Tag Archives: History

Sudan stories III: war by remote control

Posted on by
Reply

Summary: Elphaba on some disturbing new trends in the Sudanese conflict

We are constantly learning how this obsene tit-for-tat war goes between groups who care nothing for the folks in the middle. Towns fall to one side and then are re-taken, new weaponry allows for new tactics in an unclear strategy. 

So it is that drones this week hit Singa taking out the power supply and with it the water. I imagine a person many miles away with a computer programme and some coordinates playing an online game with lives. Of course on the ground there has been a rounding up of people suspected of guiding the missiles to their targets.

There is a deep weariness as people say: “Ah so we’re back to that again” and for how long?My family member, Ax, says they came in the middle of the night Wednesday and it took several attempts to hit their target.  The noise sent people scurrying outside. Some left Singa again, crossing the river as they were revisited by the trauma and fear of last year. He kept the family indoors more worried about the risk of falling debris than immediate re-occupation. But that grim possibility is never fully out of mind.

The scaling up of threats from RSF (they hit the airport that the government was boasting they would re-open soon, they claimed to have taken Fasher, they threatened cities beyond Sudan that support the Govt) and counter attacks from the government (they killed the leadership of communities in Kordofan as they met last week) seems to be in preparation for talks in the US – talks that although reported are hotly denied in Sudan. Even talking about them is risky.

Meanwhile Ax and I mused on the differences between towns in England and Sudan: a mini tale of two cities. Where in dying town-centres in UK the shops all seem to be nail-bars, second-hand clothes shops and takeaways, in Singa  every shop is a pharmacy, mini-clinic or something medical related.

We are hoping this latest wont lead to something more serious.  

From Siege to Safety: A Sudanese Family’s Journey

Posted on by
Reply

Summary: First in a series of guest blogs on the war in Sudan, by “Elphaba”

I have been writing family bulletins for myself and anyone ready to read them since the start of the war in Sudan in April 2023. Kind readers have followed events that have driven my family from their homes at gun point from areas around Umderman to Gedarif and Singa. Then again from Singa as they went under siege there.

Before the war, meeting of the Blue and White Niles at Khartoum: many of the buildings in this photo have now been burnt down

In an attempt to spread the burden of too many mouths to feed under one roof and much heart searching they scattered further. Some made the treacherous route to the north only later to face long electricity blackouts in April and May in the hottest time of the year. Others fled Singa on foot eastwards to Gedarif. From there one or two made it to Saudi Arabia where they have safety but at the cost of visa renewals and a deep sense of loss.

Now since the start of this year with relative peace in the Eastern areas of Sudan. For our family, at last, the kids are mostly back at school, the offices working and the economy working on some level. The banks work intermittently and cash is in very short supply. Some can use online banking with an app but for all everyday trading for basic goods, it is only cash. Adding to this, at some point in the year someone thought it a good idea to introduce a new currency and a new layer of potential confusion and corruption. In most of the East only the new currency works, while in the West only the old. In Khartoum and Wad Medani both get used.

With no immediate drama, I worry that we run the risk of joining the world in forgetting that the war and instability is far from over and accepting a new normal that is anything but. Now with the rains falling heavily there is very little seed to plant to benefit because infrastructure is decimated and only very few have any spare funds. And there is drama. For our friends in El Obeid and our once-home Dilling, siege, counter siege and fear have outlasted anything seen in the East and Darfur continues to be another story again. We last heard from close family friends there about a year ago.

As in Israel/Palestine there are huge profits and plans for still greater ones being made by those who would seize power and (ab)use weakness. In Port Sudan there are huge agricultural schemes under discussion not to mention rebuilding contracts and deals with the Gulf. It is mind-numbingly depressing in its logic of winner – eventually- takes all at whatever cost.

Meanwhile, for our family there is the on-going need to claw back dignity and rebuild with the resources we have.  The young men – nephews and sons – working for low wages as labourers, drivers and other sorts of fixers send back what they can. They are themselves stranded in nearby countries away from their families and they know that whatever they send it is never enough. We are aware we have more than many and less than others.

I challenge anyone to fault the determination. My elderly sisters-in-law (elderly = 10 years older than me and in their 70s) have returned to their suburb in Umderman. There is no power. They returned to homes totally stripped bare “not even a teaspoon”. The first job for Nxxx was to buy a front gate as that too had been taken. Bottled gas costs 5 times what it did a year ago and anyway the cooker is gone. The widespread gossip that her neighbour’s son – now gone – whom Nxxx had known since childhood orchestrated the theft of her property and many others. And yet after a few days Nxxx at least is back in her house. As Rxxx explained to me from Saudi Arabia, her homesickness palpable: “of course all the family have been amazing. We are lucky. So much luckier than many. But you ache for what is yours, where you are you and where you’re not thought of a ‘a displaced’”

The violence has gone from these neighbourhoods for now and the young men returning have great plans to fix the power. Knowing the place well, I have no idea how they are getting by. I know it will be a profoundly communal endeavour. My 24year old nephew, his own life plans long since on hold returned from Port Sudan to help his father. He says they live on ful and ta’amia because that is made at a local shop where they have fuel. I imagine them all together much of the day to support, chat about possibilities, find workarounds to issues, talk prices and a future. I hope this will help them recover for now from the trauma of recent months/years. 

The profound divide emerging in Sudan and the discrimination and racism that underlies the political stories is a worrying strategic trend that most Sudanese don’t have the luxury of considering. Maybe in that there are some universal trends.

The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome, by Robin Lane Fox

Posted on by
Reply

Summary: a survey of Greece and the Roman Empire from Homer to Hadrian

Robin Lane Fox may, for want of space, skim over some important subjects, such as the Peloponnesian War or the Year of the Four Emperors (69 AD BTW). But The Classical World is still a lucid and engaging narrative, and an excellent introduction to the sweep of that whole period of history.

It’s depressing to think that after some 2,500 years of history humanity has little changed: the abject supplication that the UK displays towards the US shows what empires expect of their vassals is little changed in millennia; today privileged poshos still think as little of committing genocide on foreigns as did democratic Athens or autocratic Rome.

But, as Lane Fox notes, some of the ideas from this time notably those of Socrates and particularly Jesus, offer a more hopeful ideal for humanity.

Given the depths to which western civilisation has sunk at this point in time, Jesus’ imperative to love our neighbours as ourselves still has a lot of heavy lifting to do.

Four Shots in the Night, by Henry Hemming; and Stakeknife’s Dirty War, by Richard O’Rawe

Posted on by
Reply

Summary: two books plumbing the depths of the intelligence war during the Troubles

The morally vile, but tactically brilliant, American Confederate general, Nathan Bedford Forrest had a philosophy when giving battle: Get there first with the most.

This philosophy seems to have been taken up with some degree of alacrity by a raft of English politicians and writers who want to capture the history books to rewrite the Irish peace process as a benevolent English achievement. 

Central amongst these has been Peter Taylor whose focus for some years has been on the role of British intelligence in the peace process, particularly the “Back Channel” between MI6 and the IRA. This, as far as he seems to be concerned, was the only strand of the peace process that mattered. Forget the Hume-Adams talks; forget Irish diplomacy and the Downing Street Declaration; forget George Mitchell; forget the European Union; forget Mo Mowlem. Instead, the peace process was something gifted to the quarrelsome Irish by perspicacious spooks, selflessly concerned with Paddy well-being. 

Hemmings’ book gives a nod to diplomacy with mention of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 – also portrayed as a British initiative. But, like Taylor he is also principally interested in intelligence operations, albeit with a broader perspective. At its core his book explores three parallel but occasionally overlapping British intelligence operations: In addition to MI6 and the Back Channel, Hemmings describes MI5’s efforts to boost Sinn Fein’s electoral fortunes with a view to weaning them away from violence, and the army’s efforts to disrupt the IRA’s military operations through the activities of, in particular, Freddie Scappaticci – Stakeknife. 

Scappaticci was the army’s most important agent in the IRA. A senior figure he was the head of the IRA’s internal security – the Nutting Squad. He was personally involved in the interrogation, torture and murder of dozens of suspected IRA informers. Many of these were, of course, also British agents, like Scappaticci himself. 

The term “British agent” can be a misleading one. It can lead one to think of James Bond, who was an intelligence officer NOT an agent. The agents are the vulnerable people who through blackmail and bribery are recruited by officers to turn traitor on former friends and neighbours. 

The pathetic plight of these desperate people is a central concern of Richard O’Rawe.  O’Rawe, a former IRA man himself, knew Scappaticci. But given the sociopathology that he documents, he records that he is thankful that he did not know him well. 

Scappaticci was an army intelligence operation. But O’Rawe shows, there was an essential unity between the IRA’s Nutting Squad and the “Tasking and Co-ordinating Group”, the senior officials from all British intelligence agencies who oversaw their diverse operations. So much so that it was they, ultimately, who decided who would live and who would die, and gave orders accordingly for favoured British agents like Scappaticci to kill other less valued ones. 

O’Rawe’s past IRA involvement gives him access to other IRA volunteers and his interviews with them provides a broader perspective on the Troubles to Hemmings whose book is more dominated by British sources. O’Rawe also has an altogether more morally clear-sighted view of that squalid war than Hemmings. He is not afraid to use the term “war crime” in his assessment of the savagery of both IRA and British actions. 

Aside from the desperately sad human stories that these books recount, and the important ethical questions relating to the conduct of insurgency and counter-insurgency that they raise, these books also offer valuable insights into some broader historical questions. 

First, the whispered accusation that Martin McGuinness was a tout is effectively discounted. Given the efforts that MI5 was putting in over decades to coaxing the republican movement onto a more constitutional path, compromising McGuinness like that would have risked wholly undermining their efforts. But while he may never have been a tout, the callousness which McGuinness showed towards human life, particularly in diverse killings of suspected informers, means that while he may be an important figure in Ireland’s history, he should never be thought of as a hero. 

Second, the idea that the IRA was beaten is disabused. Even though British intelligence had compromised major parts of the IRA, its rural organization in South Armagh, Tyrone and Fermanagh were still capable of sustaining the killing, even if there was never any hope of military victory. 

This leads us to the third point, that of the importance of the political processes that were running parallel to these intelligence ones. Without those, offering a constitutional framework that, if not giving the IRA all that they wanted, at least gave them some, there would have been nowhere for the Back Channel to go. The British might like to now remember the peace process as a British led affair, one of the great achievements of New Labour as that morally bankrupt party likes to chauvinistically put it. However, without the thread of Irish leadership showing the way, they would still be entangled in the labyrinth of killing typified by their Stakeknife operation.

Both O’Rawe and Hemmings describe with some admiration the efforts of Jon Boutcher’s Kenova enquiry to get to the bottom of the moral morass of the Troubles intelligence operations. Boutcher, who was involved in the police killing of Jean Charles de Menezes may have been expected to do the decent thing by the British Establishment and cover up embarrassing information. Instead, he recommended prosecutions in 28 cases involving both former IRA and senior British personnel. 

The Public Prosecution Service declined to undertake these prosecutions, which seems a travesty. But in that it is hardly surprising. The Stakeknife operation is but one among many war crimes that the British state was involved in: Aside from Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday there was also extensive collusion with Loyalist death squads across the North. So, this makes it more understandable why past British governments have scrambled to introduce blanket amnesties for all Troubles era killings. It also gives insight into why the current British government of “human rights lawyer” Keir Starmer still strives to prevent a public inquiry into the killing of Sean Brown. 

Both Hemmings’ and O’Rawe’s books may require some revision – in the details but most probably not in the substance – in the light of Boutcher’s final Kenova report. But they are still fine work, grappling with difficult subjects. O’Rawe’s in particular, while more narrowly focussed than Hemmings, is an elegantly written work, marked by a burning sense of indignation at the scale of the depravity that he describes

Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves;  The Great War, by Peter Hart; Catastrophe: Europe goes to war 1914, by Max Hastings;  and The Peacemakers, by Margaret Macmillan

Posted on by
Reply

Summary: Diverse, highly readable perspectives on the First World War

Like many of my generation, my introduction to the First World War was at school, studying the sublime poetry of Wilfred Owen. Owen’s writings along with others such as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, did much to promote the “lions led by donkeys” view of that war. 

This is a perspective on the war that Peter Hart takes considerable exception to. A key theme of his fine narrative history of that war, similar to Hew Strachan, is that the allied generals have been unfairly maligned, made scapegoats by civilian leaders who bore more responsibility for the carnage.

The generals of the Western Front were, he argues, by and large, diligent soldiers, trying to learn the best way to fight an industrial war. This is something that their prior experiences, helping their colonial empires steal other people’s countries and butchering anyone who objected, had not properly prepared them for. 

Better than Strachan, Hart illustrates well the impact of the generals’ decisions on the front line troops of all armies. He quotes extensively from the letters and diaries of the combatants to give a truer sense of their experiences, including of the vicious fighting. This makes it hard to sympathise with Hart’s  broader argument that the generals were doing their best. 

The industrialised trench warfare of the First World War was not quite unprecedented: the Union’s final campaign against Richmond under Grant previewed the sort of warfare that would come to define the Western Front. Grant had realised that an attritional campaign would bleed the South to such an extent that even if he lost every battle the Union would win the war. 

With no extant tactics to breach the fortified lines in a way that would have meaningful strategic impact on the course of the war, the opposing sides settled into a similar war of attrition. This led to regular battles that hoped to inflict such a butcher’s bill on the other side as to make it difficult for them to continue.

Other pressures, not least that of coalition warfare, also demanded action, irrespective of how inadvisable. That is how the British came to attack fortified German positions on the Somme in 1916 – to provide some “relief” to the French under German attack at Verdun. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 deaths. That still does not seem to me a reasonable price for generals learning on-the-job or offering moral support to an ally. 

By way of contrast, during the Second World War Matthew Ridgeway, an American Airborne general risked his entire career by refusing to lead his troops on what he believed would be a suicidal assault on Rome. This would have entailed dropping his lightly armed forces in the midst of two German heavy divisions.

I suspect most of the allied troops on the frontline of the First World War, such as Owen, Sassoon and Graves, would have happily swapped their “diligent” generals for a few with a fraction of Ridgeway’s moral courage. 

Graves was almost killed in a later stage of the Somme battle. It is striking that in Goodbye to All That, his engaging account of his wartime experiences, he never describes killing anyone, though he hints that he did. The closest he comes is describing a sniping opportunity to kill a bathing German. Graves writes that he could not bring himself to press the trigger on the naked man, so he assigned the task to a subordinate instead.

Graves clearly carried the war with him for decades after. The guilt and trauma of it infuses his account of the Greek Myths, for example.

Given the horror of the war, it is understandable that we all should look for who to blame. This is among the tasks that Max Hastings undertakes in his typically gripping account of the outbreak of the war. Hastings is at pains to point out that Germany more than any other nation was the one that could have put a stop to the descent into cataclysm. Hence in Hastings’ view this is the country that should bear most of the blame. Hart has a similar perspective, noting that Germany believed that as war was inevitable the sooner it began the better it suited them. 

In this Hastings and Hart offer somewhat different perspectives to Christopher Clark’s exceptional book on the same subject, The Sleepwalkers. This lays considerably more of the blame on Serbia, Britain and France’s ally. Margaret Macmillan, whose book, The War that Ended Peace, also explored the dangerous, dizzying array of alliances and egos that shepherded Europe to war. Both these accounts suggest there is plenty more blame to go around all combatant nations. 

With The Peacemakers Macmillan explores the end of the war, specifically the Paris Peace conference that led to the Versailles Settlement. This established much of the contemporary political shape of Europe. Alongside the “Great Power” politics of the Conference, Macmillen’s book is also the story of how the peoples of, in particular, central and eastern Europe shook off the rule of the Great Powers whose blundering had dragged them into catastrophic war. 

But the Versailles settlement also sowed the seeds of future war in Europe, by assigning all the guilt for the war to Germany. This ignored the role of, in particular, Serbia in starting things. It also ignored the fact that the Germany that came to Paris was a different country to the one at the start of the war. Not fundamentally different, of course: as German history since 1919 has shown it a country that has never quite lost its relish for atrocity. But by 1919 it had been through a democratic revolution that was economically crippled by the demand for reparations from the victorious powers. This created the political conditions for the Nazis to emerge. 

In granting to Britain the Palestine mandate the Versailles Settlement also paved the way for a new settler-colonial entity there, and for the Zionist genocide of the indigenous people that, with shameless US, German and British support, continues to this day. 

The First World War remains an example of, as William Faulkner once wrote, the past not even being past. Its dark legacy is a bloody one in the present for millions of defenceless human beings.

So, perhaps Wilfred Owen remains still the most vital voice on the First World War, understanding from that one war the pity of all war, and encouraging a level of empathy for the victims of war that no discussions of causality, strategy or blame ever can.

My best reads of 2024

Posted on by
Reply

Summary: some humanitarian assistance for book shopping this Christmas

As Christmas approaches some of you may be pondering books for yourselves or the bibliophiles in your life.

So here, in (more or less) chronological order are my best books of the year. Four entries are Irish; three about aspects of the British empire and one is about an aspect of the American empire; two trace the roots of Israel’s genocide in Palestine; two are feminist dystopian thrillers and one is a bit of feminist literary criticism; and there is one that is about pretty much everything. And there is some stuff about the Roman Empire, because there sorta has to be.

Each item has a link to a longer review if you want to know more. Hopefully some will supply some of you with some inspiration. 

  1. The Kidnapping: A hostage, a desperate manhunt and a bloody rescue that shocked Ireland, by Tommy Conlon and Ronan McGreevy – a lucid and gripping account of an incident in the Troubles that illustrates just what an all-Ireland affair they were.
  2. Empireworld, by Sathnam Sanghera – an elegantly written exploration of the contemporary impact of the British Empire on the world.
  3. Brotherhood: when West Point rugby went to war, by Martin Pengelly – an important insight through the prism of rugby into American war-making amongst the post-9/11 generation of American officers.
  4. Dirty Linen: The Troubles in my home place, by Martin Doyle – An outstanding portrait of the pity of war in the North of Ireland, that also builds a picture of the pervasiveness of collusion between British state forces and loyalist paramilitaries.
  5. Resting places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution, by Ellen McWilliams – an exceptional book in which the interplay of the most personal of histories with the political helps illuminate some of the most shameful aspects of Ireland’s past.
  6. Spent Light, by Lara Pawson – “It’s quite hard to describe really. To begin with, it’s about a toaster, but it ends up being about everything,” the Kirkdale Bookshop on Spent Light.
  7. Ghosts of the British Museum, by Noah Angell – a fascinating exploration of the dark side of British history and culture through the spooky stories of one museum
  8. Sweet Home, by Wendy Erskine  – a wonderful collection of short stories of contemporary Belfast
  9. (A twofer) The General’s Son, by Miko Peled; and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappe – two outstanding works of personal and national history that amount to a searing protest against genocide and apartheid by two Israelis of conscience and exceptional moral courage.
  10. Another twofer: The Handmaid’s Tale, and the Testaments, by Margaret Atwood – two all too believable dystopian thrillers, set in a United States that has been transformed into a theocratic dictatorship of the sort imagined in the fevered dreams of the legions of Trump’s incel supporters
  11. The Flashman Papers, by George McDonald Fraser – not sure if this is a thoughtful rumination on Empire masquerading as a scurrilous romp or vice versa. A sort of Carry on British Colonialism with all the casual racism that entails.
  12. Of course, you may still be thinking about the Roman Empire – some of us are men after all. So there are these: Palatine, by Peter Stothard; Emperor of Rome, by Mary Beard; Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age, by Tom Holland
  13. Finally there is Monsters: what do we do with great art by bad people? by Clare Dederer – a fascinating exploration of the relationship between the audience and the monstrous artist, included, not least, for having the chutzpah in recognising that Stephen Fry can be an awful eejit sometimes.

That makes 13. A lucky number.

Some Service to the State

Posted on by
Reply

Summary: why partition in Ireland has been such an injustice.

“… sometimes it is absence itself which is the hardest thing to hide.”

I grew up in South Armagh, just a mile or so from the British-imposed border in Ireland. That border is a thing that, in many ways, has cast a long shadow over my life. It was, I sincerely believe, at the root cause of many of the problems for both parts of Ireland during the Twentieth Century, not least the squalid little war known as the Troubles during which I grew up.

With partition, the British sought, successfully, to create two sectarian states in Ireland rather than one plural one. My novel, Some Service to the State, is at heart an exploration of some of the human rights abuses that Irish people had to endure as a result of this.

Hence it is an indictment of the injustice of partition’s continuation. As the impetus takes hold for an end to partition and the establishment of a new Ireland, I hope that this book will resonate with an audience that wants to understand better why the status quo has been such a poisonous thing for ordinary people living on the island of Ireland.

But Some Service to the State is also a gripping detective story, about the repercussions of an enquiry into the fate of a girl who seems to have gone missing in that politically divided island.

Here is what other authors said about it: 
Ronan McGreevy, author of Great Hatred: the assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, has said of Some Service to the State that it is “a superb book with dialogue that would not be out of place on the stage of the Abbey Theatre. … [in Mick McAlinden} McQuade has created a character whose travails highlight the thwarted dreams and the tragedy of partition for so many people in post-revolutionary Ireland.” 

Rosemary Jenkinson a multi-award winning playwright and author of Marching Season, has said that the book shows a “prodigious skill in shining a spotlight on the scandal of the mother-and-baby homes and in brilliantly imbuing the past with … [a] potent blend of heart, soul and wit”

If you would like to get a copy, the book is available in the UK from Bookshop.org and in the US from Barnes and Noble. It is also available on Amazon.

I hope you will read it, and if you do, I would love to hear what you think in the comments below.

Keep safe and many thanks.

Resting places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution, by Ellen McWilliams

Posted on by
3

Summary: trying to see “higher than the ditches that break up the canvas of the land”. 

There is an echo of Martin Doyle’s book, Dirty Linen, in Ellen McWilliams’ Resting Places. Like Doyle, McWilliams also uses the literature of Ireland and Britain, experiences from her professional career, and the local history of her home place, in County Cork rather than in County Down, to reflect on wider issues of Irish history and Anglo-Irish relations. 

But McWilliams doesn’t stop there. Resting Places is also a remarkably personal work. Her insights on the “big” themes are also prompted by the most domestic ones: by reflections on her relationships with family – both the Cork ones and the English lot – and from her experiences of her own body in her most private moments as a lover and as a mother.

This is apposite: Women and girls were, as McWilliams reminds us, the subject of institutionalised systems of abuse and enslavement, including the Magdalene Laundries and the Mother and Baby Homes, for much of the 20th Century in Ireland. In writing of her own body with such candour she reminds the reader of the strength and fragility of human flesh and how this can be so easily desecrated by bigotry masquerading as righteousness. 

By pondering these very intimate aspects of life McWilliams also comes to some of her most important historical insights, ones that can be lost or overlooked in more traditional narrative or political histories. Because so many of the dynamics of war, and particularly of war-crimes, in revolutionary and civil wars have their sources in the domestic sphere: around hearths and kitchen tables, in whispered conversations the memories of ancient ills – of land expropriations, of scorched earth and famine – are kept alive. 

And it is one atrocity that perhaps grew from such conversations, the Dunmanway massacre, that lurks at the heart of this book. The country was meant to be at Truce when these killings occurred. But there is no truce on bitter memories. 

Between 26 and 28 April 1922, fourteen Protestant men and boys were killed or disappeared around Dunmanway and the Bandon Valley, in the very roads and fields around which McWilliams grew up. These were the families of neighbours killed by the families of neighbours, and indeed the comrades of her own family, which was deeply involved in the struggle for Irish independence. 

The fate of two 16 year old boys, Robert Nagle and Alexander McKinley, are particularly difficult for McWilliams to contemplate. A new mother when writing this book, she writes of these boys with an agony of empathy, knowing what it is to carry a child for nine months, tend to him as he grows into his own little person, and to worry that something awful might happen to him. For these boys’ mothers, they awakened to that nightmare.

Perhaps there are still whispered conversations telling new generations why these murders “had to be done.” But McWilliams remembering how Greek tragedy reminds us that crimes that stay buried poison the water of the living, shows true patriotism in confronting this vile aspect of the Irish revolution.

McWilliams is an exquisite writer, warm and frequently very funny. At one point she muses if, in marrying an English scholar of the English civil war, she has actually ended up – at some psychic or metaphorical level – marrying Cromwell himself. 

On the evidence of her book, I think the answer is a resounding “NO”. I can’t imagine Cromwell ever fretting over the recipe for soda bread, which her lovely-sounding husband does. Feeding other people is antipathetic to genocide. Cromwell would have hated him. 

McWilliams book is an incredibly rich one, fizzing with more ideas that any review can do proper justice to. Read it!

Palatine, by Peter Stothard; Emperor of Rome, by Mary Beard; Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age, by Tom Holland

Posted on by
2

Summary: not just fun and games

Perhaps we – well … men at least – are fascinated by ancient Rome because it seems so different to today’s world, a place where cruelty was often regarded as a virtue and so many human vices were given free rein, not least as entertainment: In answer to Maximus’ question to the circus audience, we are indeed entertained. 

But perhaps we are fascinated by it because, paradoxically, the Romans also remind us so much of ourselves in our contemporary world: we see echoes of Nero in buffoons like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump; the genocidal campaigns of the legions in Gaul and Germany echo with the depredations of the Israeli Defence Force in Gaza, and the Russians in Ukraine; the fanaticism of Hamas has resonance with that of the Sicarii defenders of Masada. 

For whatever reasons, historians of other eras must envy those who have stuck to Rome and the seemingly insatiable appetite of readers for new takes on these old stories.

Palatine, by Peter Stothard, Emperor of Rome, by Mary Beard, and Pax, by Tom Holland are amongst the most recent offerings of publishers to meet this ravening demand. 

Of these three highly enjoyable books, Holland’s is perhaps the most straightforward: a narrative chronicle from the downfall of Nero in 69 AD, “the Year of the Four Emperors”, through the Flavian dynasty to Trajan. This may be subtitled “Rome’s Golden Age,” but these things are relative. For example, the campaigns by Vespasian and his son Titus against the Jewish revolt in Palestine, which led to the destruction of the Temple and the mass crucifixion of much of the civilian population of Jerusalem, are a particularly chilling example of performative cruelty in the service of mass murder. 

Nevertheless, Vespasian and Titus are still remembered as “good” emperors. Which is to say they were good for Romans… in the same way as – that contemporary echo again – the British Conservative Party is “good” for rich people, and the British Labour Party wants to be “good” for some English ones. 

Palatine is something of a prequel to Holland’s book. It deals with the first Roman emperors from the perspective of the courtiers of the Palatine – the hill in Rome on which the emperor dwelt and which gives its name to the word “palace”.

The Pantheon

In particular Stothard focuses on the Vitellius family. Heard of them? Well one of them was one of the emperors whose brief reigns in 69 AD, and comic-dreadful ends, were prologue to Vespasian’s more enduring tenure. 

Stothard affects a highly entertaining gossipy style for this. In doing so he gives a sense of the court’s preoccupations through the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero. These ranged from the apparently trivial – seating, décor, banqueting, rumoured love affairs – to the sinister – the growth of Sejanus’ power, the casual cruelties of Caligula. 

What all these subjects had in common were, like an ancient world Kremlinology, they indicated where power lay, who was in favour and who was out. These were questions of life and death on the Palatine. So, the creatures of court paid attention – much as today’s political correspondents claim to do to the gossip and self-serving off-the-record briefings of power-insiders.

Mary Beard covers similar ground to Stothard, but slightly differently. As with her book SPQR her subject is perhaps histography rather than history. That is, rather than delivering a simple narrative, she presents us with the evidence, discusses what it might mean, and hence what conclusions we may be able to draw.

In doing this Beard gives us intriguing factoids, such as that the first representation of the crucifixion of Jesus was in a piece of anti-Christian graffiti found in the slaves’ quarters on the Palatine. But, drawing on diverse sources, including grave inscriptions,  she also gives us some more insight on the way those denizens of the Palatine once thought when contemplating their place in the pecking order and what it might mean for their life prospects. 

In other words, Emperor of Rome is a fine work for anyone who wishes to develop their critical thinking skills, not just in relation to history, but in relation to life. 

Rome may still offer us circuses to distract from the awfulness of the present. But we can also learn from it how to recognise the ways that power corrupts fools and the cruelty that arrogance breeds. Those will remain important skills and responsibilities for citizens for as long as human society continues to exist.

Ghosts of the British Museum, by Noah Angell

Posted on by
1

Summary: a fascinating exploration of the dark side of British history and culture through the spooky stories of one museum

When I was a student in Belfast in the 1980s I used to feel a cold chill every time I walked past one spot, particularly at night-time. I mentioned this to a friend. “You would,” he said. “There was a young fella murdered there earlier in the Troubles.”

Noah Angell gets similar feelings in almost every gallery in the British Museum. But then, the whole place is essentially a crime scene. 

So much of the stuff there, from the Parthenon Marbles to the Benin Bronzes to much of the Egyptian collection was stolen in the course of Britain’s bloody colonial plunder of the planet. Angell wonders in this book if the murders that accompanied that pillage still echo in the trophies of conquest that the British Museum now houses. 

This fascinating book grew out of Angell, an American in London, noticing at a social gathering that former employees of the British Museum had a lot of freaky stories to tell. So, he began gathering them: diverse tales of the uneasy ghosts that still seem to lurk in every corner of the Museum. These include the moving mummies in some of the, frankly creepy, Egyptian galleries; the hauntings of the old reading room by the shades of forlorn former employees; the ongoing religious wars between the ghosts of Christian and Islamic warriors around rooms containing the Sutton Hoo hoard; the feelings of Museum staff that certain American and Asian artefacts emanate a sense of demonic possession. 

As Angell notes, the British Museum likes to present itself as one of the key places on the planet which protects and preserves world heritage for all humanity. However, only about 1 per cent of the Museum’s collection is ever on display. So, it really is a place in which much world heritage is disappeared rather than displayed.

Not that that makes these artifacts in any way safer: the British Museum did irreparable damage to the Parthenon Marbles in ignorant efforts at maintenance; in 2023 it emerged that thousands of artefacts, particularly from the Greek and Roman collections, had been pilfered, many sold on ebay.

At least the thieves were acting in the spirit of the Museum itself, which is fundamentally a repository of stolen goods. Angell wonders if the key lesson that hordes of schoolkids draw from their visits to the Museum is that stealing is really okay if you can just get away with it… which is, if truth be told, a very British idea.

In its refusal to return stolen artefacts to their rightful owners the UK, and hence the British Museum, stands at odds with most enlightened thinking about the ethical curation of world heritage. Angell does report that George Osbourne, chair of the Museum’s trustee board, proposed transferring the Parthenon Marbles back to Athens as a loan. This, understandably, the Greek government has rejected: how can you take a loan of something that is rightfully yours? But this did make me feel rather more sympathetic to Osbourne: British law forbids the British Museum from returning much of their stolen loot. So Osbourne, it seems, was trying to come up with some path towards resolving this historical injustice.

As anyone who has visited the British Museum will know, it can do fascinating work exploring and explaining aspects of history. But, even if you don’t believe in ghosts, this absorbing book provides a compelling insight into the dark side of the institution’s own history, a microcosm of the country in which it is based. It is a shameful past that the British Museum, and all of British society, must squarely face if they are ever going to rehabilitate themselves.