Order your FREE Sample today! Call 0845 357 3613
Oldie Review Of Books - History
Sign up for our email newsletter
Only the finest Oldie missives direct to your inbox.
What has happened to biographies?
BIOGRAPHIES have boomed in recent years, bestowing wealth and acclaim on practitioners like Michael Holroyd and Richard Holmes, but according to Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian the business is in a critical state, and she knows whom to blame. Ten years ago Amanda Foreman published her biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Foreman was bright, ambitious and good-looking, and happy to pose naked behind a stack of her books, and nothing has been the same ever since.
According to Hughes (the biographer of Mrs Beeton) royal mistresses have proliferated at the expense of more worthwhile subjects: “Georgiana was the precursor of modern-day celebrity culture, in which Being Jordan which is surely a ghosted autobiography, rather than a biography sells 335,649 in hardback, while Hilary Spurling's life of Matisse splutters along on 12,451.
It seems a bit hard to blame it on the hapless Foreman: royal mistresses have always sold best in the biography stakes, and Nancy Mitford wasn¹t rapped across the knuckles half a century ago when she produced her biography of Madame de Pompadour. But Amanda F. is not the only villain of the piece: equally culpable, it seems, are publishers, who far prefer to commission a well-known name to write another unnecessary biography of Hitler or Napoleon rather than risk an untried author and an unfamiliar subject. There's some truth in the accusation, but again it¹s nothing new.
In the 1930s Jonathan Cape, the most distinguished literary publisher of the day, urged authors stuck for a subject to have another crack at Nelson; O G S Crawford is hardly a household name, yet Kitty Hauser found herself a publisher and was widely reviewed. Kathryn Hughes approves the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate¹s suggestion of a 'paradigm shift', in that bright biographers now concentrate on an aspect of a life rather than a blow-by-blow account.
The truth is that too many biographies are boring and badly written: their authors may or may not be familiar with primary sources, but unlike Hesketh Pearson (who wasn¹t) they cannot tell a story, crack a joke, build up the subsidiary characters, or modulate between slow and fast, sad and funny. If some of them fail to find publishers, so much the better.
Giles MacDonogh ‘convincingly argues that 1938 was Hitler’s annus mirabilis,’ Nigel Jones wrote of this ‘moving and searing book’ in the Sunday Telegraph.
Historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s new work attempts to show that there was a lot more to 1492 than Columbus, said Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph.
THE first volume in a series about the post-World War II period, Austerity Britain draws on extracts from autobiographies and diaries, newspaper articles, reports of sporting events, speeches from Hansard, statistics, and Mass Observation reports to create a vivid portrait of an age before television and telephones were widespread.
A CURMUDGEON who lived alone with his cats, O G S Crawford loathed his fellow-countryman but adored the buildings and countryside of England.
‘This is a thoughtful and important book by a first-rate historian, and deserves to become required reading,’ wrote military historian Richard Holmes in the Literary Review.
It wasn’t until 1939 that ‘every university in England, except Cambridge, awarded women qualifications on the same terms as men,’ wrote Genevieve Fox in the Daily Telegraph, praising an ‘incisive, lively and astonishing history of women’s struggle for full admission to British universities.
BISHOP has followed on from the earlier success of his bestselling Fighter Boys, about the pilots who won the Battle of Britain, with a book about the forgotten heroes of Bomber Command.
PAUL ROUTLEDGE in the Spectator called this ‘an agreeable canter through a disagreeable twenty years, from the hubris of Versailles to the humiliation of Munich’ and welcomed the ‘Hatterisms’ that ‘inject an entertaining, even ribald, note into an otherwise grim story.
‘WHAT’S A nice provincial boy like D J Taylor,’ wrote Mark Bostridge in the Independent on Sunday, doing resurrecting these ‘gilded butterflies’ – the beautiful dissolute people who came of age between the wars? ‘I deeply wanted to enjoy this book,’ wrote Richard Davenport-Hines in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘but overall [it] is a chippy social history written with the mindset of a killjoy jobsworth from the Health and Safety Executive.
It was Cato the Elder who uttered the famous words from which this book takes its title: ‘Delenda est Carthago.
ARE THE BRITISH peculiarly good at lying for their country? That is the thesis of this compendium of deception in both World Wars in which Nicholas Rankin declares ‘the British enjoy deceiving their enemies’ – and no one enjoyed it more than Winston Churchill, arch patron of conjurors and fraudsters with a few charlatans thrown in.
The author’s earlier book Agincourt (2005) has sold over 100,000 copies in hardback and paperback.
CRISIS? What Crisis? is a cultural and political history of tumultuous 1970s Britain which draws on the sitcoms, films, fiction and fashion of the era, as well as Turner’s interviews with stars and politicians.
Starting her survey with the accession of Queen Victoria ‘because, to me, the Victorian era is the start of modern times’, Catholic journalist Mary Kenny shows that Irish popular resistance to the British state has not always precluded popular affection for the British monarchy, although this became an underground, guilty pleasure for the Irish bourgeoisie during the latter half of the 20th century.
Shooting straight to the top of the bestseller lists, Beevor’s latest World War Two study invited universal admiration.
‘The death of Amy Robsart in September 1560 remains one of the fascinating unsolved mysteries of Tudor history,’ declared Antonia Fraser, biographer of Mary Stuart, in the Mail on Sunday.
BY FOLLOWING the journeys of seven key characters, Stafford tells the story of what happened in the parts of Europe liberated by the Western allies (Italy, Holland, Austria and Germany) between Hitler’s birthday on April 20th and midsummer 1945.
Between July 1940 and November 1942, Britain fought land, sea and air battles with the considerable forces at the disposal of Pétain’s Vichy French.
The second volume of Kynaston’s projected four-volume ‘New Jerusalem’ social history of Britain from 1945 to 1979 runs from the Festival of Britain until the election of Macmillan after Suez.
NOWADAYS, any moderately intelligent A-level student can explain in detail why Hitler was foolish to launch an attack on the Soviet Union, but Hitler, whatever his other shortcomings, was a better military strategist than your average pallid sixth-former, so why did Operation Barbarossa seem such a good idea? This conundrum, and nine others of similar weight and moment, are the subject of Sir Ian Kershaw’s bulky study of the decisions made by the key players of World War II from May 1940 to December 1941.
‘It is becoming difficult to say anything new about Churchill as a war leader,’ wrote Jonathan Sumption in the Spectator.
‘FOR the first time, the story of how jealousy and financial disasters nearly caused the Flying Scotsman to run out of steam is being told,’ reported the Yorkshire Post.
In the late 1920s, the American car manufacturer Henry Ford decided to build a modern Midwestern town in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon jungle to house the workers on a vast rubber plantation the size of Tennessee, whose ostensible aim was to guarantee a cheap supply of rubber for his cars.
Simon Winder, a publisher at Penguin Press, has been visiting Germany for many years.
THIS IS THE first book of a two-volume biography of Henry VIII, which serves as a culmination to David Starkey’s career-long work on Tudor history.
AS HITLER’S interpreter once remarked: ‘The Nazis kept talking about a Thousand Year Reich but they couldn’t think ahead for more than fi ve minutes.
in 2004, these two historians each published excellent histories of individual crusades: Asbridge of the First Crusade, which lead to the conquest of Jerusalem, and Phillips of the Fourth Crusade, which never reached the Holy Land but instead resulted in the sack of Constantinople.
THIS POLEMIC takes the form of various newspaper clippings, extracts from diaries and memoirs, presented without any authorial context beyond the selection itself.
‘Hunting Evil is a widely researched, occasionally ponderous but ultimately satisfying investigation into the web of interlocking interests that assisted many high-ranking Nazis as the Third Reich collapsed,’ wrote Peter Cunningham in the Irish Times.
IN the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war, American neo-cons attempted to implant a pro-Western capitalist democracy into post-Saddam Iraq.
In the wake of the global economic crisis and with governments pump-priming their economies, Keynes has been enjoying something of a renaissance.
Leo McKinstry’s last book was Spitfire: Portrait of a Legend.
Liaquat Ahamed, who has economics degrees from Cambridge and Harvard and has been an investment banker for the past 25 years, ‘has produced a beautifully written, important, timely and highly readable history of the causes of the Great Depression,’ wrote Terry Pender in the Canadian newspaper, the Record.
A former investment banker and journalist, Bunker has devoted himself to finding out almost everything that there is to know about the first European colonists of North America.
THIS IS the first book to focus on the relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill and their army chiefs of staff, General George Marshall and Field-Marshal Alan Brooke (later Viscount Alanbrooke).
John Nichol was an RAF pilot who was shot down over Iraq in the Gulf war.
Rachel Polonsky’s book hit the headlines recently after the historian Orlando Figes, reviewing her book pseudonymously online, dismissed her prose as ‘dense and pretentious’: apparently she had savaged an earlier book of his, and revenge was in the air [see page 27 for the full story].
‘HOW HARD it is to love Virginia Woolf after reading her thoughts about her cook, the woman who shared the most intimate details of her life for 18 years,’ declared Susannah Herbert in the Sunday Times.
FOLLOWING ON from his excellent Armageddon, about the conclusion of the Second World War in Europe, Hastings now endeavours to do the same for the Asian and Pacific theatre.
Anyone who has read the 1953 bestseller The Man Who Never Was, written by Ewen Montagu of Naval Intelligence and later turned into a film, ‘will be familiar with this tale of wartime deception: how the body of a young man who died in London was preserved for several weeks while British intelligence gave him a new identity and plausible personal history,’ wrote Christopher Silvester in the Daily Express; according to M R D Foot in the Spectator, ‘Ben Macintyre has taken a well-known story, embellished it, and shown that it was even more ingenious and even more risky than we had all supposed’, and the result is ‘a chillingly good book.
ACRES OF COVERAGE greeted the appearance of this third volume of
A N Wilson’s history trilogy which began with The Victorians and exhausts itself in Brown’s Britain.
This takes the story of Mediterranean piracy forward from the period covered in Roger Crowley’s Empires of the Sea, so it is fitting that the Sunday Telegraph should have got Crowley to review it.
NODS TO McCarthyism and Guantanamo annoyed some reviewers of this new history of the Catholic Church’s machinery of persecution, though all agreed that the subject has contemporary relevance.
In this pacy and vivid survey of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the author Victor Sebestyen (himself a refugee from the abortive 1956 Hungarian revolution), rightly puts Mikhail Gorbachev at the centre of his story,’ wrote Anthony Howard in the Daily Telegraph.
The battle of Kohima, which took place on the Indian side of the Burmese border a couple of months before D-Day, was ‘a supreme example of how a few men can have a seismic effect on whole continents,’ declared Sam Kiley, himself a war correspondent, in the Evening Standard.
VIRGINIA NICHOLSON’S account captures ‘what happened to a generation of young women who were forced… to stop depending on men for their income, identity, and happiness.
THIS TELLS the story of the 164 women (from Britain, the United States, Poland and South America) who flew as pilots in the Air Transport Auxiliary during the Second World War, delivering warplanes to RAF bases around Britain.
This is a study of four British aristocrats who squandered their fortunes and acquired reputations for self-indulgent excess, debauchery, and even crime: Edward FitzGerald (1892–1976), 7th Duke of Leinster, known in his later years as the ‘bedsit duke’, who gambled away a £400-million fortune; the father and son duo of Victor and John Hervey (1915–1985 and 1954–1999 respectively), Marquesses of Bristol, one a convicted thief and fantasist, the other a drug addict; and Angus Montagu (1938–2002), the 12th Duke of Manchester, who served time in a US federal prison for his part in a fraud.
Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s rival for the mantle of Lenin, met his end in the summer of 1940 at the hands of an assassin who had infiltrated his inner circle in Mexico and sneaked up on him from behind with an ice pick.
The Seventies, wrote Simon O’Hagan in the Independent on Sunday, are ‘receiving closer inspection and turning out to be both even worse than we remember, and at the same time more interesting.
IN AN INTERVIEW with author Julie Summers in the Daily Mail, John Triggs set the scene: ‘After 1945, millions of servicemen returned home, many of them changed for ever, but as a new book reveals, so were the wives waiting for them – and the children they’d often never met.
IN HIS review of Ackroyd’s latest in the Independent on Sunday, Christopher Hawtree donned his waders: ‘At first Thames: Sacred River appears a meditation upon the shared subconscious but is in fact, as with the river itself, something where one can halt at any point and land a gem.
IRELAND’S wartime neutrality is, as Tom Adair wrote in Scotland on Sunday, ‘a subject on which it is difficult to stay neutral’ – a point underlined by an Irish Times review that gloated over a ‘debunking of the myth of the appalling Brendan Behan’, as did George Rosie’s piece in the Sunday Herald, which used Irish history as a stick to beat present-day Scottish nationalists.
REVIEWERS OF The Age of Wonder were unanimously gushing.
WRITTEN TO accompany a BBC TV series, ‘this is the most exhilarating book that has been written about America for at least eight years,’ gushed Bronwen Maddox in the Spectator.
JOHN HATCHER, a professor of economic and social history, and a scholar of the Black Death for many years, has stepped into the speculative shoes of the novelist to tell the story of the coming of the plague to the Suffolk village of Walsham in 1349.
‘THESE diaries made me laugh out loud every two or three pages,’ wrote Andrew Gimson, in the Daily Telegraph.
During the eight years of the Clinton presidency, Taylor Branch, the distinguished historian of the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, would leave his Maryland home and spend a few hours in conversation with Clinton.
‘OUR IMPERIAL story has been crying out for a top-flight historian who can write,’ wrote Saul David in the Literary Review.
‘This measured and compelling history looks at how successful MI5 has been in protecting us from traitors and foreign enemies,’ wrote historian Max Hastings in the Sunday Times.
‘THE LENGTHY process of discovering rural France,’ Robert Tombs said in the Sunday Times, ‘is Graham Robb’s theme’ – and in order to do so, Robb cycled some 14,000 miles through la France profonde and spent four years in the library.
AFTER 250 YEARS, the clash between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires culminated in the Battle of Vienna in 1683, after which the Ottomans were forced out of central Hungary.
The trick of writing history today is to find a new way of repackaging an old story,’ wrote John Campbell in the Mail on Sunday.
A COMPREHENSIVE history of US economic policy-making in the 1930s, this book has as its main theme the failure of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to stimulate economic growth.
BRITISH DOCUMENTARY-MAKER Tzouliadis has followed the fates of the several thousand Americans who went to live in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, either out of political idealism or as economic migrants seeking to escape the Great Depression, and were then sucked into Stalin’s Gulag.
Clive Emsley’s interest in the British bobby is personal as well as professional.
In her previous book, The Perfect Summer, Nicolson analysed Edwardian society through the prism of the heatwave of 1911.
ACCORDING TO novelist Jane Stevenson in the Observer, ‘Clubs were an essential aspect of the 18th-century urban male lifestyle.
The late Christopher Hibbert published more than fifty works of popular history and biography, backed by careful scholarship, and this history of the House of Borgia is his legacy, possibly a companion to his book on the House of Medici.
INCOMPLETE and posthumously published, Hugh Trevor-Roper’s diatribe was written in the 1970s as a counterblast to plans for Scottish devolution, but ‘now that outright independence is the issue, the book’s polemical purpose has a fresh urgency,’ Tim Blanning suggested in the Sunday Times.
Quite undeservedly, this impressive book received sparse coverage in the national press.
In the period leading up to World War One, George Joseph Smith was a bigamist who preyed on vulnerable ‘surplus women’ left high and dry by the marriage market, persuaded them to hand over their modest savings or make out wills in his favour, and drowned three of his brides in bathtubs in boarding houses.
ELIZABETH Marsh was conceived in Jamaica, born in England, brought up in Menorca and Gibraltar, and held hostage in Marrakesh, before going on to a married life spent travelling between London and India, sometimes in company with her dashing, unmarried ‘cousin’.
WHEN GOVERNMENT official Samuel Pepys, several years after retiring his diarist’s pen, issued an arrest warrant for a shadowy individual named Colonel Scott, little did he realise that Scott would become a formidable enemy dedicated to laying a false charge of treason against him.
Several reviewers took issue with whether this book merited the sobriquet ‘new’, which is possibly a publisher’s insertion.
FORMER Literary Editor of the Daily Telegraph, Kate Summerscale, won this year’s Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction for this intricate Victorian whodunnit.
In her history of the decade, Juliet Gardiner ‘misses practically nothing,’ said D J Taylor in the Independent on Sunday.
Miranda Carter’s approach is to treat the build-up to the First World War ‘as a disastrous quarrel in a sprawling dysfunctional family,’ noted A N Wilson in his Evening Standard review.
SIR Ralph Verney, an otherwise unremarkable member of the Buckinghamshire gentry, has won immortality thanks to his policy of never throwing away any document.
‘THE DELIBERATELY double-edged title,’ explained Antony Beevor in the Times, ‘refers both to those who whispered so as not to be overheard, and those who whispered to the secret police to denounce neighbours, colleagues and even their own family.
A LITTLE-KNOWN aspect of World War I, the front between Italy and the forces of the Austro-Hungarian empire, represented by the Italian authorities as a war of independence and conducted with breathtaking military incompetence on horrendous terrain, witnessed the death of 698,000 Italian soldiers and 600,000 civilians.
Starting with the violent suppression of the Paris Communards in 1871 and ending after the Russian Revolution, Butterworth provides a narrative history of what he calls ‘the first international war on terror’.
WHEN William Boyd was writing a novel about the conflict between British East Africa and German East Africa, he would have, as Boyd recalled in the Sunday Times, ‘welcomed Edward Paice’s superb history of that strange and calamitous war’, which was ‘so bizarre and surreal that it seems almost without precedent’.
The author of this history, fashionable solicitor Anthony Julius, the lawyer who represented Princess Diana in her divorce from Prince Charles, baldly states that ‘anti-Semitism is a sewer’: judging by his voluminous endnotes to Trials of the Diaspora, he swam at length in the filth.
Confined to British reporting from the Boer War to Iraq, Unreliable Sources, as Christopher Silvester pointed out in the Daily Express, ‘is not a comprehensive history’ but instead ‘offers a series of casebook studies of key moments when journalism was challenged and either measured up or fell short’.
In what Sunday Times reviewer Frances Wilson called an ‘absorbing study’, Musson ‘has worked through a vast archive of unpublished letters and memoirs to piece together the servants’ day-to-day experience’ from the 1400s to the present day.
Many in the generation who grew up in West Germany in the years after the Second World War could not accept their parents’ claim that a clean break had been made with the Nazi past.
‘THIS IS A spellbinding book,’ writes John Carey in the Times, though he is quick to point out that it is not really about Vermeer.
POLITICAL and social historian Martin Pugh’s revisionist history of the inter-war period follows in the footsteps of similar studies of the late 1940s (David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain) and the 1960s (Dominic Sandbrook’s Never Had It So Good and White Heat).
ALMOST ONE THOUSAND foreign correspondents covered the Spanish Civil War, mostly from the Republican zone.
Calling this book ‘a vibrant portrait of Britain in the Seventies, an era traditionally described in apocalyptic terms,’ History Today’s John Shepherd explained the author’s approach: ‘In a personal odyssey, including interviews with key figures … the author leaves few stones unturned in chronicling major events during the decade’ – all of which are ‘depicted with a strong narrative flair in a volume aimed at the general reader.
‘ITS BREVITY and unflamboyant presentation are deceptive,’ wrote Hugh Cecil in the Spectator.
Advertisements:
© 2010 Oldie Publications Ltd. (Company No. 02649845). Kenrick House 65 Newman Street W1T 3EG. Contact us