History

A million people thronged the streets of Barcelona on 11 September 2012, clamouring for liberty. This had been their special day long before 9/11. Like Gallipoli, it commemorates a defeat: the rout of the Catalans and their Austrian Hapsburg allies by the Bourbon monarch Philip V of Spain on 11 September 1714 in the closing stages of the War of the Spanish Succession. How could something that occurred three centuries ago get Barcelonans so worked up? It all goes back to the foundation of modern Spain through the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469. Forging a nation-state in an age of non-stop warfare proved a brutal business.

Writing a book on a large, multifaceted, and complex historical subject on which there is a vast amount of source material is a little like sculpting a substantial yet elegant statue from marble. In this case, the sculpting process is far from complete. A potentially valuable book remains submerged within this long and inadequately edited volume. A clue to the problem lies in the subtitle, which asserts that the book is ‘the complete story of the Australian war’. There is, of course, no such thing as a complete history: even the longest multi-volume histories must decide what to exclude.

At last, new Bradman territory to be conquered: the Don 1939–45 or, if we discount the ‘phoney war’ (‘Business as Usual’, as Robert Menzies said of that first phase in World War II), perhaps 1941–45. I imagined a slim volume. Not so! Instead, there is a catch to the subtitle of Bradman’s War: How the 1948 Invincibles Turned the Cricket Pitch into a Battlefield, which indicates that we will be on more familiar terrain.‘More familiar’ because this book is an attempt at revisionist history. Questioning the Bradman idolatry and the invincibility of the Invincibles is a suitable aim. However, the main task for the revisionist historian is to provide either fresh new evidence or a powerful reinterpretation of existing evidence as part of formulating a balanced argument: Malcolm Knox does neither.

I n 2013, Australians will celebrate the centenary of modern Canberra. This singular anniversary – intensely local but also emphatically national – commemorates not the actual building of the capital (that process was fraught and would not gather pace until the 1920s), but rather the optimistic laying on 12 March 1913 of three foundation stones for the grandiosely named Commencement Column on Capital Hill where the Australian Parliament, seat of our increasingly raucous national democracy, stands today. The high point of the ceremony was the naming by Lady Denman (wife of the governor-general) of Australia’s new capital as ‘Canberra’.

Curious Minds sets out to explore the naturalists and scientists who brought Australia’s flora and fauna into the public consciousness: on the face of it a laudable aim, but one not totally fulfilled. From the title onwards the book seems confused in its aims and in its style. Is the book intended to be about people (the curious naturalists), flora and fauna (their discoveries), or both? Does it aim to provide new insights about the twenty-six selected naturalists and the culture within which they worked, or is the intent to provide a popular, even slightly scurrilous, account of the lives of selected individuals?

For the poet W.S. Graham, running away from Scotland ‘with my money belt of Northern ice’ at the age of nineteen, London was the ‘golden city’ in his poem ‘The Night City’. Graham ‘found Eliot and he said yes // And sprang into a Holmes cab. / Boswell passed me in the fog / Going to visit Whistler who / Was with John Donne …’ For other poets in this anthology, London is a ‘noisome sewer’, as Cowper tells us in an extract from his long poem ‘The Task’. John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, after a night of wine and ‘grave discourse / Of who fucks who, and who does worse’, goes out into the cool of St James’s Park to find among the trees ‘nightly now beneath their shade / Are buggeries, rapes, and incests made’, and that there is a great congress of sexual activity of all walks of London life.

In Australia today, Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73) seems a fleeting figure on history’s stage: a brief interlude between Kennedy’s Camelot and Nixon’s Watergate – ‘All the way with LBJ!’ – the retreat from quagmire Vietnam – and that’s about it. So how does one justify buying and reading Robert A. Caro’s seven hundred-page book (dubbed ‘bloated’ by one critic), the fourth in a five-volume biography?

Norman Davies illustrates the literary life available to a score or so of living historians whose works at one time or another made the bestseller lists. Like Simon Schama, Niall Ferguson, and Paul Kennedy, he occupies a place in a Valhalla where the normal rules don’t apply. Instead of waiting nervously for publishers to give thumbs up to a cherished manuscript, agents offer large advances, wide publicity, and – best of all – a huge canvas on which to paint. Of course, the great gulf that separates such stars from hungry hacks yawns in many fields. Novelists like Toni Morrison or Julian Barnes, artists like Anselm Kiefer or Damien Hirst, architects like Zaha Hadid or Frank Gehry enjoy similar advantages. Among the most striking privileges for historians in the pantheon is exemption from the usual 100,000-word limit. Davies can use as many pages as he pleases. The result is Vanished Kingdoms, which, at 847 pages, stands about as tall as a stack of five ordinary monographs. Apart from making it an unlikely book at bedtime, the question arises as to whether it is five times as good. Or has Davies drifted lazily into the category of ‘overweight or obese’?

Too often histories of World War II either have ‘total’ in their title or make great play with total war as a concept. Essentially this is meaningless, because all that is meant by total war is big war. Antony Beevor mercifully does not call World War II ‘total’ or make any reference to total war.

W hat book would you want to read in hell, or in one of humanity’s remarkably competent imitations of it? Tristram Shandy seemed about right to one young Yorkshireman who reached the Western Front in 1915. A year later he found an anthology for soldiers edited by Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, but it seemed so lofty in purpose, so earnest in its morality, and so abstract in its idealism that it simply wilted in the mud and blood. When World War II began, the Yorkshireman, now famous as the poet and art critic Herbert Read, assembled his own sturdier anthology, The Knapsack (1944), mixing Spinoza with Edward Lear. Read’s little volume seemed perfectly pitched to William Loh, a Western Australian soldier in New Guinea in 1943, where ‘hardship and boredom walked hand in hand’, films and concert tours rarely reached the front line, and newspapers and precious letters from home arrived far too late, or so Loh complained. He suggested getting an Australian version of Read’s book to the troops. Just give it a different title, he advised: ‘Knapsacks are too bulky up here.’