Monthly Archives: December 2023

My top ten reads for 2023

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Summary: in case anyone is looking for reading or gift ideas

In chronological order of reading:

  1. Hitler, by Ian Kershaw: an exceptional work of historical biography and the definitive work on the pathetic monster who brought cataclysm to Europe.
  2. My Father’s House, by Joseph O’Connor: an outstanding historical thriller of Hugh O’Flaherty – “the Irish Schindler” – and Europeans united against the Nazis
  3. The Restless Republic, by Anna Keays: an elegantly written, though overwhelmingly Anglo-centric and bizarrely affectionate account of “Oliver’s” genocidal dictatorship
  4. Sword of Honour, by Evelyn Waugh (Men at Arms; Officers and Gentlemen; Unconditional Surrender): Waugh’s war, told with his trademark combination of high comedy and profound melancholy: classics for a reason.
  5. Empireland, by Sathnam Sanghera: a gripping and elegantly written survey of the bloody British empire and its echoes in the present day
  6. The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron: An superb prequel to the Slough House series: 1990s Spook Straße, Berlin, Moscow Rules very much apply
  7. Five Decembers, by James Kestrel:  a surprising and compelling crime story, with a strong echo of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, to the backdrop of WW2 in the Pacific.
  8. The Sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914, by Christopher Clark: an extraordinarily adept and compelling elucidation of the complexities of European politics and alliances that led to the outbreak of World War 1. Basically, it was everyone’s fault… but mostly Serbia.
  9. A History of Water, by Edward Wilson-Lee:  a fascinating exploration of an aspect of Portuguese history and attitudes at the outset of Europe’s colonial plunder of the global South
  10. Killing Thatcher: the IRA, the manhunt, and the long war on the Crown, by Rory Carroll: insight on the Troubles through the prism of a gripping account of one bloody incident

Killing Thatcher: the IRA, the manhunt, and the long war on the Crown, by Rory Carroll

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Summary: insight on the Troubles through the prism of a gripping account of one bloody incident

Patrick Magee did not kill Thatcher when the bomb he planted in the Grand Hotel, Brighton exploded. She emerged from the wreckage with her reputation burnished by an extraordinary display of courage and self-possession for one who had just survived an assassination attempt.

Magee did kill Jeanne Shattock, Anthony Berry, Eric Taylor, Muriel Maclean and Roberta Wakeham. Most were sleeping when the bomb exploded but were not killed instantly. Instead they suffocated, terrified and alone, in the rubble that scythed through the hotel, unleashed by the explosion. Others were grievously injured, including former nurse, Margaret Tebbitt, who was left quadriplegic. More would probably have died were it not for the startling courage of the firefighters who attended the scene and broke protocol by insisting on searching for survivors before the building was declared free of explosives.

Killing Thatcher is Rory Carroll’s gripping narrative of the events leading up to this 1984 bombing and the subsequent hunt for the bombers. Its principal focus is on Magee, but it is also an account of the others, from Magee’s victims to the bomb disposal experts and cops who he came into interaction with during the course of his involvement in the IRA’s often vicious campaign in England.

Magee is in many respects a hugely impressive individual. After release from prison, in which he earned a PhD, he showed considerable moral courage in meeting and subsequently working with Anthony Berry’s amazing daughter, Jo. This initial meeting, he admitted, was the first time he realised that he had been responsible for the death of a fine person. But in spite of his apparently genuine regrets, he continues to insist that the Brighton bombing was a legitimate act of war.

Following her callous handling of the 1981 hunger strikes, Thatcher was a hate figure in much of Ireland. So, the Brighton bombing was principally an act of revenge rather than a strategic move coolly calculated to advance war aims. Justice in Ireland was instead advanced by the diplomacy of Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald, who convinced Thatcher to sign the Anglo-Irish agreement the year after the bombing. This laid the foundations for the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

Reading this book as thousands of women, children and men are suffocating to death in the bombed out rubble of Gaza, I imagine that, like Magee before he met Jo Berry, Netanyahu, Hamas and their cheerleaders in the British parliament and American Congress do not trouble themselves to think of the dying as fine human beings. But I doubt that any of them would have the integrity of the likes of Patrick Magee to face their victims, or of Thatcher to put in the groundwork for a political solution, in spite of personal feelings.

So, for all that is repellent about British and IRA policy and actions during the Troubles, Magee and Thatcher appear now as moral paragons by comparison with many contemporary political figures with their weasel words in defence of war crimes.

A History of Water, by Edward Wilson-Lee

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Summary: a fine exploration of attitudes at the outset of Europe’s colonial plunder of the global South

In A History of Water, Edward Wilson-Lee notes how towards the end of his life, Leonardo da Vinci continued to find excuses for not painting by researching the shifting patterns of cascading water. By the thinking of the day, this represented the ultimate waste of time as received wisdom was that the Platonic ideal of the fixed and unchanging metaphysical world was the only thing that was knowable.

But human society is itself as fluid and tumultuous as water. And, with A History of Water, Wilson-Lee offers accounts of two people who tried to understand the different patterns of its flux.

The people in question are Damião de Góis, a cosmopolitan Portuguese envoy and latterly chief archivist of Lisbon’s Torre do Tombo (Tower of Records), and the much more proletarian Luís de Camões, Portugal’s greatest poet, author of the Lusiads, a romanticised account of Portuguese exploration.

Both men were travellers around the same time, when Portugal began Europe’s imperial pillage of the global South. De Gois’ journeys around Europe made him witness to the stirrings of the religious wars that disfigured Europe in 16th and 17th Centuries. De Camoes travelled much further afield, into Asia, and so was a more direct witness of Europe’s disfiguring of the rest of the world.

However, the two mens’ reactions to their experiences and encounters are tellingly different. De Gois, recognising the humanity of others, sought to build understanding and diminish conflict where he could. Of course, this brought him to the menacing attention of the Inquisition which, in truth, did not approve of Jesus’ admonition to love and not judge others.

De Camoes’ on the other hand, drawing on his experiences in South and East Asia, made Vasco de Gama the hero of the Lusiads.

Just one thing about Vasco de Gama: On his second voyage to India he captured a ship called the Meri bearing some 400 Muslims pilgrims to Mecca. This he set alight and kept burning for four days, deaf to all pleas for pity, until every man and woman aboard was dead. Twenty children were spared and forcibly converted to Christianity, according to some accounts, due to ransoms offered by their desperate mothers.

In this, de Camoes is perhaps the prototype of hundreds of other imperial propagandists who spent the colonial era elevating thieves, rapists and war criminals to the level of national archetypes. It happens still.

A History of Water is a fascinating book that offers a novel aspect of early modern European history and the origins of colonial conquest.

But the book also has contemporary resonances.

All societies have a sort of duality between imperial and democratic tendencies, between the Establishments and the dispossessed, between the chums of the elites on one hand and the human rights protesters on the other.

Edward Wilson-Lee’s exploration of an earlier manifestation of this duality is a stark warning of what can happen when recognition of our common humanity is suppressed by chauvinistic myths of superiority. 

It is an outstanding book and rightly acclaimed as one of the best works of history of recent years.