deaf).

There are exceptions, such as cooking, which tends to be, or can be, learnt in the home. She spends considerable space refuting claims to any effect of birth-order, particularly by Sulloway (including a 25 page-length Appendix). It was interesting that she should suspect that such claims arose from the once widespread, now near-obsolete, custom of primogeniture.

The author assures us she is not kidding about the names of Ernst and Angst, on whose research she draws.

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I have now finished reading The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness by Virginia Postrel, and it has been a strange experience. The book made its way towards me garlanded with superlatives from people to whom the thing was clearly a revelation. My only reaction at the end of it was: It is all obvious and it is all true, but... so?

You know how you are often a very bad judge of your own writings? Well, I often am. There is a reason for this. It is that some of my writings are the result of thorough reflection, in which I say only that which I know to be so, and those writings seem to me very dull and obvious. I fear that all readers will react exactly as I reacted to The Substance of Style. With a weary: yes, and...? When readers are delighted or amazed by what for me were obvious mundanities but which were for them were startling revelations, so am I.

But then there are the other, less good writings, with what I think are startling revelations which have only just occurred to me. These ones I am extremely excited about. But because of my excitement I make elementary blunders of all kinds, and consequently most readers are underwhelmed.

The experience of reading The Substance of Style reminds me of this distinction, because this is a book I could have written myself. Well, not really (see below). But it does resemble my best stuff, in that to me it is obvious but that others are delighted and amazed.

My problem is that the underlying mentality Virginia Postrel brings to the study of aesthetics, Look and Feel, etc., is one that I arrived at many years ago. What it comes down to is: it is all subjective. (Think: Austrian economics.) Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The only reason why we all make such a fuss about steel production and Gross National Product and suchlike is that eventually, the result is lipstick of the sort that someone will really enjoy. All consumption is for the sake of subjective sensations, when you trace it back to its source in human desire, and whether it is really pleasurable or pleasure-enabling or pain-relieving or pain-avoiding will depend on exactly what turns you on and off, and you, and you.

And now that we can do all this Look and Feel stuff relatively cheaply and easily, we are doing it, and good for us.

But, subjective though aesthetic experiences may be, they are still very important. People get a huge kick out of looking how they want to look, and of having carpets that look as they want them to look. But since it is all so subjective, we need different places where different Looks and Feels can predominate.

The subjectivity of taste is one of the most potent arguments for property rights, in my experience. Property as nice stuff for rich bastards to accumulate at the expense of others is the case against property. The case for property is that it is the solution to conflicts which are impossible to settle in accordance with any other objective standards. Property equals peace. Property equals civilisation. What colour should the curtains be? Wrong question. Right question: who should decide? Answer: the owner. When conflicts still rage, in public places for example (whatever they are exactly), then: let us all be tolerant. Amen.

Let me retract that claim that I could have written this book myself. I couldn't have written it, because book-writing is beyond me. I would not have dug up nearly so many anecdotes about toilet brushes and Christmas lights, and aesthetic planning disputes involving different coloured tiles. And if I had written it I could not have got it published. The footnotes would have been a shambles, and no way would I have persuaded Robert Venturi or Tom Peters to put rave reviews of it on the back.

But everything in it is stuff I have long thought, and I had to really make myself carry on with it on the off chance of startling revelations, which never came. All there was at the end was an acknowledgement of the force of what early readers of early bits probably offered by way of objection.

This objection, I'm guessing, went roughly: aren't you taking this Look and Feel thing just a tad too seriously Virginia? All that you say about it is so. The high modernists of former decades were a deal too ready to legislate about the allegedly objective superiority of their own tastes. People like pretty computers and computer add-ons and pretty dresses and hairdos, and they like this dress rather than that dress for all the reasons you say. Plastic surgery isn't the moral issue some say it is. And indeed, now that the Chinese actually make all this stuff, we have to employ ourselves deciding how it will all look. But, well, put it this way: Could Look and Feel ever win a war? She doesn't put the question quite as forcefully as that, but she answers it nevertheless.

I can think of a few military applications for Look and Feel expertise, such as camouflage, the design of the control panels of aircraft and ships and tanks, getting propaganda leaflet designs right. But not many. Engineering – the mastery of the construction of ugly, clunky but effective things – will always be necessary for wars.

Or to put the same point rather differently, Postrel is describing one of the many peace dividends of the end of the Cold War. We can now think about Look and Feel more than before, because we can. So, bodily adornments will not win the Cold War? It doesn't matter, because it is already over.

Although, Look and Feel does have rather more to do with winning the War against Terror, because it is all part of making the West more attractive and enticing. (Postrel starts out with a bit about liberated Afghan women wanting to get lipstick.)

Nevertheless, I still want my civilisation to be able to do things that do the job, and don't just look nice. Michael Jennings, who along with me has also been reading this book, made the same point about it by saying that what he particularly likes about the design of bridges is that bridges are beautiful because they work. Their beauty is intrinsic to their engineering excellence. It is not stuck on afterwards by stylists. I feel the same way. That is a very high modernist attitude, I think.

But no, Look and Feel alone couldn't win a war, concedes Virginia. Or build a bridge. We must be pretty and smart. And that deals with my only serious doubt about this book, apart from the fact that I found it too obvious to stir me.

So the question I do still have (I always seem to have questions on Samizdata don't I?) is not: is this a fine upstanding book? Of course it is. My question is: who else is reading it? Who else in the world is being told to think the way I already do?

My impression is, quite a few, in fact a great many. Postrel is a schmoozer of the opinion forming and opinion spreading classes, and not coincidentally to the message of this book, she appears to look the part. (That is another department where she has a big advantage over me.) This book is attractively written and is surely attracting lots of quality readers. And that's good.

To many of them, I further surmise, it will strike with the force of revelation. Good again.

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A Personal Odyssey
Thomas Sowell
Free Press, 2000

The autobiography of this economist is an impressive one, first as an achiever in the usual sense of someone making a life for himself, from a heavily disadvantaged childhood to a respectable career as both an academic and practical economist. Born in North Carolina and soon orphaned, he was brought up in New York by a great-aunt as part of her family, a relationship that ultimately broke down under the pressure of his trying to better his education. Then there is an interesting account of his experiences as a conscript at the time of the Korean War; he never went to Korea, partly due to his photographic expertise.

Apart from "merely" achieving, he also chose to follow a more rigorous self-imposed regime in his academic career, in opposing any dilution of standards, lowering pass-marks, acquiescing to special pleading in individual cases, let alone cheating (at Howard University). This attitude got him into trouble with two or three university faculties and administrations. He had the misfortune to have to try to teach during the disturbances of the late '60s and "while approving the Civil Rights campaigns and legislation, he was uneasy at the obsession of black activists with these aspects of black improvement and opposed "affirmative action" as an incorrect extension of the struggle for black advancement, which he saw as basically a matter of education.

He never alludes to suffering from race discrimination himself, apart from a mention of segregated southern lunch counters and he summarises his own good fortune: "I happened to come along right after the worst of the old discrimination was no longer there to impede me and just before racial quotas made the achievements of blacks look suspect." He continues "... many of the paths I took [have] since been destroyed by misguided social policy, so that the same quality of education [is] no longer available to most ghetto youngsters, though there was never a time when education was more important." Though sounded out as a possible adviser to Presidents Nixon and Reagan, he refused to be considered; he feels he lacks the politics gene. He is not affiliated to any political party and gives the impression that he does not even vote.

There is not much about his personal life: he married, had two children, a boy and a girl, divorced and remarried. His son, though bright in other ways, did not learn to speak until he was four; his story is told in another book, so that the therapy is only sketchily given here; he seems to have developed into a normal person. Sowell himself suffers from high blood pressure, as do or did the siblings he was separated from at birth but later got to know; after a 20 year gap of estrangement he also contacted again his great-aunt's daughter.

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The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
Thomas Sowell
Basic Books, 1996

The title illustrates the difficulty of captioning and characterising the problem the author is up against. "Touch not the Lord's anointed" seems to be the sentiment behind the title – except that "the anointed" are the self-anointed. To some extent the sub-title of the book helps: "Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy", defining as it does the moral complacency of the left-liberal consensus and its absence of self-doubt even when policies fail. Sowell does not like the classification into left and right, but it is difficult to avoid.

He also points out that while the attitude of controversialists on the right to those on the left is that they are misguided or foolish, the converse attitude of the left is that the others are evil and "Problems exist because others are not as wise or as virtuous as the anointed."

Ch. 2 defines a "Pattern of Failure" when the anointed initiate a program as involving four stages "The Crisis"; "The Solution"; "The Results" and "The Response" and illustrates this with three examples – President Johnson's "War on Poverty", Sex Education (starting at about the same time) and Criminal Justice (the new "criminals' rights" initiated a little earlier). Matters had actually been improving in all three, so that whether any of the changes were needed is questionable. After all these programs or initiatives had been in operation for some time, all three situations were manifestly worse.

The "response" was usually to talk about something else rather than to admit the problem wasn't solved. The War on Poverty was to abolish dependency; it increased it, but, naturally "it benefitted a lot of people"; sex education was to reduce teen-age pregnancies; these increased but "people felt better about sex"; crimes increased after criminals were given more rights, but Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had been most responsible for this merely claimed that people were "overlooking the root causes of crime" – without explaining how these must have got worse after 1960. This chapter is perhaps the most tightly argued in the book, but other chapters are also valuable, pursuing the contorted reasoning of those who know they are right, despite everything that happens to the contrary.

Later, he introduces the instructive concept of "trade-offs" (see Index): that improvements in one direction may result in deterioration in another and that cost is something that must always be taken into consideration.

There are also "mascots" (Index), normally "undeserving" sorts of people who are treated as if they can do no wrong – vagrants, homeless persons, the "handicapped", homosexuals, AIDS sufferers. Just as some hazards are exaggerated (ignoring the "trade-off" factor), others are pooh-poohed, perhaps the most tragic being AIDS. Transfusions had been proclaimed safe (without testing); about half of all haemophiliacs in the US became infected with AIDS from them, because homosexuals were "mascots". And there are extraordinary contortions of logic to let criminals off. The victimisation of business and the professions is nothing short of frightening.

What is not so clear is where the mind-set comes from that so persistently flouts conventional wisdom. It seems to result from the idea that, because any situations is not perfect - and is therefore a problem - some alternative must be better. What could be simpler than to carry the honourable Anglo-American tradition of dissent to its reductio ad absurdum and proclaim that to do the opposite of what always has been done must be the solution? But who started this Gadarene rush?

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Dawkins vs. Gould: Survival of the Fittest
Kim Sterelny
Totem Books, 2001

This relatively short book (156pp., no index) should, perhaps be taken at a gulp, which I have not done. Much is made of the ding-dong controversy between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould on the mechanisms and implications of evolution ("punch-ups ... notorious for its intensity ... savage battle ..." - from the blurb), but unfortunately not in the words of the two antagonists. Instead Sterelny (a male, by the way) sets about describing what they disagree about. Perhaps unfortunately, as tends to be the way in Biology, it does not seem possible to set up some experiment, or look for a crucial observation, that will settle their differences.

In fact, these fall into two categories, one theoretical and technical, the other philosophical.

For the first, there is the disagreement between Dawkins' theory of selection at the level of the gene as against Gould's emphasis of the species as the selective unit (if I understand this aright). While Dawkins seems happy to accept the assumption of a gradual, steady, uniform pace of evolution, Gould has espoused the theory of "punctuated equilibrium", in which selection acts in short concentrated bursts after some catastrophic alteration to the environment, such as the impact of a meteorite, which has resulted in the wiping out of most other species, as with the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous.

However, as Sterelny says, these disagreements are not adequate to explain the antagonism and in Chapter 12 (p. 123) he gets down to the more philosophical ones. "Dawkins is an old-fashioned science worshipper" he states (and lines up with him), while "Gould's take on the status of science is much more ambiguous. ... In Gould's view, science is irrelevant to moral claims. Science and religion are concerned with independant domains."

It should be said that Gould is as much an atheist as Dawkins, but whereas Dawkins sees religions as erroneous explanations of the world with usually unfortunate consequences, "Gould … interprets religion as a system of moral belief" and seems to think that science is in danger of being contaminated by its social milieu. Sterelny does not quite make the point that Gould is scared that science will lead him where he doesn't want to go, but this is certainly implied by his statement, "Gould hates sociobiology."

And surely this is simply the old Marxist dogma that human psychology and behaviour have no innate characteristics, but are infinitely plastic and manipulable, together with the social systems that have been and can be founded upon them.

Gould has died. Is that the end of the controversy? After all, as Max Planck said, he didn't need to convince the opponents of his theory: "They died."

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Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers
David Edmonds and John Eidinow
Ecco, 2001

"Wittgenstein's reputation among twentieth-century thinkers is ... unsurpassed. ... A poll of professional philosophers in 1998 put him fifth in a list of those who had made the most important contributions to the subject, after Aristotle, Plato, Kant and Nietzsche and ahead of Hume and Descartes (p. 231)." Yet there is nothing in this book that is comprehensible to the layman about Wittgenstein's philosophy, or even, I have to say, much of an attempt to make it so. His eminence and influence and his credibility to other philosophers we have to take on trust.

On the other hand, Popper - the antagonist to Wittgenstein's protagonist - has two well-known and accepted achievements to his credit, his book The Open Society and Its Enemies and his "falsifiability" theory on the structure of scientific hypotheses (though I have often wondered if "vulnerability" would not be a better term). But in Britain and America, Popper is slowly being dropped from University syllabuses; his name is fading, if not yet forgotten ... a penalty of success rather than the price of failure (p. 230)." Or perhaps, being transferred from the useless category of philosopher to that of scientist? Far from turning his office there into a shrine, the LSE has had it converted into a lavatory.

The allusion in the title is, of course, to the famous incident with the poker on Friday, 25th October, 1946 about which none of the supposedly acute seekers after truth present could agree. This was the only time the two philosophers actually met, though both came from Vienna, both were of Jewish descent (though neither of religion), and both had to leave Austria when the Nazis took over. As far as I can make out, the dispute was whether philosophy, as a discipline, could or should deal with real "problems" (Popper) or merely with "puzzles" (Wittgenstein), say with language expressions. The meeting was of a discussion group at Cambridge University, called the Moral Science Club (MSC), of which Wittgenstein was actually the Chairman. He was, however, usually overbearing and difficult, tending to hog the discussions, often leaving meetings half-way through - something Popper probably didn't know.

Popper had been invited to give a paper and Wittgenstein interrupted and shouted his disagreement, making his point brandishing the poker that lay by the moribund fire, laying it down when Russell told him to, and then leaving. Smoothing matters down, someone asked Popper for an example of a moral principle. "Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers," was the reply, provoking a laugh and, I imagine, relaxing the tension. Popper later claimed that Wittgenstein was still present when he made this retort, but the general agreement is that he had gone, one witness even accusing Popper of lying. The poker itself disappeared.

The book, however, is much more than an account or investigation of this episode. Tracing the lives of both personalities, both of them combative and obsessive, the authors also fill in the background they grew up in - the increasingly anti-semitic Vienna of the post-WWI war decades, despite the efforts of those of Jewish ancestry to assimilate, including many who discarded their religion and became Christians. Wittgenstein's was an extremely rich family (though his grandfather had adopted the name of his aristocratic employer, to whom he was not related) but he divested himself of his own share of its wealth. He had served with distinction in the Austrian Army in WWI, volunteering for dangerous posts, being decorated several times and during it writing his seminal work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He ended the war in an Italian POW camp. On the other hand Popper, some thirteen years younger, came from a bourgeois but impoverished family. He had difficulty in escaping from Austria; with perhaps some exaggeration he claimed that taking a Chair in New Zealand left free for another (Waismann) an opening to a temporary lectureship at Cambridge (p. 221). His "war effort", he said, was writing The Open Society (p. 71), though he tried, unsuccessfuly, to join the armed forces as well. "Popper's impact on academic life [in the University of Canterbury, New Zealand] was greater than that of any other person, before or since," judged that institution; he acted as a kind of intellectual champagne after the dry depression years (p. 172)."

Wittgenstein died in 1951, Popper in 1994. The authors do not try to give much information on the later work of either, though there is a joint chronology (pp. 245-242). They do seem, in my view, to be somewhat biased against Popper, if only because he's left more evidence against himself; presumably also they cannot help but be influenced by the poll of philosophers given above (and in which, presumably Popper comes nowhere). Neither men come across as particularly pleasant, let alone lovable, though Popper seems to have kept friends as well as making enemies, while the impression is given that Wittgenstein despised everyone - no list of friends is given for him, though mention is made of disciples and acolytes who imitated his mannerisms. Although Popper died only six or seven years before the book was written and published, there is no indication that either author ever interviewed or even met him. It is also a little disappointing that no mention is made of any relationship between him and other thinkers on the right, such as Bauer and Hayek, who, in contrast with both Popper and Wittgenstein, was noted for his courtesy towards opponents. Perhaps these don't qualify as philosophers. Isaiah Berlin is mentioned, but once only to have his philosophical pretentions pulverised by Wittgenstein (p. 24), and twice in passing.

A minor but irritating typographical blemish is the close resemblance between 3 and 5.

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Wandering into the back streets of anarcho-capitalism, for the first time recently, I started out with the naive idea that there would only be one form of it. Sort of like when you discover jazz, perhaps as a teenager, with the misguided impression that there'll only be one musical format dominating all late-night jazz events. Well, Professor Hoppe steered me straight on that feeble notion, when he blasted his trumpet towards me in Democracy: The God that Failed. Staggering out into dawn's clear light, after a full whiskey flagon of Hoppe's invective, I needed a few days to recover from the mentally-induced hangover. Where before I'd been a happy-go-lucky wanderer, breezing through this vale of socialism we call the United Kingdom, Hoppe turned me into a paranoid Cassandra seeing the evils of the state under virtually every rock and anti-social nuisance order.

Is car parking costing too much in Henley town centre? The parasitical agents of the state in South Oxfordshire District Council are exploiting their monopoly position as coercive public roads owner and enforcers of parking law to rob honest individuals who wish merely to trade with one another in local shops. Is graffiti starting to cover the local road signs? This marks the disintegrating failure of state government, in the guise of that dangerous idiot David Blunkett, to provide decent law and security services thereby causing degenerative failure because of the hopeless government monopoly provision of both. Plus, the forced integration, into the great democratic vote bank, of hundreds of thousands of economic migrants in search of welfare has destabilised the UK's fragile network of societal links. Arrrrggggghhhhh!!!! I can't take it any more.

Hoppe's book is enough to drive you towards Abba Gold albums, to lie in a darkened room with a wet flannel over your face thinking of bearded portly men strumming exotic star-shaped guitars, to briefly escape the logic of its conclusions about every decivilising aspect of modern state-dominated life. Is there an alternative?

The worst thing about Hoppe, however, is that I feel he is right. Damn his free-trade cotton socks! All of the problems in modern Britain can be analyzed down to the problem of government. Take the transport system, please, take it somewhere else. Then take the schools, the hospitals, the welfare system, and the appalling state of law and order, which would be laughable except for the increasing number of people being knifed, tortured, and shot almost at will by lowlife scum exploiting the dwindling numbers of police, particularly in rural areas, as our boys in blue concentrate on harassing soft-target drivers rather than harassing hard-target criminals. Throw in the postal system, the fire service, and the abject state of British farming, and you're just about there, though I'm sure you can think of hundreds of other areas possessing this common thread of mediocrity and uselessness. All are subject, of course, to the coercive whim of democratic government and its need to retain monopolistic parasitical power.

To maintain its subterfuge that the state is a necessary requirement of human life, the government must buy off its intellectual client groups, most of whom in the UK read the Guardian. These include teachers, university lecturers, doctors, and journalists at the BBC, who in grateful supplication worship at the font of government proclaiming all of its alleged wondrous benefits. So, to misquote Lenin, we finally know whom the guardians are guarding; their friends in the government.

If you combine this comfortably-funded middle-class mass of government-loving bloodsuckers along with all the other welfare-dependent voters, such as the subsidy-junkie farmers, you've got Hoppe's permanent democratic majority you need to stay in perpetual power, until either war or revolution destroys your state to replace it with another variant of the same thing, or your civil service can grow it into a greater slough of despond. Empire down the pan? Grow a European Union.

Obviously, you need to construct a cosmetic 'change-in-power', every now again, between the various classes of collectivist, such as those in the Labour, the Social Democratic, or the Conservative parties, to fool the people that they've been given a choice. But in reality, if you fail to vote for one lizard, the other lizard always gets in. So Hoppe asks the question: Why don't we just start trying to live without lizards? How can this mirage of governmental choice be a good thing anyway when political parties compete not to provide us with 'goods', but compete to provide us instead with 'bads', such as slightly higher or slightly lower tax rates? How about no taxes at all?

Steady. Don't frighten the horses.

Add to this a rigid state control of the education process which brainwashes the rest of us feeble-minded taxpayers into accepting the mantra that even if the government isn't always good, it is always necessary, and that anarchism is a punk-rock fuelled Mad Max-style fantastical insanity, where the average life-span will be about 3.92 nano-seconds before each of us is hit by an explosive bullet fired from a nutcase-manned mobile mini-gun.

It is this control of education which is the state's most precious jewel, manned 24x7 by its most partisan supporters. Until we wrest these schools and universities from their cold dead hands, the state, and all of its benefactors, such as the 659 parliamentary MPs here in the UK, more than were needed to run an empire, and heaven knows how many leeches over there in Washington, will continue to maintain their easy lunch-filled and holiday-filled lives, inside an iron grip of state.

But iron rusts. And one day we will be free of them. Or at least Professor Hoppe hopes so via a gradual oxidation process where as many of us as possible disengage ourselves from the state; for instance, by refusing to vote in its elections or by avoiding its rapacious tax demands. Along with the subversive creation of micro-states, the Professor hopes to evolve a system whereby the state really does wither away, as Trotsky once so charmingly believed, to leave us with a myriad world of privately owned city-states, along the lines of the ancient Greek model, or perhaps a worldwide libertarian alliance of Tolkienesque shire-states, where Sarumanian government ruffians and parasites, along with all of their intrusive taxes, rules and regulations, are driven out to leave us with family and clan-based freedom, where the highest form of government is a familial aristocracy, led perhaps by figures such as the Master of Buckland or the Took of Tookland. Or heaven help us, even Mayor Sam Gamgee, whose only governmental role will be to eat an enormous lunch once every four years. Oh, and we'll make him pay for it, too, unlike those trough-munchers in Westminster and inside the Washington Beltway.

But I just don't get the feeling that Hoppe's plan is going to work out. It feels inherently unstable. Yes, we can keep physically excluding communists, as they arise in each new generation, and perhaps even coercive democrats, but surely it would make immediate sense for them to journey straight towards the welcoming embrace of whichever socialist Mordor arises in response to our exclusions, to then try to destroy us by whatever means comes into their disposal. Democracy and the rule of the mob may be an evil, but it appears to retain stability, even if one may disagree with it. There are just too many people on this Earth who are embittered failures in their miserable lives, who hate seeing the success of others. Jealously, that most potent ingredient of the anti-capitalistic mentality, is a force capable of destroying the world, as it so nearly did in the Cuban missile crisis, and it continually eats away at us in all of its other collective forms, such as Islamofascism or the New Left's environmentalism. To remove democracy we need to destroy jealousy. And as long as Tom Cruise continues to shack up with Penelope Cruz, jealousy will continue to march in this world. At least it shall in the one small corner of South Oxfordshire.

And who are we, anyway, to ban private democracy on private property? Karl Popper's long dreamed of open society surely allows us to witness the creation of private democratic communes. If fifty homosexuals wish to jointly purchase an island, and wish to live there together under local democratic rule, without trying to impose their democratic and sexual lifestyle on the rest of us, who are we to stop them? Although Hoppe's analysis of the current problem of world government may be one hundred per cent accurate, I think his family-based solutions are a little too unstable to survive, except perhaps in pure virgin territories which may occur in humanity's distant space-bound future. And even in this undiscovered future we can imagine the rise of a Dune-like system of aristocratic families, where the temptation to create planetary-wide states under monopolised taxation, security, and jurisdiction programs, under a single Harkonnen-like family, and an overarching Emperor, will become all too great to resist if we place family-based covenantal powers into the binding hands of a spontaneously-arising elite.

So this begs two questions. Is there a quicker way towards creating a more stable anarcho-capitalist future? And am I finally going to say something about David Friedman? Oh, go on then.

In 'The Machinery of Freedom', Friedman adopts a second route towards an anarcho-capitalist future, by creating transitional libertarian policies capable of being put to democratic voters in party-political elections. In short, he follows Mao Tse-Tung's philosophy, that the march towards anarcho-capitalism begins with tiny but quickly accumulating steps.

Now let me put my cards on the table. I am by instinctive inclination, as you may already have noticed, a proto-Hoppeian-Rothbardian-Miseian, of the Austrian school. If it wrong for the state to be involved in education, it is wrong for the state to be involved in education. Full stop. But does this hard-line attitude actually get us anywhere? Friedman disagrees. He argues that it may be unrealistic for us to throw off decades, nay millennia, of accumulative statist history, in a single bound, and that we may have to be more gradualist in our attempts to wither it away. So, wracked with the contradictions of being a Hoppeian who holds that Hoppeianism appears mechanically unstable, I opened up Mr Friedman's Magnum Opus with as unbiased and fresh a mind as I could manage, while drinking a particularly nice cup of tea.

His preface to the first edition kicks us off wonderfully, going straight down the defence's throat:

I believe, as many say they believe, that everyone has the right to run his own life – to go to hell in his own fashion. I conclude, as do many on the left, that all censorship should be done away with. Also that all laws against drugs – marijuana, heroin, or Dr. Quack's cancer cure – should be repealed. Also laws requiring cars to have seat belts. The right to control my life does not mean the right to have anything I want free; I can do that only by making someone else pay for what I get. Like any good right winger, I oppose welfare programs that support the poor with money taken by force from the taxpayers. I also oppose tariffs, subsidies, loan guarantees, urban renewal, agricultural price supports – in short, all of the much more numerous programs that support the not-poor – often the rich – with money taken by force from the taxpayers – often the poor.

Say hallelujah, brother!

The final point is a recurring theme of the book. The 'Welfare State' is often described by socialists as a way, albeit a particularly inefficient one, of supporting the poor, whereas in fact it often ends up being a way of supporting the rich; witness the recent Conservative Party demands, here in the UK, that university education should continue to be subsidised by the taxpayer, most of whom never go to university. Witness also the huge cost of the welfare state, in the UK, where most of the cost ends up as profitable salary cheques paid to affluent university-educated Guardian readers for their various comfortable roles ensconced within the warm body politic of the Leviathan.

Who would suffer from the abolition of the welfare state? It sure as hell wouldn't be the poor. Give them back all the taxes they're currently forced to pay to support the Guardian reading enemy class, and within days you'd have beggars on the street brandishing signs like this:

Home in Cornwall, Child Nanny, Soho Restaurant, and Two Audi Estate Cars to Support – Please give generously or we'll lock you in a room containing an art installation of Polly Toynbee articles

These people know the true edge of evil.

Later in the book Friedman made me think, for the first time, about the usual socialist dogma that people must be forced to pay taxes, in a democratic society, for the good of society. Friedman poses the knotty question, 'What makes you think people who won't hand money over voluntarily will ever vote in a government to make them hand it over?' Go on socialist, if you're reading this, answer that one on a postcard for me.

Friedman then jumps straight into a defence of property, as is proper in a libertarian treatise. He uses an excellent example of broadcast media versus printed media. With terrestrial broadcast media the state takes it upon itself to own the airwaves, renting them out to its favoured clients. These clients know a cash-cow when they see one, so they strive to avoid upsetting the government's regulator rather than serving their customers. What we end up with is a narrow range of homogenised options, on terrestrial television, with little to choose between on each channel, with even the much-vaunted public service mandate of the BBC delivering us tripe like 'Eastenders' and programs starring Pauline Quirke. In other words, the democratic mass of the population is served to the level of the lowest common denominator, with each individual rarely feeling that a particular government-approved channel covers all of his or her interests.

Compare this with the printed media, which has far less government intervention, where there's a magazine title for virtually every interest under the sun, from Atlas Shrugged fans to Zoological Zebra breeders, regardless of whether the government, or the rest of us, approve. I don't know if there's a group of people out there who like looking at pictures of blue-spotted heffa-lumps, but if there is, I'm confident there's a magazine title being readied for them as we speak.

This brings us to a minor weakness of Mr Friedman's book, in that it first came out in 1973. Although 'The Machinery of Freedom' has been updated several times since, and although its basic ideas have stood up over time, the emergence of satellite broadcasting might've made this a more interesting discussion, with its magazine-like programming and the excellent way it has induced the decline of statist institutions like the BBC, but again, the original discussion points stand up so this is only a tiny quibble.

And so the book continues, in its first part, with many carefully thought through ideas challenging the status quo of the state, and making us realise why it fails in so many of the areas it controls, for instance in government insurance pensions, where the rich benefit at the expense of the poor, because the rich live longer, and start contributing later, often after completing their subsidised university courses. We also see exactly why government-driven monopoly destroys choice and increases waste, particularly when a private interest group, such as the American Medical Association, uses governmental controls by proxy to benefit their own members to the detriment of the general consumer, for instance by creating the vastly over-priced and over-regulated American medical system.

I particularly liked the section on the three ways of getting other people to do what you want. These are love, trade, and force. I can persuade you to give me something gratis, because it goes to a cause you believe in, such as the Andy Duncan Needs Chocolate Campaign, or I can trade with you and exchange some of my lovely paper money for your chocolate, or I can point a gun to your favourite avian pet and say, "Hand over the chocolate, sunshine, or the budgie gets it." Much in the same way, of course, that tax authorities do it with self-assessment forms: 'Fail to fill in this form correctly, sunshine, and we'll send you to jail.' Charming, don't you think? Who'd have thought these people were paid with our own money?

Socialists criticise us and say we libertarians only use the 'selfish' method of trade. Well, it does keep us all fed, and it does keep them all in marijuana, but in a truly free society private charities will prosper.

The Beatles, one of Earth's wealthiest rock bands, used to say that all you needed was love, but I think they were only halfway there. What you don't need is coercion. And with the removal of forced taxation to fund all of those Guardian readers' second homes in Cornwall, the chance for love to work its magic will be all that much greater, as there'll be so much more productive wealth to spread around. So to all of you socialist hippies out there, yes, you, Cherie Blair, come over to the light side. Throw those tax-enforcing jail sentences away.

Friedman then adds several chapters on why collectivism is less efficient than the free market, in the same excellent primer fashion as Henry Hazlitt's 'Economics in One Lesson'.

[BTW, just an aside. Have you ever noticed how even socialists, deep down, feel really uneasy about taking taxes off people? They have to work themselves up about it, and then come out with all sorts of Marxist nonsense saying 'The Rich' stole it off 'The Poor' in the first place, by means of capitalist exploitation, and that just like Robin Hood, all they're really doing is redressing the balance by stealing it back. Why most of the loot then ends up in the hands of affluent Guardian readers like Cherie Blair is beyond me, but there you go. Personally I love Robin Hood because he didn't steal off the rich and give to the poor, as the song said. Instead, he took large tax rebates off government officers, like the Sheriff of Nottingham, albeit without their permission, and then handed these tax thefts of gold straight back to their rightful owners. Just like that Norwegian fella did in 'Atlas Shrugged', you know, the only one Dagny Taggart didn't actually get round to sleeping with.]

We then come to IMHO the most important part of Mr Friedman's book, its second section, entitled the 'Libertarian Grab Bag or How to Sell the State in Small Pieces'. To be fair to the author, he tells us in his introduction to the book that he thinks government interference in the schools, in any form, is wrong, but that he thinks we'll only be able to get them out via compromise. Part II therefore opens up with the chapter 'Sell the Schools', which tries to persuade us that instead of running the schools, the government should merely fund them, via the oft-debated voucher system.

The idea of school vouchers has a long history starting with Friedman Senior back in the 1960s, when the older Friedman also suggested negative income taxes. Way back then vouchers seemed a pipe-dream for an impossible land filled with tangerine men wearing looking glass ties. Even Keith Joseph, the frizzle-haired Thatcherite 'extremist' of the 1970s thought vouchers were too radical. But time has moved on, and conservative parties around the world are finally getting used to the idea, persuaded in part, I'm sure, by 'The Machinery of Freedom'. I do worry, however, that vouchers will get twisted around somehow by government, just as Gordon Brown perverted the ideas on negative income tax into income tax credits, thus trying to turn the entire UK population into welfare bums.

The school vouchers plan is followed by a discussion of how to free the universities by opening up a market-driven system. I work, personally, in the vigorous IT training market, and out there we will teach anyone anything they want to learn, so long as they're prepared to pay for it. It saddens me when I hear students say, as happens regularly, that they've learned more in one of my four-day private sector courses than they did in an entire term of public sector computer science at University. Obviously I'll accept that they're saying this just to make the sad fat bloke at the front feel happier, but my fellow trainers regularly hear this too, and they really do know what they're talking about. Now, it can be amazing what you can do in four days, in the private sector, but why is it taking state-run universities more than a whole term to match it, easily breaking the old rule of thumb that the state is usually one-third as effective as private industry? Friedman explains, and then works up a policy to make them far more responsive and efficient.

We then get to the emotive subject of immigration, where Friedman proposes unrestricted immigration into the USA to give oppressed people around the world a chance for a better life, and to give America a new burst of life. If it was good enough for most of America's forbearers, why is it so wrong now? If America can't do this, says Friedman, it should consider shipping back the Statue of Liberty to France.

Strong stuff, and I'm sure Professor Hoppe would have a thing or two to say about such 'forced integration', but hey, if you folks over there are going to start opening your borders up again, to white Europeans, please keep at least one berth free, for one comfortably-sprung fat bloke, slightly shop-soiled. I think you know who I'm talking about.

The rest of the section truly is a grab-bag of ideas for withering the state out of our lives, including an interesting discussion on how a privately-funded mission to the Moon would've taken off later, but then given us much better long-term benefits. I'll let you work through these ideas yourselves, when you read the book, but Friedman rounds off this grab-bag section with an excellent parting shot:

In the ideal socialist state power will not attract power freaks. People who make decisions will show no slightest bias towards their own interests. There will be no way for a clever man to bend the institutions to serve his own ends. And the rivers will run uphill.

Well said, sir.

And so begins Part III, on anarchism, containing far more alignment with the Austrians. For those who wish to explore anarcho-capitalism, you'll take a long time to find a better summation of the topic. It's all here; the Police, the Courts, the Law, and the non-existence of a ruling class. What I was particularly interested in though was the stability of the anarcho-capitalist state, and the really hard question of military security. Both subjects get their own chapter. Excellent.

Friedman tackles the two primary objections to anarchist stability. First, that society would be taken over by Mafia-style gangs running protection rackets, the second, that these gangs would merge together to create a new government. Or as Michael Corleone once said, and I paraphrase, 'Do you really think senators don't have people killed? Now who's being unrealistic?'

The answer to the both objections, explained far more cohesively in the book, is that under anarchism virtually all of the activities of the current Mafia gangs would be legal, and that they would, in their own terms, really be 'legitimate' businesses, but this time up against real competition. And if they did try to impose themselves coercively, people would turn to other protective agencies who would cost less, who would be more efficient, and who would drive the mafia protection agencies out via the market process of competition.

Friedman surmises that there would be thousands of such protection agencies, and that it would be impossible for them to try to arrange a 'government' between them, as they would either be undercut by new rivals, or collapse internally due to all of the usual cartel-collapsing reasons. In the final analysis however, all of the protection agencies together would comprise a large fraction of the armed power of the nation, even in a nation with every homeowner possessing firearms, so they could in theory take over that nation. But Friedman asks if this is the case, why hasn't the US Army done it yet? Because, he says, US Army soldiers know it would be a 'wrong' thing to do, just as armed workers within the protection agencies would know it would be a 'wrong' thing to do. And far less profitable, too. And far more dangerous, to boot.

Which brings us to the thorny subject of national defence, or as you Americans insist on spelling it, 'defense'. Friedman brings up all the usual objections, plus a few more often avoided by other capitalist anarchists:

It is all very well to fantasize about fighting the invader village by village, commune by commune, or corporation by corporation, according to the dreamer's particular brand of anarchy. A serious invader would inform each unit that if it resisted or failed to pay tribute, it would be destroyed by a nuclear weapon. After the invader proved that he meant business, the citizens of the surviving communities would be eager to create the institutions, voluntary or otherwise, necessary to give the invader what he wanted.

Friedman suggests several schemes for national defence, including insurance and a national defence charity, but in the end says it will take time to work out:

In such a situation I would not try to abolish that last vestige of government. I do not like paying taxes, but I would rather pay them to Washington than to Moscow – the rates are lower [written in 1973]. I would still regard the government as a criminal organization, but one which was, by a freak of fate, temporarily useful. It would be like a gang of bandits, who, while occasionally robbing the villages in their territory, served to keep off other and more rapacious gangs. I do not approve of any government, but I will tolerate one so long as the only other choice is another, worse government.

Sort of like New Labour and the Conservatives then.

Meanwhile, I would do my best to develop voluntary institutions that might eventually take over the business of defense. That is precisely what I meant when I said, near the beginning of this book, that I thought all government functions were divided into two classes – those we could do away with today and those we hope to be able to do away with tomorrow.

At least he's honest about it, refusing to duck the question.

The fourth part of the book is then a post-1973 postscript to the rest, with chapters on private money, the enforcement of anarchist law – an oxymoronic topic to tickle the most jaded palate with – and how to promote libertarianism, including a brief piece on the Libertarian Party and how it should remain purely ideological without caring about election results. It should care, instead, on getting its message across in the same way the Socialist Party of America eventually got most of its radical 1928 policies affirmed into law by the US government, in later decades, including the minimum wage law and social security insurance, without ever controlling a US territory bigger than Milwaukee.

So, Mr Spock, is this a book worth buying? Affirmative, Captain. It is broken down throughout into bite-sized chunks, which even an intellectual orang-utan such as myself is capable of absorbing without the necessity of mind-expanding drugs, and if you need a brief guide to Anarcho-Capitalism, you really won't go far wrong with this well-written gem. The second section you'll have to make your own mind up about, but at least you'll have a good foundation. And then, Ha Ha Jim lad, you'll be ready for Rothbard!

So, finally, is David Friedman a radical capitalist or a utilitarian apologist? In my opinion he's a radical capitalist who's just trying his best to get us to a libertarian future as quickly as possible. And what could possibly be better than that? I think I'm still in the Rothbard camp, but I do admire Friedman's honesty about rogue socialist states dropping nuclear weapons on Philadelphia, and the possible consequential need to retain a really minimalist state in the meantime, purely for national defence, until this anarchist circle can finally be squared. There is therefore only one further thing to say about Mr Friedman. May the seed of his loins be fruitful in the belly of his woman. Boomshanka.

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The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush
David Frum
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003

It would be nice to think that a lot of people will read this book and have their perception of and attitude to George Bush altered for the better, but given the relentless negativity of the media, I'm not too hopeful.

David Frum, a not very "observant" Jew, was offered a job of speechwriter to GWB shortly after his election. Though a Republican, he was not a strong supporter of Bush in particular, but grew to be impressed by him, mainly from his straightforwrd character and his persistence in trying to do what he considered right, rather than expedient or merely strategic.

It is clear that GWB's character was radically altered for the better by his Christian conversion, and the White House ambience reflected his beliefs. Those chosen to work with him tended to be notably pious. Indicative of this, the book opens with "Missed you at Bible study," a remark made to Frum's companion, it's not clear by whom, as they entered the White House together. Mutual courtesy and consideration extended to restraint to any rivalry. Profanity (even "damn") was out, sober suits, jackets and ties in and all stood when the President entered a room, unless waved down. "Yet sometimes I found myself wondering whether there was not a danger of overdoing this solid and sensible business ... my colleagues reminded me of the sort of girl my grandmother's friends encouraged me to take out ... Nice - and what else?' [he'd ask] Just nice - what else do you want?'"

With notable exceptions (Donald Rumsfeld was one) "conspicuous intelligence seemed actively unwelcome in the Bush White House." Perhaps a British reader (wary of someone who is "too clever by half") will be more sympathetic to this feature, especially when Frum seems to suggest that it is such people that are the source of trouble and leaks. Chief of Staff Andy Card, "the nicest of all the administration's nice guys", was much concerned to prevent that sort of thing (p. 23).

The Clintonites left the place rather grimy, apparently because the cleaning had been franchised to a firm staffed by the "mentally impaired" - no kidding, p. 19 - which may have given credence to the tales of sabotage attributed to the departing staff.

Frum discovered that GWB was far more articulate and appeared more commanding when addressing people live, especially in small groups, than on TV (which is, of course, how most people see him). Recruited as a speech-writer, Frum is interesting in his descriptions on how the process of putting together presidential speeches works. There were two top ones: Karl Rove, risk-taker and Karen Hughes, risk-hater. Frum compares them to Grant and McClellan.

Frum makes it quite clear that from the start it was Bush that was leading the White House team, though he was at first uncertain where to (p. 27). The critical point in the Bush presidency was of course Sept. 11, 2001, and Frum gives a good description of the fear, anger, bewilderment and grief that afflicted him, along with all other Americans (though he was at the time still a Canadian). The White House was quickly evacuated but its staff left in the street, until a generous ad hoc offer from Daimler/Chrysler gave them the use of its offices: "I was pointed to an office and told it was mine for the day. Its regular tenant gave me his long-distance dialling codes, showed me how to work his e-mail, packed his briefcase and shook my hand on his way through the door (p. 117)."

It is quite possible that, but for the heroic action of the passengers on the fourth doomed plane, the White House, with Frum in it, would have been destroyed. Bush himself was in Florida, of all things "reading to the second-grade class at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota . . .(p. 118)"

Bush's first speech (for which Karen Hughes was responsible), Frum admits, was poor and banal, but his handling of the situation, and the speeches he made, improved thereafter. Frum claims that he "made one of those mysterious connections with the public that some leaders make and others ... simply cannot (p. 124)."

Bush also bent over backwards to exculpate Muslims in general from the crime and prevent any reflex anti-Muslim violence - which didn't stop lies being told about its prevalence. This line seems to have done no good at all (p. 162). Bernard Lewis is quoted as sarcastically suggesting that the media were "all of them seemingly determined to convince the American public that Islam was a religion like Quakerism, only less violent (p. 153)." The reason why Muslims had voted so heavily for Bush in the presidential election turned out to be almost certainly because Gore had a Jew, Lieberman, running for Vice-President. I suppose everyone will say that Frum's scepticism about any such thing as Muslim goodwill stems from the fact he is a Jew but it seems pretty well grounded from my own observations.

In late December 2001 Frum was asked "Can you sum up in a sentence or two our best case for going after Iraq?" I suppose it was news to me that Bush's thinking had already turned to Iraq, but it was from this assignment that the phrase "axis of evil" emerged, originally coined by Frum as "axis of hatred", in either form likely to set the teeth of purists on edge.

By this time, Frum was feeling his time of relevant usefulness was coming an end and he resigned, disappointing any dirt-diggers by his consistent praise of the President. A pleasant, rather reassuring book - but perhaps not to such as Gerald Kaufman who, "a venerable leader of the British Labour Party [eh?] grumbled that "Bush, himself the most intellectually backward American president of my political lifetime, is surrounded by advisers whose bellicosity is exceeded only by their political, military and diplomatic illiteracy.' (p. 278, ref. to: The Spectator, 31/8/02)"

Frum now writes the back page for National Review.

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I do not know whether it is the done thing on Samizdata to get involved in the statist plots of the BBC to stop us thinking, and to get us wasting our thoughts on irrelevant trivia, but after watching Ray Mears’ excellent Big Read program on 'The Lord of the Rings', I thought it might be interesting to work out which of the twenty-one books was the best from a libertarian point of view:

Birdsong: Shows the horror of the state in action, destroying human life for no real reason. But I look for entertainment in a book, not misery, as real libertarian novels entertain for the dollar price, rather than depress, or as Robert Heinlein said, 'my books were written for entertainment to pay my grocery bills.' So I can not comment further on this book as I will never be able to get beyond the first page. Unless someone tells me it's full of Blackadder IV style jokes, of course.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin: Come on, this book is only in this list because of the recent film. Just why are British people so shallow? However, being secretly in love with Penelope Cruz, as I am, I am as shallow as the rest so I won't comment any further.

Catch-22:Yet another war story pointing out the futility of inter-state destruction, so quite libertarian. But I could never get past that part in the film where the bloke's entrails fall out, so I ca not comment any further.

The Catcher in the Rye: Oh no, the usual socialist obsessions with teenage sex and do-gooding. Alas, I have never read the book. The cover page always puts me off. It is probably great. Shame I will never read it then, unless someone kicks my eyes open.

Great Expectations: The state education system in England always tries to stuff Dickens down the throats of its inmates, presumably because Mr Dickens encouraged the growth of do-goodery in Victorian England. However, aside from televised adaptations I have never been any further with Dickens than 'The Tale of Two Cities', which I was forced to study, I think, at English 'O' level. I can not remember the details, except it was a far nobler thing to fall asleep in English lessons than it was to fall asleep when my unrequited love goddesses read out their essays on it.

Gone with the Wind: We really are a bunch of bananas in Great Britain. How can 'Gone with the Wind' be in a top 21 of great all-time books? There's obviously still ten million women in England in love with Clark Gable. And who can blame them, I suppose? Still the greatest moustache of all time.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Arrgggghhhhhhh!!!! "Oh come on," he said, pathetically. It would need three hundred pages just to describe what I think of this book. Much like it took three hundred pages for J.K.Rowling to start this book. But she has made a lot of money, and got children back into book reading. So she can not be all bad.

His Dark Materials: Loved the armoured bear. Aside from that I felt the novels leant too much in the direction of Channel 4-style leftieness, though could not put my finger on why. Did not manage to finish the third one. Just could not see the point.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Fabulous. We vote for the lizard to stop the other lizard getting in. We make sure the President of the Galaxy is the man least likely to be any good at it. Douglas Adams, RIP, surely a closet libertarian, like most sci-fiers. Top quality.

Jane Eyre: Excellent commentary on the gentility of living before the nanny state. I always get it confused in my mind, however, with 'Pride and Prejudice'. Both books are excellent for impressing ladies at University though, for showing them that you are well-rounded, i.e. that you would like to sleep with them.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: C.S.Lewis, superstar. Read all of these, including all of the Prince Caspian novels, but stopped reading them when I was about thirteen, so I can not remember the details. I have the hazy recollection that the state is represented by the Witch-Queen of Narnia, and her perpetual winter of discontent, and individual freedom is represented by Aslan the Lion. So probably libertarian. I will stock them up again when my children get to eight.

Little Women: Unfortunately I've never read it, and unfortunately, from the cover story, probably never will, as again it seems a bit too miserable for my tastes. But I do remember a great joke by 'Fletch' about it, in 'Porridge', as he tried to get some cigarettes for it, in prison, by pretending it was pornographic. I suppose you had to be there.

The Lord of the Rings: Ah, 'Lord of the Rings'. Surely the greatest book ever written. Perhaps the most libertarian novel ever written, the free western peoples of Middle-Earth trying to throw off the yoke of Stalin/Hitler/Sauron. When it wins this BBC competition, I will retain my hope that the British people will one day wake up and throw off this evil socialist Euro-yoke monster we are currently sleepwalking towards.

Nineteen Eighty-Four: The only mystery remains, how did Orwell manage to write this, and still profess to believe in socialism at the same time? Perhaps this was some ironic form of double-think? Surely the greatest book ever written. But did not I just say that? Oh well, that's double-think for you.

To Kill a Mockingbird: Have not read it, I'm afraid. Sorry. Looks a bit too miserable.

Pride and Prejudice: Again, as with Jane Eyre, great for impressing the ladies, for gentlemen seeking company amongst intelligent women. That, and as with most men who read this who have been plagued by numerous instances of unrequited love, it has the ending we've all dreamed of when the unrequited woman is revealed as having been in love with us all along. Tragically, this seldom seems to occur in real life. Not really libertarian, but a damn good yarn.

Rebecca: Oh this is ridiculous. What about 'East of Eden'? What about 'The Old Man and the Sea'? What about 'The Godfather'? What about 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress'? What about 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy'? What about 'Smiley's People'? What about 'The Stand'? God forgive me, but what about 'Atlas Shrugged'? But 'Rebecca'? I'm sorry, we in Britain are obviously a bunch of childish romance obsessed emotional retards. This is of course why we are so great!

War and Peace: Rubbish. Rubbish. Rubbish. Read by people desperately trying to either impress themselves or their friends. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of characters, all of whom blend into a chaotic mass by about the five-hundredth page. People are voting for this to impress the watchers of this poll that the British people are intelligent. Will this madness never end? When trying to impress myself and attempting to read this for the umpteenth time, about ten years ago, I resolved to give up and start having a life. Absolute rubbish.

The Wind in the Willows: Pure genius. Toad, the ultimate libertarian. Total superstar. What can I say about his dressing up as a washerwoman to escape the clutches of the state? Magnificent.

Winnie the Pooh: The wonderful thing about Tigger is that he is the only one. Surely the ultimate libertarian slogan, that each individual is unique. Top quality.

Wuthering Heights: I always think about Kate Bush singing 'Kathy', so I just can not take this book seriously. However, I do remember being rather tearful reading it as a teenager, perhaps in the grip of yet another period of unrequited love, but we need books that make us think, not that make us cry, so therefore it fails on the libertarian front.

A strange list then. Lots of romance and lots of children's books mixed in with real mind-benders like 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'. 'Lord of the Rings' will win, as is surely its right, and because the 'Return of the King' will be coming out around the time of the final voting, but who can tell which book will come second? I guess 'Pride and Prejudice' will, for its girly soppiness, but wouldn't it be great if 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' came in riding shotgun, or Toad of Toad Hall got the anti-environmentalist vote? Poop poop!

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After reading his Memoirs, I sent Edward Teller my enthusiastic opinion of it - and a personal "Thank you". I did not expect, or receive, a reply.

Dear Professor Teller,

You will have received many tributes to your wonderful book and I should like to send you mine. During the last few years I have decided to write, just for myself, reviews of the books I read. Usually brief, this one has got entirely out of hand and I cannot expect you to read it, but perhaps its length will impress you of the impact your book has had on an ordinary person. Also a "Thank You". I was interned by the Japanese in Shanghai and it is uncertain how things would have gone if the ending of the War had been long drawn out and messy. The Bomb you helped to make ensured it was sudden and conclusive.

Edward Teller died in on September 9th of this year at the age of 95. The review that follows was written shortly before his death.

Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics
Edward Teller (with Judith Scoolery)
Perseus Publishing, 2002

A big book (628 pages); since the author is 94, there is some reason for this, given he is still active in the Hoover Institution, though perhaps not in research nuclear physics. I have been aware that he has attracted considerable hostility both from the usual left-leaning media and intellectuals, but also from other physicists (e.g. Bethe, p. 542), partly for his strong advocacy of making the H Bomb, but mostly because of his negative testimony about Oppenheimer, though I feel that these were pretexts rather than reasons.

Yet despite this, there is a remarkable lack of bitterness or animus against his opponents. Photographs of him in old age show him as jolly, benign and genial. I could almost say that Teller was anti-paranoid and perhaps the clearest thing about him which emerges from this book is not his scientific achievement and persistence in his work to bring his ideas to fruition, but the warmth of his friendships, his lasting relationships and his feelings for others in general. In an odd way, which perhaps he does not realise, and I am sure does him an injustice, they even seem to overshadow his love for his wife and family, as if these were only special cases in his general attitude to others, and that Mici was just the one of the band of friends in Budapest that he happened to marry. He was obviously deeply hurt when fellow-scientists actually "cut" him and never, as far as is given here, broke off a friendship himself. He certainly managed to retain friendships with those he disagreed with, scientifically and politically, in particular Szilard and Fermi.

His character seems to have been imbued with the feeling that beliefs and attitudes, like scientific problems, can be decided or reconciled by discussion and a disinterested search for the truth. Therefore why quarrel personally with an opponent while doing so? Oppenheimer, to ET, was not so much unreliable, as an enigma - and no wonder. It seems extraordinary that Oppenheimer should have discouraged him from signing Szilard and Franck's petition to the military, and Truman, to go for a harmless demonstration of the atomic bomb (p. 206), yet exhibited so much revulsion against further nuclear work after the war (p. 219). Yet again, Oppenheimer suggested the use of the H-bomb during the Korean War, not only in conversation with Teller (p. 352), but also to Eisenhower (p. 353). Granted that Teller writes from memory and presumably without documentation, it would be interesting to know if Oppenheimer has denied these assertions.

Teller makes little of, if he mentions at all, the culture-shift to the left that took place amongst scientists from the '20s to the '50s, which made them reluctant to adopt the same wholehearted anti-communist, as had been their anti-nazi, stance. All Oppenheimer's political friends and associates were communists (including his wife), and he supported the Communist Party to the tune of $150 a month during the '30s. Yet from the long interrogation Teller underwent (given in full as an Appendix) in the hearings to decide on whether to withdraw security clearance from Oppenheimer, it is clear that Teller did not doubt Oppenheimer's loyalty, only his judgement, reliability and motivation with respect to his employment on nuclear research. Teller had every reason to be anti-nazi - he was of Jewish descent - but never seems to have been attracted (like, say Koestler, also a Hungarian Jew) to communism; perhaps he'd been immunised by his experience, brief as it was and young as he was (born 1908) of the Bela Kun regime of 1919.

Although it must surely be that the years of Teller's work on the A and H bombs were the most important, he says himself: "My years as a young scientist in Germany were the most satisfying years of my life (p. 77)." I can see that to a physicist the pages about his early scientific development will be most revealing and interesting, while to the general reader they sketch the last years during the century when people could move freely from country to country, with scientists visiting here and there to learn and exchange views.

Born in Budapest, he was stranded after the war in a town now in Romania, then taken back to Hungary, educated there, and there made his first friendships, including his scientific ones - Wigner, von Naumann and Szilard. His University education was in Karlsruhe, then in Munich, where he lost all but the heelbone of his right foot after jumping off a tram. The repair operation, together with a German-made prosthesis, seems to have restored almost normal ability to walk: "I could even go for long hikes in the mountains". He then studied under Heisenberg in Leipzig, visited Bohr in Copenhagen and took a paying job in Gottingen (where he modified the "Twenty Questions" game by making the Object unknown to both questioner and questioned.)

In 1932 he visited Rome and made friends with Fermi. By this time it was becoming inadvisable to return to Gottingen and he was one of the scientists invited to Britain by Lindemann and Donnan, getting a job at London University. It is an interesting (if hidden) example of his take-it-for-granted attitude to his own intellectual abilities that he never mentions when he learnt English, or any other language, which makes me wonder how many others he knows. He and Mici spoke Hungarian together; at age eight, his daughter Wendy confided to Szilard that she couldn't become a mother because she didn't know the secret language wives spoke to husbands in (p. 355n).

Supported by the Rockefeller Foundation (whose bureaucrats provided some obstacles), between two stays in London Teller worked with Bohr in Copenhagen and married Mici, then moved on to the George Washington University. Thus as with other scientists, his move from Europe to the US partook of an escape, but was also a progress from job to job. Having experienced a far more virulent, ingrained form of anti-semitism in Hungary, he almost failed to recognize the more menacing, because more ideological and programmed, nazi version. One result was that his parents and sister remained in Hungary; while they survived the War, his father died and he did not see the others until they were allowed to leave in 1959, probably as a result of the influence that Szilard had with the Hungarian government.

Another reason why Teller didn't notice the political situation was that from an early age he was fascinated, almost obsessed, with science and extremely fortunate in having the brains to match. As one who cannot follow what Teller would doubtless describe as the simple physics of his explanations of his work and his problems, I wonder how many scientists, let alone his readers, are able to. Yet this does not detract from appreciation of the scientific aspects of his autobiography; his disagreement with Bethe and Ulam on the technical feasibility of "Method A", and his ultimate vindication by more accurate computer methods (p. 544), might even be seen as an illustration of scientific intuition, though such a concept is never claimed.

Teller also gives an excellent analysis of the dilemma facing the scientist when trying to find out whether something undesirable (in this case H-fusion) will or won't work (p. 310). And surely Bethe's hope that an agreement between the US and USSR for neither to try to make the H-bomb, around 1950, when Stalin was still alive, was hopelessly unrealistic (p. 544)? And certainly a scientist can't write, as Bethe did, of the H-bomb as a "calamity" that could have remained uninvented, and disingenuous of him to suggest "that it was necessary to make a pause before the decision and consider this irretrievable step most carefully." After all, there was a pause and that was what exasperated Teller so much - and it was people with misgivings like Bethe who caused it.

Although dubbed "father of the H-Bomb", Teller repudiated this title, but more, I think, out of modesty than to avoid its odium. I am not sure how he can avoid deserving it, at least from his efforts to get it made; despite these, work was delayed for perhaps five years. Another achievement was the setting up of a nuclear research lab, the Livermore, in competition with Los Alamos, a situation which he judged would be beneficial to nuclear research and to both labs. He also worked on a commission to ensure that nuclear power stations were foolproof, at a time when there were, of course, no nuclear engineers. Two projects dear to him were thwarted: the use of nuclear explosions for what can only be called super-landscaping, rendered impossible by the popular fear of radiation, and - though it may still come to pass - the Strategic Defence Initiative, or SDI - never called "Star Wars".

Pertinent to popular fears and scares about radiation is his conviction as long ago as 1960 that a small but measurable amount of radiation above normal background could be beneficial, citing Cohen (p. 442n). Inevitably, as the book nears its end, friends begin to die - Fermi, van Naumann, Szilard - his beloved Mici at 91, after 66 years of marriage and 76 of companionship, and his sister Emmi, just before this book was completed. Perhaps the most poignant to the reader was that of his dear friend Maria (who providentially didn't burn his letters) and his realising later that she would probably have understood him if he had spoken to her, on her deathbed, as did another friend, in German, her mother tongue, instead of English, which they had used for 50 years.

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The Reconquest of Spain
D. W. Lomax
Longman, first published 1978

It is surprising to read (p. 179), "There seems to be no serious book in any language devoted to the history of the whole Reconquest," (at least when the book was published in 1978) despite the fact that it would seem to be the underlying theme of the history of the Middle Ages in the Peninsula, with the nice firm dates of 711-1492. The author commends O'Callaghan's A History of Medieval Spain.

Like everywhere else, from Persia to the Atlantic, Islam rolled unstoppably over the whole of Spain, except its tiny northern edge, probably leaving that out in favour of richer pickings in southern France. Even here, in Asturias, only active resistance to the Arabs ensured the survival of the tiny state and an early civil war amongst the Moslems led to the withdrawal of disaffected Berbers from northern territory which was then occupied by Christians.

The author claims, with some evidence, that quite early the ideal of Reconquest was the ambition of the Christian kings and people. However, the initial Ummayad emirate, subsequently caliphate, flourished until the end of, and particularly during, the tenth century, though the last caliphs were puppets. It is probably this period of the Muslim occupation that has been idealised as a time of toleration by Muslims of Christians and Jews, though these were definitely second-class citizens and persecution of them not unknown.

The break-up of the caliphate enabled the Christians to advance again, with some assistance from France; also the crusading ideal, though mainly focussed on Jerusalem, was some help, sometimes by crusaders en passant. The capitulation of Toledo, even though it remained something of an outpost, signalled this. However, about 1085, some of the Muslims, in desperation invited in from North Africa the Almoravids, a puritanical sect (often hated by the more liberal decadent Spanish Muslims) who, in the great battle of Sagrajas (1086) halted the reconquest. The Cid (1043-99) is of this period. Much of the time he as often served Muslim kings as Christian, but after capturing Valencia, "was the only Christian leader to defeat the Almoravids in battle in the eleventh century". (p. 74)

By this time the Christian states were Portugal, Leon-Castille (gradually united), Aragon and Navarre, sometimes allied, but more often not and generally with no scruples about fighting each other with Muslim allies. However, Aragon was pushing down the Ebro valley, taking Saragossa in 1118, though the Almoravids fought back successfully to prevent it reaching Valencia, which had been evacuated after the death of the Cid.

Like the Caliphate before them, the Almoravids disintegrated and were largely replaced, from 1157, by another sect from Africa, the Almohads, who soundly defeated the Castilians at Alarcos in 1195. This defeat seems to have first cowed then roused the Christians (particularly the Pope); finally Christians from all the Spanish kingdoms, and some from France, united in a campaign which won the decisive victory of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212). In the forty years after the battle the Almohad empire broke into pieces which were annexed by" Castile and Aragon. Vital cities - such as Cordova (1236) and Seville (1248) - passed permanently into Christian hands so that "by 1252 the whole of the Peninsula was nominally under Christian suzerainty" (p. 129), though this, of course, did not mean the end of Muslim kingdoms.

The pace of reconquest slowed down, initially as a result of another transfusion from Africa, the Marinids, who, however, could only defend the Muslim rump. In 1340, at Tarifa, their sultan was decisively defeated and no successor state in Africa invaded Spain again. Muslim Spain survived as Granada for another 150 years, the Christians occupying much of the time fighting and rebelling against each other. One is forced to add: when they should have been completing the Conquest. The process, when it happened, certainly united Spain. In the end, "Fernando and Isabel could cure one crisis in 1481 simply by setting the war-machine to work once more to conquer Granada." (p. 178)

The author, at his Conclusion makes the persuasive claim that "Only Spain [and also, I suppose to a lesser extent Portugal, which he does not mention] was able to conquer, administer, Christianize and europeanize the populous areas of the New World precisely because during the previous seven centuries her society had been constructed for the purpose of conquering, administering, Christianizing and europeanizing the inhabitants of al-Andalus." (p. 178) As so often in books published from the 1970s on, the maps leave much to be desired; certainly places are mentioned in the text which are not to be found on them.

Two days after I had finished this book I listened to a discussion on "Cordovan Spain" under Melvyn Bragg's chairmanship on Radio 4. The three other participants were Tim Winter, a Muslim convert, of the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University, Mary Nickman, a Jewess (carefully correcting herself from AD to Common Era) and an executive director of the Maimonides Foundation, and Martin Palmer, whose voice was not to me sufficiently distinguishable from the first, an Anglican lay preacher and theologian, and author of A Sacred History of Britain. Although the consensus was largely positive about the Ummayad regime, and their tone "multicultural" in the modern sense, the first two did seem to agree that the three religions, while coexisting, did not indulge in dialogue, let alone interpenetrate. This confirms an episode mentioned in the book, that even when promised immunity in a bilateral debate, a Christian was executed "when he expressed his real opinion of Mohammed". (p. 23) Nor was the Koran translated into Latin "until the twelfth or thirteenth century", someone said in the discussion. Needless to say, the rosy view of Muslim Spain did not take into account that the Muslim conquest fatally disrupted Mediterranean civilization, the burden of Pirenne's Mohammed and Charlemagne. To pick up the shards and pass a few of them on does not strike me as a very large recompense.

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The Age of Reagan: I 1964 –1980
Steven F. Hayward
Prima Lifestyles, 2001

This is a very long book (718 pages + another 100 pages of notes etc.) and it is somewhat daunting to realise that in due course a second volume will come to complete the story. It might be as well to say that this is emphatically not a biography, not even a political biography; the title and the sub-title The Fall of the Old Liberal Order make this clear. It is more a history of the times, from the anti-Goldwater landslide of 1964 to the Reagan landslide of 1980. The cumulative impression of the book itself is its richness and how its detail ministers to its analysis.

And it is a sorry, not to say a frightening tale, telling as it does of the collapse of American self-confidence and the rise of the counter-culture of self-hatred amongst its elite. The narrative is admittedly partisan, but at the very least a case that needs to be put. As for the Presidents of the period, Hayward's judgements are that Johnson was irresolute, reacting to events minimally, Nixon misguided, obsessive and unfortunate, Ford a mere stopgap and Carter simply disastrous. All of them seemed to have underestimated Soviet malevolence and overestimated Soviet stability; for the latter the intelligence services seem to have been especially at fault.

For anyone who has been misled into thinking that Reagan was an intellectual nullity, here is ample evidence that he was an independent and original thinker, often insisting on keeping to his own line or script in face of criticism from his advisers and speechwriters. Many of his statements, which at the time seemed naive, questionable, wrongheaded or too extreme now seem merely farsighted. He was also optimistic about America and had no time for any rationale for its decline, such as Kissinger, student of the rise and fall of European states, believed in, or at least feared. Nor was he put off by the "complexity" arguments of those who despised him for his simple attitude to problems and their solutions. Some of his difficulties with his own advisers and supporters lay in persuading them that this attitude could be made plausible to the public as electorate.

As much as the first two thirds of the book, however, has little mention of Reagan, for it is a history of how the US got into the messes that Reagan, it is fair to say, rescued it from. By far the biggest mess, which he was too late to do anything about, was, of course, the Vietnam War and it is quite plain that the left-leaning media and intellectuals, combined with political ineffectiveness and downright ignorance, contributed overwhelmingly to its being lost. To illustrate US political masochism: the two "war pictures" that had the greatest negative impact on home support - execution of the Vietcong prisoner and the napalmed little girl - won Pulitzer Prizes for the photographers.

It is not exactly necessary to be reminded, but it is necessary to bear in mind that it was under two Democrat Presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, that the US entered and enmeshed itself in the Vietnam "quagmire" (though this is not a term I recall being used by the author). The muddled, incremental escalation of the conflict by Johnson is described in Ch 4. It was also a Democrat Congress, not the President, the hapless Ford, that abandoned the South Vietnamese, even refusing to supply them arms.

Even more so was Cambodia betrayed, and the dignified reproaches of their leaders, as they refused the offer of evacuation by the American ambassador, to face certain death, make sad reading (p. 408). It is a terrible comment on what the consensus was that Reagan's characterisation of the US effort in Vietnam as a "noble cause" was regarded as eccentric and chauvinist, just as later was "evil empire" (but for the latter's vindication see The Week, 15/2/02, p. 13).

All through the account is woven the political manoeverings of various, almost forgotten presidential hopefuls and their minions. The ups and downs of Reagan's two bids for the Republican nomination and the campaign that won him the Presidency, are given in great detail. On the other hand, his two terms as Governor of California are more lightly sketched in (or are perhaps less memorable). A fine book, which should be better known.

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In Defence of Global Capitalism
Johan Norberg
Cato Institute, 2003

Another welcome book in the Simon, Lomborg line, this time from Sweden, an auspicious sign. The Preface was reprinted in Liberty, where I first read it and where it makes a good summary of the argument of the book. In 1988 when the author was 16, his party – the Anarchists – got the largest percentage of votes, 25%, in the school mock-election, running an agin-the-government campaign. His position has changed somewhat – capitalism has difficulty working without a legal system and transparency in transactions – but is basically the same.

He starts by insisting that over the past three or four decades things have got better, particularly in the poorer "developing" countries. Income per capita has increased and mortality been reduced. This he ascribes to opening of the countries concerned to "the market", both internal and external. He is, moreover, strongly against national barriers, not merely to trade, but also to migration, though here he doesn't take into account our xenophobia. The case against tariffs is succinctly put by the quotation: "Either a branch of enterprise is profitable, in which case it deserves no tariff protection; or else it is unprofitable, in which case it deserves no tariff protection (p. 152)."

Although not explicitly against the EU as such, his analysis of its CAP agricultural subsidies and protectionism (pp. 148-) is damning, and it is even more shaming that so-called pro-Third World anti-globalisation protesters do not target them.

There is a separate chapter on "The African Morass" (p. 98-) where per capita GDP has actually decreased since the '60s, though I think the statement that "The African countries have inherited a hierarchic, repressive political structure from the colonial powers" needs to be modified: what they did inherit, according to Bauer, was a late move to a command economy and a socialist intellectual outlook. The situation has been exacerbated by international aid, and debt cancellation would only be an encouragement of the behaviour that brought the bankruptcy about

The author refutes the prevalent belief that world inequality is growing, either between (p. 53) or within countries. He also points out that social mobility means that "the poor" are not the same people from one year to the next (p. 76). This, incidentally, is the factor most frequently, in fact always, omitted from discussions on poverty, whether absolute or relative; in fact, only 4% of the US population remain in the "poor" bracket (20%) for as long as two years, though some will remain longer.

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The Skeptical Environmentalist
Bjorn Lomborg
Cambridge University Press, 2001

This is not exactly a book of surprises for me, since I have read Julian Simon, Donald Bailey, et al., but apparently it has caused a stir and much hostility, which I can only assume is because all the other sources haven't attained the same (desired) publicity. It is a big book – 352 pages plus 160 pages of notes etc., divided into six sections:

1. The Litany – the media consensus that things are getting worse. Lomborg sets out to counter this in his section "Things Are Getting Better" and examines "Why Do We Hear So Much Bad News?"

2. Human Welfare – population, life expectancy, food stocks, general prosperity, leading to the conclusion: unprecedented human prosperity.

3. Can Human prosperity Continue? The "Are we living on borrowed time?" worry, is answered reassuringly in the sections following on food, forests, energy and raw materials, water.

4. Pollution – air pollution (decreasing in the developed countries, correlated with increased prosperity), acid rain (a false scare), indoor air pollution (greater everywhere than outdoors, resulting in allergies and asthma), water pollution (exaggerated and decreasing), waste disposal (not a problem as far as enough space is concerned).

5. Tomorrow's Problems – exaggerated fears over chemicals and pesticides causing cancer etc., also over biodiversity loss and species extinction, the last from figures grabbed from the air, and a long section of global warming (pp. 258-324). This may be the section that has caused most trouble. Lomborg does not deny that "anthropogenic" additional carbon dioxide may have caused, be causing or will cause global warming but he does make clear the variation possible and the excessively alarmist nature of some of the forecasts. He also points out that money spent on reducing the earth's temperature could be better spent and that the dislocation of the world economy would reduce the expanding prosperity that makes possible the necessary efficiency needed to bring about the desired results.

6. The Real State of the World is a generally hopeful one, basically summarising the message of the rest of the book and including a section on GM foods. There is also a discussion of the costs of protection measures; thus the Environmental Protection Agency (in the US) spends $21.4 billion to save 592,000 life-years (though how this figure was attained isn't clear to me). A Harvard study estimates that 1,230,000 life-years could be saved for the same money. This is a good source-book, with something interesting on every page. I find it pretty convincing.

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The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America's Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars?
Stephanie Gutmann
Scribner, 2000

First published in 2000, nothing could better illustrate the subordination of the military to the civil power than this account, by a woman journalist, of the submission of the male-oriented former to the feminist-dominated latter. Since it is modern political dogma that men and women are equal, the recruitment of women into the fighting forces becomes obligatory. This book is a description of how this is done, and what happens afterwards. As yet, the result has barely been tested in battle conditions, so the problems are being confronted in peacetime.

There is ample evidence that if physical equality was the criterion, few women would qualify – after training intensively, a batch of women, in it for the experiment (not recruits), reached the standard of the weakest males (p. 251). At the same time as trying to pretend that females could be the equivalent of males in tough fighting with enemies out to kill them, they were presumed so vulnerable that they needed protection from all forms of harassment by their comrades, which meant that the sexes couldn't really interact – and when harassment changed into acceptable behaviour, that was just as bad – the pregnancy rate soared.

There is a long account and analysis of the notorious "Tailhook" party in 1991, post-Gulf (pp. 156-188) "when we had finally gotten over Vietnam" which led to numerous dismissals of top airforce brass and a greatly lowered morale of the rest, resulting in a haemorrhaging of disgusted qualified pilots, at a cost of $lm each for training. This was ostensibly about harassment, though most of the women present could either take care of themselves, expected what they got or went there to get it. Even during a rowdy "gauntlet", when someone shouted "I've lost my pager", everything stopped until it was found. The woman who led the complaints benefited to the tune of $5+m – and left the service. After Tailhook, everything was about gender, ... [it was] the worst event for the Navy since Pearl Harbor."

Of course, the whole burden of the book is that the US armed forces are not being treated by Congress and the media as a fighting force whose efficiency is paramount, but as a section of society which can be moulded into something with quite a different agenda from fighting and killing, though what that is is difficult to define – that men and women are basically equal and if it doesn't always work out that way, it's the men's fault.

The book ends with a series of recommendations, granted that the forces should remain open to women:

1. Eliminate recruiting quotas for women;
   
2. Have separate-sex "boot camp" training;
   
3. Have high and equal standards there;
   
4. Restore "openness" and be frank about the problems, not just put them down to "sexism";
   
5. Exonerate the personnel victimised after Tailhook ("Witchook");
   
6. Separate the social service personnel from the fighting forces;
   
7. Copy the practice of Marines, who seem to have fought through the "gender" nonsense largely unscathed.

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A Life Against the Grain: The Autobiography of an Unconventional Economist
Julian L. Simon
Transaction, 2002, hardback

This is a posthumously published work:

Julian Simon died suddenly and, according to the doctor's report, instantly of his first and only heart attack on February 8th, 1998. He had just returned from a trip to Spain where he had been awarded an honorary degree from the University of Navarre. He was in very good spirits and showed no signs of fatigue or illness.

So runs the initial "Comment" by his widow, Rita J. Simon. I had wondered how he died, having learnt, with regret, the fact from the mention in a Laissez-Faire Books Catalogue, and even feared that, given his history of depression, he might have committed suicide, a fear justified by his admission in this book that he had contemplated doing so while in depression, being prevented by thoughts of his family responsibilities.

The Autobiography of an Unconventional Economist, as the work is subtitled, had been finished, apparently over a year before, in a much longer form (900 pages – though whether they are equivalent to the page size of this 359 page book is not indicated) and has been edited by his widow, with acknowledged support. There may have been a misprint or two I have forgotten, but the only obvious textual fault is not filling in internal references to other chapters, which are left as 00, awaiting specification in the final revision. There is an unfulfilled promise of a bibliography of JLS's publications in the text, but not even a normal list of previous titles at the beginning. His death date is not given on the reverse of the title page, with the usual guff there. All this said (at perhaps unnecessary length) I must say that the book is a very interesting one, less so perhaps for its ideas – these are in his other books – than for information on the personality of its author, though even here there is a possibly involuntary veil of reticence. I hasten to add that I don't just mean about sex, a rather welcome exclusion, but rather why he feels dissatisfied with himself. He obviously had a happy marriage and his three children grew up satisfactorily (Ch 17); he had no money troubles and always did the job he liked or, if it wasn't suitable, changed it.

Although his reassuring ideas about world resources and the environment had not gained widespread acceptance by the time he died, he does not seem to bear ill will to anyone. He may have thought that he didn't manage his life effectively – but this would conflict with his propensity to work at whatever took his interest. This gives an episodic feel to about the first two thirds or so of the book; when is the action really going to start?

Julian Simon was born in Newark, NJ, 12/2/32 of Jewish immigrant stock – he was the third generation – and an only child. He could not respect his father; his feelings for his mother were warmer; love is not mentioned. He claims to have been no more than competent at school, with nothing unusual about him but there seemed to be no problem about getting into Harvard. This was combined, in a way I seem to have missed, with service (presumably the draft) in the Navy. After this he did a stint in advertising and then went to Chicago's Business School, where he realised that he was at ease with economic concepts. After that he set up a mail order business; after writing a book about it, he realised that he liked writing and teaching and got a University job. It is not too clear from the book when Simon's career of "alarmabater" began. He started studying demographic economics in 1966, taking the orthodox view that rapid population growth was a menace (Ch. 20). He changed his views rather gradually during the 1970s, but had great difficulty in getting his work published. By the 1980s he could claim that his views on population – that its growth is a benefit, not a drawback, to human progress – were prevailing, though he's not given much credit for the change (p. 257). Ben Wattenberg's Foreword to Simon's Hoodwinking the Nation, testifies to how Simon underestimated his own influence. On the other hand, he came in for a lot of vilification and, which he found almost as bad, a refusal to listen to his message. However, in March 1981, he received the letter of which he is the most proud, from Hayek, beginning "I have never before written a fan letter..." (p. 268)

Chapter 25 is a rather tantalising account of his 13 year long battle with depression (early 1962 to early 1975). He had – and probably continued to have after the depression lifted – an extremely self-critical personality, and was obsessively concerned with his shortcomings and errors; the long period began with guilt engendered by some unspecified peccadillo. A critical mother didn't help – a Jewish phenomenon? His diagnosis and treatment of his own malady is entirely psychological, rather than metabolic; he may have been unaware of such an approach and certainly took no drugs to alleviate it – this was before the development of modern tranquillizers, so they would be either narcotics or alcohol. He seems rather to have reasoned himself out of it, in this being greatly helped by his Jewish culture: I use this somewhat weasel-word, because "faith" seems too strong a word for his ideology; he calls himself "a radical atheist along the lines of Buddha", in contrast to his wife who "has a fairly traditional Jewish religious belief (p. 315)." He and his family observe Jewish practices, and the start of his recovery seems to have come about from the injunction that a person should not be sad on the Sabbath; indeed, "Judaism also imposes an obligation upon the individual to enjoy his or her life … not to waste your life in unhappiness or to make your life a burden;" in short, it enjoins one to be cheerful. It is of course impossible to say whether his recovery was due to his working this out through his system, fighting off the load of self-criticism (by saying, for one thing, to himself: "Lay off. Don't criticise."), or whether the depression was moving off anyway, or because his work was beginning to receive recognition and make an impact. He has written a book, which he says has helped some – not all – those he has given it to, Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression. The last Chapter (28) is entitled This I Believe: Values and Attitudes. A great man, who underestimated himself.

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May I strongly recommend to fellow bloggers to go out and get a Green friend a copy of Bjorn Lomborg's book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, copyright 2001, p515, Cambridge University Press. A great book, written by a leftist former Greenpeace member who saw the light after reading material by the late, great and much-missed Julian L. Simon. Lomborg is that rarity, a Green with a thirst for the hard facts who is not afraid to change his mind if the facts don't fit a preconceived view. Already getting rave reviews.

Read the author's excellent summary at The Economist here.