History

This year, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) celebrates its centenary as the world’s largest and oldest broadcasting institution (the US company NBC was founded four years later, in 1926). Whether it will reach its bicentenary, or even have another ten years of life in anything like its current form is a question facing other British institutions such as the Conservative Party, the monarchy, and indeed the Union of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland itself. Placing the BBC among this group signals its estimable role in defining an imagined community but also the possibility that the existence of these other entities and their function in this process might be finite, subject to challenges from their own internal contradictions as much as from hostile external forces without.

In the centenary of Jeremy Bentham’s death in 1932, there was widespread and somewhat macabre interest in the Australian press in the commemorative dinner at University College London, at which Bentham’s famous auto-icon made an appearance as the guest of honour. Some of the more serious commentary sought to educate readers about this ‘human bridge between the thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ and more especially about his relationship to Australia. New South Wales was established as an experimental penal colony just as Bentham (1748–1832) was reaching the height of his powers, and could hardly fail to play a dynamic and critical role within his thinking on crime and punishment. Given the origins and nature of the colonies that became Australia’s states, they could not but bear some imprint from the house-philosopher of the Victorian British state, making Bentham, in Judith Brett’s assessment, Australia’s ‘foundational thinker’. 

In October 2022, the United Nations announced that its Total Digital Access to the League of Nations Archives Project (LONTAD) was complete. For the past five years, archivists in Geneva have been preserving, scanning, and cataloguing more than fourteen million pages of historical documents, making them accessible to researchers around the world. Harnessing a technology that people a century ago could hardly imagine, this project has extended the League of Nations’ foundational values of sharing knowledge and cooperating across borders into the twenty-first century.

In the 1990s, I was a doctoral student at the University of Melbourne writing on the representations of race in the School of Historical Studies. Geoffrey Dutton’s White on Black: The Australian Aborigine portrayed in art (1974) and Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific were essential reading. Over the subsequent three decades, interest in Dutton’s White on Black seems to have languished, but Smith’s magnum opus remains an indispensable text. Writing in Meanjin in 1960, Robert Brissenden noted that European Vision was ‘an extremely valuable and distinguished piece of work, one to which historians and scholars in many fields will be gratefully indebted for a long time’. I doubt he could have possibly imagined that sixty-two years later we would be reading the third edition of this monumental work, now edited by Smith’s biographer, art historian Sheridan Palmer, with an excellent introduction and contextual essay by Palmer and Greg Lehman. 

Audrey Tennyson, in a letter to her mother in January 1903, wrote: ‘About my letters … would you ask somebody to buy at Harrods a japanned tin box for holding them … the great thing is to keep them together as if they are in several places they are likely to get put away and forgotten. I am afraid they won’t be worth publishing but they may be of great interest to the boys some day – and Hallam might perhaps make use of them for a book on Australia.

Beginning with a lament on the lack of serious academic attention that has been paid to biography, despite its enormous popularity and importance, Nigel Hamilton seeks to make good part of this deficit by providing an overview of its history and development. The account he offers is engaging and remarkable in its breadth and scope. It is customary for more literary histories of biography to begin in the classical world with Plutarch or Suetonius, and to end with the ‘new biography’ of the 1920s and 1930s. Hamilton, by contrast, begins with the first depiction of a real human drama in a prehistoric cave painting, and ends with a discussion of the death of Dolly, the cloned sheep. This latter issue is not merely frivolous on his part, but leads to a discussion of the ways in which biography might be written in a new technological world in which individuality, as currently understood, ceases to exist as life becomes technologically created, standardised, and processed.

Books, of course, should not be judged by their covers. In this case, however, the choice of cover illustration – the historic Reichstag veiled in silver fabric by the Bulgarian–American ‘wrap artist’, Christo – seems unusually significant, and not only because the author devotes his concluding remarks to it (more about that later). German history is a well-ploughed field. With library shelves groaning under the weight of books on the subject, only the narrowest studies, aimed at specialised markets, will offer much that is really new. The only justification for yet another narrative history of modern Germany – and with a title as blandly generic as this one – is therefore that a familiar story will be presented in a new wrapping.

Eva Marks was nine years old and living in Vienna when Kristallnacht forced her family to leave Austria. Although her parents separated early, there was no shortage of money during her first nine years. Her mother ran a successful business manufacturing exquisite accessories for fashionable women, which involved occasional travel. At these times, Eva was left in the care of her grandmother and her two aunts, who were as independent and strong-willed as her mother. An only child, only niece and only grandchild, she was greatly indulged, although conscious that she lacked siblings and happy parents.

Oxford is not what it was once. We scholars swot too hard. Even the Bullingdon has lost its brio. It’s hardly surprising that this Age of Hooper has ushered in a cottage industry of aesthetes’ nostalgia, for many sense that the time when students could still be boys, and boys could be Sebastian Flyte, was just more fun. No reports, recorded lectures, or Research Assessment Exercises to interrupt the heady days of evensong, buggery, and cocktails (to paraphrase Maurice Bowra’s infamous utterance).