Josephine Tey – The Daughter of Time

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Book Review, History, Josephine Tey, Richard III, The 1951 Club, The Daughter of Time, The Plantagenets, The Wars of The Roses

Making the past sing a relevant song

It has been a real delight to read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time again, as part of Kaggsy’s bookish rambling’s ‘1951 club’ I came across this first in my teens and it was one of those books which stayed with me, as one of my favourite books in the genre ‘Crime Fiction’ Probably because it wasn’t about fictional crime at all (but more, later) – I had a kind of squeam about loving descriptions of bludgeonings and hackings – but was about a historical mystery – so it might be, (it is!) educational as well as entertaining

Tey, a jolly good writer of mysteries and detection, fascinated by psychology, and not dwelling overmuch in bloody gore, uses the crime fiction genre to deconstruct a historical villain – or, at least, one who has come down to us as villain – Richard III. The one who had the innocent lamb sons of his brother, Edward IV, brutally done to death in the Tower. The vile and hunchbacked monster so memorably portrayed by Laurence Olivier in Shakespeare’s play of the same name:

Now is the win-ter of our dis-con-tent
Made glorious sum-mer by this son of York

There continues a soliloquy full of great self-loathing, bitterness and grimness, giving the psychology in a nutshell which will let the audience know the man is a monster and will be prepared for the most heinous of misdeeds

………………………………………………..I
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on my own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determin-ed to prove a villain.

Earliest surviving portrait, circa 1520, copy of a previous

Shakespeare, of course, our wonderful Shakespeare, was living in Tudor times, Specifically, Elizabethan. Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII, bluff King Hal, wife murderer, son of Henry VIIth, first Tudor, the one who had killed the vile Richard in 1485 ‘ ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse……..’ at the battle of Bosworth. Henry VII, saviour we are told, ended the ruination of The Wars of The Roses, uniting the Yorkists (of whose number Richard was) and the Lancastrians (of whom Henry was a distant claimant to be king) by marrying the lambkin princes’ sister Elizabeth. Hurrah, rescuing us all from the wicked Uncle Richard, who had murdered his nephews.

Except – Shakespeare takes his history from Holinshed, who takes his history from the sainted Sir Thomas More. Who lived through these times…….except, he was 5 when Richard came to the throne, and 8 when he died. Thomas More was a Tudor made man. And history, as we know, is written by the victors.

Interestingly the Shakespeare ‘I am a nasty piece of work’ opening soliloquy suggests prematurity

                                               sent before my time Into this breathing world

yet the equal and opposite ‘man was a monster’ myth was that his mother, Cecily Neville has been pregnant with him for 2 years and he was born with a full head of black hair and a mouth full of teeth!

Re-reading this marvellously entertainingly presented history lesson this time, forcefully struck me by its topicality. Tey does not just look at the creation of ‘false news’ in Richard’s time – or, to be more honest, in Henry’s time, but scattered through these pages is evidence of a lot more ‘false news’ some of it twentieth century, and always produced for political/power capital

She uses a great device here – her detective, Inspector Alan Grant, of Scotland Yard, is laid up in bed, flat on his back – for weeks – in hospital, following a severely broken leg, falling through a trap-door, chasing a villain.

This inevitably made me laugh a little wryly. This book was published in 1951. The NHS would have been very young. And perhaps Inspector Grant was quite unusual and maybe of some means. Laid up for weeks in hospital? In a private room? How times have probably changed. I doubt most Inspectors or most anyone would either find private insurance schemes keeping them in bed in a single room for some weeks. Okay, medicine has also moved on and perhaps a badly broken leg is otherwise more speedily mended

Alan Grant does, however, move amongst the cultured great and good, as a good friend is a celebrity West End actress, much admired, who visits him in hospital. Seeking to relieve his grumpy boredom, and knowing his interest in faces, she picks up a job lot of historical portrait photos from another good chum who works fairly high-up at the V + A. One of the portraits is of Richard, and Grant becomes fascinated by the mismatch between the historical monster and his face (mind you, the best known portrait was also painted around 100 years after his death!)

Tey slides in the historical information as Grant investigates (with a tame American researcher who looks like a woolly lamb) in a very easy to assimilate fashion, by the introduction of memorable well drawn secondary characters, including the hospital staff, with whom Grant can be ‘undry’

And the reader (well this one) becomes as eager to unravel a historical mystery as Grant.

Of course, it turns out that the theory Tey is proposing is not (and was not) a new one, at the time of her writing, but she probably did a lot to begin to rescue Richard’s reputation, because she was a popular crime fiction writer.

There have been, since, other historical writers – Alison Weir for one, – who challenge the conclusions Tey makes, many of which came from a 1906 book by Clements Markham.

I wonder how many people became fascinated by history, due to an early exposure to Tey’s book.

The writer herself was born Elizabeth Mackintosh and died in 1952 She had two pen names, Josephine Tey, as here, and as the playwright Gordon Daviot

This book has achieved enduring popularity, voted number one in The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time list compiled by the British Crime Writers’ Association, in 1990, and, in a 1995 American Poll of The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time list compiled by the Mystery Writers of America it held the 4th position

The recent discovery of the skeleton buried under a Leicester car park, identified as Richard’s from mitochondrial DNA analysis comparison with a sample analysed from that of a known descendant ,  shows that Richard was not a hunchback (probable Tudor paint-the-monster invention). He did have scoliosis, a fairly common twisting of the spine away from a perfect perpendicular, but this would not (given the degree of it) been visible from observation of the clothed person

I can see how this book would particularly appeal to late teens and twenties readers, who often have a strong sense of the wrongs of injustice, as the whole search for ‘the truth’ by Grant, and his woolly lamb American researcher Brent Carradine, is ‘un-dry’ precisely because of the passionate intensity to right a wrong.

The Daughter of Time Amazon UK
The Daughter of Time Amazon USA

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E.H. Gombrich – A Little History of the World

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A Little History of The World, Book Review, Children's Book Review, E.H. Gombrich, Ethics, History, Philosophy

Santa Claus doesn’t exist – when should the children be told about history?

E.H. Gombrich is probably best known as the author of a wonderful book on the History of Art, which I guess must have made its way, at some time, to every Art lovers bookshelf.

I recently discovered that he had, as a young man, written a wonderful history book for children, which was published in Austria in 1935, much later, translated into twenty five languages, , but only towards the end of Gombrich’s life (he died in 2001) did he produce an English version. This has also updated the History, taking it to the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Gombrich, born in Vienna in 1909, was an Austrian Jew, and made his home in England in 1936.

He originally wrote A Little History of The World, a history book for children, when he had been commissioned to translate an English history book into German. Gombrich was not very complimentary about the history book, instead, suggested to be publisher that he could do rather better, by writing a book about history himself, for children, The publisher took him up on this, and, quite astonishingly, he wrote his wonderful ‘little history’ in 6 weeks .

The sweep of this effortlessly readable book starts in prehistory, and in 40 chapters arrives at the tail end of the twentieth century.

Whilst there is a major focus on European history, what Gombrich is really looking at is a kind of exploration of empires – whether these are empires of the mind, of ideology, ideas, religions, politics and of course the regrettable history of empires won and lost through club, sword, firearm, bomb and all the rest of mankind’s panoply of destructive devices.

It has to be said, an account of several thousands of years of interminable war, war which almost every tribe humanity might belong to (whether city states, nation states, countries, followers of religious, political or other belief systems) seems, if it gets any sort of power, to want to batter another grouping into submission to, makes for pretty depressing, despairing reading. In some ways, stunning though this is, I’m quite glad I didn’t read it as a child, since I’m pretty sure I might have succumbed to hopelessness.

What absolutely makes this book at all possible, in terms of a sensitive young mind not getting overwhelmed and distraught by our peculiar species, is the great warmth, the immense humanity, and, yes, despite our bloody history, the compassionate optimism of Gombrich, who at every turn also sees the wonders and the marvels, the intelligence, the curiosity, the excitement and the heart that is also humanity’s heritage.

And then there is the far from small matter that he writes like a dream, talks directly to, rather than down to, his intended young audience – not to mention his admiring older audience.

He will, I hope, reach small people who might, by this, want to take charge of learning the sad lessons of the past, in order to help us to better avoid repeating errors in the future.

Here is Gombrich, with a wonderfully poetic and heartfelt, not to mention wise and encouraging, exhortation to his young audience, on the theme of time, and history itself, as a river. He has taken his audience on an imaginary journey, flying along the river of time, from prehistory to the present, and presents this spacious, soulful image

From close up, we can see it is a real river, with rippling waves like the sea. A strong wind is blowing and there are little crests of foam on the waves. Look carefully at the millions of shimmering white bubbles rising and then vanishing with each wave. Over and over again, new bubbles come to the surface and then vanish in time with the waves. For a brief moment they are lifted on the wave’s crest and then they sink down and are seen no more. We are like that. Each one of us no more than a tiny glimmering thing, a sparkling droplet on the waves of time which flow past beneath us into an unknown, misty future. We leap up, look around us and, before we know it, we vanish again. We can hardly be seen in the great river of time. New drops keep rising to the surface. And what we call our fate is no more than our struggle in that multitude of droplets in the rise and fall of one wave. But we must make use of that moment. It is worth the effort.

This is a marvellous, fascinating, deeply thought provoking, highly engaging and interesting book

It is beautifully complemented by woodcut images at the head of each chapter, by Clifford Harper

A Little History of the World Amazon UK
A Little History of the World Amazon USA

Jasmine Donahaye – Losing Israel

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Book Review, Ethics, History, Israel, Jasmine Donahaye, Losing Israel, Middle East conflict, Palestine, Politics

The shifting sands of home

Jasmine Donahaye’s confessional exploration of the heartbreaking complexities around the divide between Israel/Palestine: whose land? whose homes? whose sacred and historical places? whose truthful history? – the aching, tearing emptiness in clear sight for one’s own, and others emotional faultlines – is a beautiful, soulful, despairing and melancholy piece of writing.

Donahaye, daughter of two kibbutzniks, one of them born in Israel (her mother) and the other an English born Jew, keen to help the socialist vision of an Israeli society, was born in the UK when her parents left Israel and came to live in her father’s birthplace.

She first visited Israel at the age of 10, in 1978. Losing Israel recounts her profound sense of home, belonging, commitment to Israel, and her swallowing of its myths and hero stories, as absorbed in childhood from her former kibbutznik parents. Israel was the longing-in-the-blood home; Israel was beloved grandparents; Israel her history and connection

The stories we learn in childhood, before we are able to analyse, stand outside and deconstruct them, or learn that there might also be other stories, are seductive and often, quite literally, enchanting – that is, they exert some kind of magic over us, and learning that our view of the world is a subjective, not an objective one, and that someone else is glamoured by different stories and world views, is shocking and unsettling. Often it’s the easiest, least challenging way to live to choose to view our own stories as objective and true, and to choose to view the stories of  others as glamours, wrong, false, subjective.

As with any national narrative, in order to legitimise itself, the modern Israeli one is grafted, like a new fruiting variant, onto an old gnarled trunk with deep historical roots

So, for Donahaye, `the Arab’ was dangerous, one who was trying to take `our land’. And then, the complicated history of Israel, or Palestine, or what had been the British Mandate, rather flung itself upon her, after she discovered the role of those passionately idealistic kibbutzniks, including her own grandfather, in taking those “desert wastes and uncultivated scrublands”, to build the kibbutz. Build Israel, There was a false potency in the myth of desert wastes and uncultivated scrublands, a false potency in naming that land, the ownership it implies, that hid the other story of displacement. Not the sorry uncultivated scrubs, but land already settled and farmed by Palestinians. Who has displaced whom, in all its sorry complexity, becomes the theme of this painful, honest and unresolved exploration

Israel’s national anthem is in minor chords, saturated with longing for a redemption that cannot be, a hope that cannot be fulfilled, because who can ever be fully at home in the world when that home rests on the homelessness of others

Donahaye was well into middle age before that other story, that Palestinian story, began to demand she listened to it. Although she had grown up in the UK, where there has been open, sometimes deeply painful dissent between the concepts which `Israel’ and `Palestine’ contain, she then spent over 10 years in America, where perhaps the Palestinian arguments have not been so widely listened to. In conflicts, the history which gets heard is that of the victors. It is not `the true’ history. It is the history of the victors. The `true’ history must always be knotty and uncomfortable : it contains oppositions.

How can we ever come to this place (‘Peace’, written in Arabic and Hebrew); the need gets ever more urgent

I didn’t find Donahaye’s late realisation of that other history surprising, precisely because those beliefs we grow up with, as received truths, whatever they are, shape us. Changing our fundamental beliefs, `losing our faith’ – whether that is religious, political, or any other belief which is as much emotional as intellectual, is an overwhelming experience. Letting go of our cultural and family myths may in the end be liberating, but there is likely to be a deeply painful process involved in that awakening. For Donahaye, it was also linked with the rightness – or wrongness – of her own family history, rewriting her heroic parents and grandparents and finding darker actions in their past

No matter what I learn about its history, what I feel about its government’s acts, its citizens electoral choices, what I think about its political foundations and exclusions, Israel is inextricably caught up with my mother – my inaccessible, elusive mother, who left her community and her country, but inwardly never left, who carried her home all the years of my childhood not in a book…..but in the locked chamber of her heart

I discovered (and was not at all surprised) that Donahaye is a poet. She has that poetic sensibility of grasping the importance and texture of language, of writing, not only beautifully, but with thought, with precision, working images, narratives, descriptions and reflections, whether of her own internal debates and confusions, or what she sees outside her, with freshness, immediacy, authenticity.

What’s In A Name : Cinnyris osea : Palestine Sunbird; Orange-Tufted Sunbird

She has also been, all her life, a passionate bird-watcher. And ruefully reflects how language to describe bird travels and origins: `native’, `migrants,’ comes to have a weightier meaning in that land whose name is loaded, always denying the other. Israel/Palestine – whose home? This became a particularly powerful, and unresolved metaphor in the name of a particular bird, native to the region. As a child, she learned to call this bird the orangetufted sunbird. However, its other name is the Palestine sunbird:

When I was a child we never called it the Palestine sunbird, because we never used the word Palestine…..Naming acknowledges and therefore begins to validate a story. Not naming erases. …it renders a thing void…..semantically the name Palestine erases Israel…the meanings and associations of the word Israel semantically erases Palestine

This is an honest, and a painful book. An uncomfortable one because the author does not take a black and white decision, there is not clear-cut, done and dusted resolution. Rather she stays in that difficult place of nuance. Our stories, it seems to me, all our stories, closely examined, are ambiguous

Love of a person, of a place – the more you know, the more complicated it is. The knowledge that the person is wounded, that the place is stained doesn’t diminish your love…..your need to love is a longing to feel whole, knowing you cannot be whole – a longing to be home, though you will never be at home in one place, not fully

I recommend this book unreservedly. She took me into the heart of the real battleground – we glibly talk about `hearts and minds’ and how we have to win the hearts and minds to resolve conflicts, but it seems to me that is the only real and lasting solution to the eternal, global conflicts which our complex, conflicted species, each and every one of us, are so prone to.

This might, or might not seem trivial, but every picture I looked at for inclusion, had another retaliatory picture behind it : my suffering, yes but you caused My suffering, here are MY dead children : and here are MINE. In the end, I found almost everything I saw provoked a raging fire, and I felt trapped by each image adding fuel to each side. Everything was oil to that flame.

I received Losing Israel as a digital review copy from the publishers, Seren, via NetGalley

I was alerted to Donahaye’s book by FictionFan, when she was in the middle of reading it, and thought it was a definite one for me. How right she was. Here is the link to her thoughtful review

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Losing Israel Amazon USA

Alison Weir – The Lady In The Tower

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Alison Weir, Anne Boleyn, Book Review, Henry VIII, History, The Lady In The Tower, Thomas Cromwell, Tudors

Keeping your head when all around are losing theirs : challenging in the court of the Tudor King

Alison Weir’s deeply researched, thorough and unsensational examination of the last 4 dramatic months in Queen Anne Boleyn’s life is a page turning, illuminating and highly anxiety inducing read, even though we know the inevitable outcome.

There are 3 major players in this drama, and the innocence and guilt of all are under question by posterity – and two of them, at the time, were not being judged in a court of law.

Anne Boleyn, now Queen, was the woman Henry VIII had broken with the powerful Church of Rome for, in order to get his first marriage to Katherine of Aragon annulled.

King Henry was an absolute monarch, and a million miles away from being any kind of benevolent dictator, though benevolence and dictatorship are an uneasy set of bedfellows anyway. Henry was far less dictator, in the end, than he was despot. At least, that is posterity’s verdict.

Thomas Cromwell, son of a blacksmith, rather than of noble birth, Henry’s `Master Secretary’ was at this point the second most powerful person in the Kingdom, at least in a shadowy, behind the scenes, pulling the threads kind of way. Even, perhaps as much the puppet master as the ostensible real holder of the reins of power. However, holding the reins of power when the real ruler is as terrifying and at times as wilful a figure as Henry, is not a secure position. He that elevates those to power – particularly when they are not with the force of a noble family behind them – can as easily remove them from that position. And indeed, that did happen for Cromwell a few short years later. Moreover, falling from Henry’s favour was a little different from finding an unexpected P45 in your pay-packet. Failing to get a good reference and another job would be the least of your worries

Anne Boleyn – possibly. As Weir points out, many of the pictures of Anne were not paintings she sat for, nor by artists alive in her time

In a totalitarian state – and this was, many will be jostling to get close to the supremely powerful figure, and in this particular version of totalitarianism, that of absolute monarchy, the King is not only monarch, but is also Divine – so there is an extra layer of fear and superstition, that of offending against God, the risking of the immortal soul, if the highest of all has his will and majesty flouted. For those who jostle to climb the slippery pole of preferment, mainly through kicking and clawing and stabbing in the back those beneath you, or greasing the palms of those above you, there must always be the knowledge that today’s friend may join forces with yesterday’s enemy and be the one who kicks, claws and stabs you, because new and better alliances will always present themselves. The fickle finger of fate creates new martyrs and new figures to embody power and prestige.

Much has been written of this horrific story. One of the many interesting facets of Weir’s book is her analysis of the changing viewpoints of culpability over the centuries. Anne, vilified as a combination of she-devil and whore at the time, later was seen as almost someone worthy of hagiography – a woman sinned against, not sinning, a woman who fell foul of a stitched -up court, a woman framed, and victim of injustice cynically carried out by the highest in the land. Later generations have seen her almost as a feminist martyr. She was, for sure, a powerful and intelligent woman, one outspoken, and by all accounts opinionated. She was certainly not content to play the role of passive, I-know-my-place-is-under-the-foot-of-my-lord-and-master wifey which society expected. Such independence of spirit alone would be dangerous, whether or not the infidelities she was accused of were true or false, when her husband bore a fairly strong resemblance to that ogre of fairy-tale – Bluebeard. In fact, I did find myself wondering when that compelling and terrifying story originated, and from where.

Bluebeard – also known as Henry VIII

Anne was later seen as a kind of martyr for religious Reformism, as she was indeed, in the developing religious schisms between Rome and England, a Reformist, and championed the cause of reform.

Whether Anne was, or was not guilty of the crimes as charged she was certainly not an unspotted open-hearted innocent. She, along with her family, like her replacement, Jane Seymour, along with her family, appeared to have had an eye to the main chance. She showed little mercy to the rather more popular (with the people) Katherine of Aragon and her daughter Mary, and perhaps should not have been surprised that her husband, who had demonstrated little loyalty to a previous wife, was once again making space for a new venture into matrimony with one of the Queen’s ladies in waiting. Becoming a lady in waiting must almost have seemed like a sure route to becoming Queen, in Henry’s court – a kind of horizontal finishing school, perhaps! Jane Seymour, in her turn, played the main chance, though as she was fortunate enough to die in childbirth having given birth to a son she never had to face the possible demotion and vilification that might well have happened when Henry’s desires moved elsewhere. Hers was at least a natural death. Without the security of being from a powerful Royal family from another country (Katharine of Aragon, Anne of Cleves) life and keeping hold of it seemed remarkably insecure for those Henry wedded.

Anne was of course accused of adultery with 5 men and plotting the death of the king. Weir performs an elegant and persuasive analysis to show the charges were, at least in part, manufactured. The charges were very specific in terms of dates, places and times with the specific, named, individuals. Certainly some of the stated dates, places and partners were complete fabrications, as either Anne, or the accused lover, according to documentary evidence, were not at those places on those days, but documented as being elsewhere. She doesn’t say though that inappropriate behaviour and conversation by a Queen (according to the mores of the times) of some kind was definitely NOT occurring, but that evidence itself can show that some of the specified events could not have occurred as charged.

What I particularly appreciated in this book is that she is very clear that to analyse the past by the ideas, mores and manners of the present is an activity which is fraught with danger. For example, some of the language used in some of Anne’s letters to those accused with her, and some of the language apparently used on the scaffold by her have been used to `prove’ her guilt – for example, the fact that in all her scaffold speeches the king is praised. There were courtly modes of address which would have been adhered to – and indeed, would have been recorded, whether or not they were uttered. And, as far as the speeches which any of the accused uttered before axes (in the case of the 5 men) or the sword (in Anne’s case) were wielded – it’s important to remember that totalitarian societies do not only punish those individuals it deems to have done wrong. You might know that whatever you say, you are about to face a brutal, painful death – there will be no reprieve from that – but what about those you leave behind, what about friends and family? Make too passionate a deathbed speech and you may very well be lining up those you love for savage punishment to come.

The major, culpable figures are of course the two men, Cromwell and Henry. Again, different historians (given the fact that much documentary evidence from the time no longer exists) draw different conjectures as to which of the two was MOST guilty. Weir certainly deduces Cromwell was absolutely the one who created and faked, or merely deduced and collated the evidence, but the fact remains that he was responding to the way the wind was blowing, as far as Henry’s desires went. Of course Cromwell and Anne had become bitter enemies, though once he was of her party and aided her rise, now he was shifting allegiance, and both he and Anne must have been mindful how each could use Henry to topple the other. However, Henry was by now clearly tired of his wife and her inability to give him the necessary male heir to secure his kingdom, and as Cromwell had been a major player in securing Henry’s desired release from his first wife, it’s not surprising to find Cromwell up to the neck (perhaps literally) in finding the means for Henry to gain freedom from wife number 2. No doubt Anne Boleyn’s fall from grace served both men well.

Cromwell by Holbein. It’s amazing the career prospects which were open to Secretaries in Bluebeard’s time

We all see and hear what we want to hear and what we want to see. Neither Henry – nor any of the peers sitting in judgement on Anne and the men accused with her picked apart the holes in evidence. As one of those peers was Anne’s own father and another was her uncle, the dangers of coming to decisions which are not those the King desires, must be obvious. Particularly in the case of Anne’s father – he was condemning not only his daughter, but his son, as Anne’s brother Rochford was also one of those accused of adultery with her.

How far all this suited Henry was shown by the fact that a mere 10 days after Anne’s execution he had married Jane Seymour.

I have read some reviews where the reviewer feels that Weir castigates Cromwell for too much, and that she `whitewashes’ Henry. I must say I did not get any sense of a Henry `whitewash’ – Weir does however try to think herself into people in their time. In that Tudor court, the terrible events of The Wars Of The Roses and an insecure succession were not that long ago. Succession happened through sons, not daughters, so the importance of a male heir felt paramount. And this was also still a highly superstitious age. Credulity existed for sure, and could also be no doubt evoked to dupe oneself as well as others. Henry was out of love with a woman he had been mad for. She was getting older and other than her first born, seemed unable to carry a child to term. Rather than looking at your own libidinous, greedy and fickle nature to explain the dreadful mistake made in your marriage choices, `being bewitched’ might have seemed an explanation which had a logic which would not wash today, but probably did in those times.

Something I found absolutely fascinating in this book is that Weir lays out for us the enormously conflicting evidence which is available from eyewitnesses, over-hearers and those who were onlookers or participants. This really indicates the huge difficulties in historical research and deduction – which, the further back in time one travels, gets even harder.

Even something as theoretically simple as what Anne was wearing at her public execution is differently described by those who were there to see it all – sometimes, even disparities in the colour, never mind the fabric and decoration of her death dress.

And as for the very very different transcriptions of what she said in her `from the scaffold’ speech – extraordinary! Of course, in an age where not only were there no recording devices, but no microphones, and crucially, not even any system of shorthand notation, it would be nigh on impossible to note down verbatim what someone was saying. Not to mention the fact that the high emotional anxiety of Anne, not to mention any listeners close enough to properly hear what she was saying, would have rendered memory and observation extremely suspect. No doubt acceptable spin was as active in Tudor times as it is today.

Anne and Henry VIII’s daughter. She did quite well for herself, and ended up being played by Dame Judi Dench, no less, in a film

I recommend this book most highly. It combines obviously exhaustive research with clarity about rationale for interpretation, which has to be done as so little documentation actually exists about the lead up and the planning and what went on behind closed doors, obviously in secret. Weir is neither dry in her laying out of research, nor is she sensationalist – she leaves the truly sensationalist events themselves to create the jaw-dropping, gut-sickening responses which any reader of any kind of empathy and imagination will have. I was so, so pleased that her recording of what actually happened in those dreadful, savage executions was delivered sparely and un-emotively, without overblown descriptors designed to titivate a kind of delight-in-horror entertainment. The events themselves are far more horrific, and bring it all to enough life, without the cheapness of creating revved-up fiction

I’m left uneasily feeling that though on one level we are far far away from the savagery and terror of that Tudor court, in some ways, it seems uncomfortably close, in a world where women can still be the recipients of savage double-standard sentences for transgressing the mores of their society, and where totalitarian states, whether espousing religious or political ideology despotism, dispense savage punishment against individuals and groups who dare to dissent.

Weir gave me pause to think about much more than the last four months of Anne Boleyn’s life

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BBC Radio Archives – The Last Day Of J.F.K

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Alistair Cooke, Assassination of John F. Kennedy, BBC Radio Archives, Documentary, History, Letter From America, The Last Day Of J.F.K

This is a compilation of 2 programmes from the BBC Radio 4 Archives, recording material following events on the 22^nd November, 1963, in Dallas, when President Kennedy was assassinated.

The first, longest programme, the hour long ‘Something Is Terribly Wrong’, was broadcast on the 40^th anniversary, presented by Alan Thompson. It is a mixture of archive material from police radio recordings, KLIF Radio recordings about this event close to the time (a year later) and there is also the ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ of people looking back at the event, across time. And what really comes across is the shock, sadness and stupefaction and incomprehension that the event had happened.

It was only later that the industry around conspiracy and counter-conspiracy theories grew up

The second 15 minute programme is the Letter From America that the legendary (even then)  Alistair Cooke delivered 2 days after the assassination, speaking his perception of a nation in shock, deep grief and disbelief. Right or wrong, there was a feeling that something different, something hopeful, something for positive change, had been snuffed out and randomly destroyed.

I found this a reflective and well constructed couple of recordings. No doubt, were the recording done today, there would have probably been a more intrusive desire by the presenter of the first programme to impose his edgy, interesting, powerful personality, to have intrusive over production. Alan Thompson is restrained, and trusts his material to contain what is interesting and fascinating, and his listeners’ intelligence to not need over emoting, to allow them to feel and think their own conclusions.

As for Cooke, what can one say. He was always a voice and a personality who invited the listener to reflect with him on what was arising.

One idea caught at me, from Thompson’s programme – the randomness, rather than the conspiracy of the Jack Ruby killing of Lee Harvey Oswald, at least according to eye-witness accounts. The killing of Oswald of course meant that the person who knew was no longer there to reveal what they knew.

However, the thought this documentary left me with, is our willingness and desire, often, to find conspiracy. Conspiracies there undoubtedly are, always have been, and no doubt always will be. But, we are a patterning animal, an animal which connects and narrates this and that. This happened, that happened, therefore this must have caused that. Sometimes this does cause that – and sometimes this happens, that happens, and the two do not connect. Is it harder to bear the random indifference of the universe, and easier to build a conspiracy, otherwise, the random snuffing out of a life, the recognition that

golden lads and lasses must, like chimney-sweepers, come to dust

makes us all uneasy. Bad things happen to bad and good people, good things happen to good and bad people. An indifferent universe may be more unbearable than a universe filled with malevolent, conspiring fellow humans.

I received this CD as a review copy from the Amazon Vine programme UK

The Last Day Of JFK BBC Radio Archives CD Amazon UK
The Last Day Of JFK BBC Radio Archives CD Amazon USA

Nicholas Gage – Eleni

Tags

Book Review, Eleni, Greek Civil War, History, Nicholas Gage

A stark account of mans’ inhumanity and the power of love

This is an extraordinary book. The tragedy is that it is a story which needed to be told at all. It is a terrible and true account of what happens when ideology (of any persuasion) subsumes our sense of our own and each other’s humanity.

The author’s mother was murdered during the Greek Civil War. The book’s journey is one that starts from anger and the desire to get vengeance and justice for what happened to his mother, from the perpetrators. It is an interesting and educational book about Greece in a particular time and place, and it is also a raw story about how we may have to assimilate and process the unendurable, in others, and in oursleves

Though the events took place in Greece during the German occupation, and afterwards during the Greek civil war, it would be dangerous to assume that there aren’t lessons here for us all, of whatever political, religious or cultural orientation. Although the story is particular to Greece during the Second World War and its aftermath, it is sadly a story which could have been told many times, with reference to different historical and geographical locations.

We keep forgetting how often this story could have been told – how often it is being replayed in different parts of the world today, and how often it may be repeated in the future.

I found myself shaken at the awful story Nicholas Gage had to tell, the terrible events his family experienced, and also so grateful that he did tell this tragic and also wonderful story. Like Wild Swans this is a book which sickens you with the realisation that any one of us, given the right (or wrong) situation might forget our common humanity so easily, and yet also serves as a wonderful testimonial to the existence of something deep, true and heroic in many ordinary people, that enables us sometimes to transcend the ego driven cruel way we can treat each other.

Eleni’s story is stark, tragic and bleak – but also shows the illuminating and transcending power of love, compassion and and truth.The author shows great courage in being honest about his own struggles to come to terms with his mother’s story, and shares something of his love for her and loss of her

The book was later turned into a film, which i have not seen, nor would i want to. It is the immediacy and rawness of this which is instructive to me, not the remove of actors coming between the sobering, shocking reality and the lived experience of the writer/son and his family’s experience

Eleni Amazon UK
Eleni Amazon USA

Otto Dov Kulka – Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination

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Auschwitz concentration camp, Book Review, History, Landscapes of The Metropolis of Death:Reflections on Memory and Imagination, Otto Dov Kulka, Theresienstadt concentration camp

There can be no way to analyse accounts of the the unendurable

This is a book I found it impossible to assess a clear response to. It is, of course, a book which should never have been written, since the fact that this history happened at all is horrifying beyond the imagination of horror itself.

Yet, having happened, books such as these MUST be written, and even more importantly, MUST be read. We must know what we are capable of for good and for ill. But how can a reader like, love, think its okay, not like or hate a book such as this?

I have (fortunately) no concept of an existence like this; I have only encountered people who lived through those times, and suffered what was suffered, who, try though they might cannot tell what they endured, because those of us who did not have these experiences cannot comprehend or imagine them.

And those that suffered them, however well they survived them were of course scarred deeply.

Otto Dov Kulka, Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. was a boy in the ‘family camp’ at Auschwitz, via Theresienstadt.

He seems to have survived in terms of his emotional, mental, spiritual sense of himself, through an element of dissociation – which is of course the third response the autonomic nervous system has to danger – aggression fight, fear/flight, or freeze/dissociation. Tellingly, he recounts (and this is horrific, heartbreaking, and at the same time astonishingly awe-inducing) a childhood (camp) memory not of the horror but of the blue skies, in the family camp. That is, he somehow managed to find a sense of the blue remembered hills idea of childhood, so many of us remember, despite the unendurable reality of the death camps. If an individual is to survive and recover from these sorts of horrors, the way it can be done may be strange indeed. I had a sense, reading this, that Dov Kulka got through by analysis, intellect, discrimination, judgement, forcing himself into a sort of objective overview response, withdrawing from the personal, subjective loss, pain and suffering. It is no surprise he became a historian, existing at the overview of events, drawing clinical assessments of them.

This is a book beyond my comprehension, shocking, dreadful, humbling. He spares the reader gory graphic individual details. It is enough that we know that those personal sufferings he spares us were, dreadfully, day to day mundane facts of what life was like, in those days, for those millions who lived and died in those unimaginable places.

It is also a book which escapes and transcends any categories it may be put into, leaving this reader bewildered, appalled – and in awe of those who, like Dov Kulka, so clearly escaped the concerted, deliberate, vicious procedures which were designed not just to physically mutilate, torture and kill, but to destroy the individual and collective humanity, the soul, the sense of self, before the final physical destruction.

It is not the physical survival of those who survived the Holocaust which humbles us, it is the evidence of the survival of their humanity – and sometimes a greater, wiser humanity than those of us fortunate enough not to be scarred and damaged by what we can darkly do to each other.

I am not saying anything about suffering like this ennobling – it doesn’t, that sort of suffering is deliberately designed to degrade and destroy and remove nobility. However, some people seem to have the ability to be as greatly transcending their baser selves, as some others have to embrace only what is most monstrous

I received this an a review copy

Landscapes of The Metropolis of Death:Reflections on Memory and Imagination Amazon UK
Landscapes of The Metropolis of Death:Reflections on Memory and Imagination Amazon USA

Jan Karski – Story of a Secret State

Tags

Autobiography, Book Review, History, Jan Karski, Poland, Second World War, Story of a Secret State

Where does such courage come from?

This is not just one man’s story of resistance in the face of tyranny and evil, it is the story of the resistance of a whole country. And I knew little of this history, of those Poles and the underground network, and their courage.

The Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, and Poland, a country squeezed between aggressors (Russia and Germany) and brutally dealt with by both managed astonishing resistance between 39 and 45. Jan Karski, a young member of the intelligentsia and privileged class, was quickly arrested by the Russian army, initially, as Poland was mobilising to resist the German invasion. The early pact between Russia and Germany worked against the Polish people, who were fighting for their survival from the start. Karski’s own individual story, escaping by various means from both Russian, and later Gestapo capture, and smuggling the true story of ‘The Final Solution’ out of Poland and into the Polish Government in exile in the UK, is awe-inspiring enough, but his book recounts the astonishing heroism and fierce resistance which many Polish people were committed to, paying for their resistance with their lives.

The information Karski smuggled to the UK, used to show the free world the awful reality of the attempted liquidation of the Jewish people in Poland, and the risks he took, led, many years later to his recognition as ‘Righteous Among Nations‘ by the Yad Vashem Institute in Israel. More Polish people have been recognised in this way than any other nation

Tragically, despite the urgent and dreadful news of the atrocities of the camps, which Karski smuggled to England in 1942, the lack of photographic evidence meant that some of his accounts were perceived as ‘propaganda’.

                       Yad Vashem Hall of Names Wiki Commons

Inevitably, such tales of resistance and heroism makes the reader wonder ‘could I have had such integrity, such courage, in the face of torture?’ I hope I never have to find out, but I fear not, personally. Which makes me awe-struck by this book, and the story of a courageous people

I’m interested in stories of individual and collective courage, without subscribing to any anti-nation view. Courage, and its opposite – apathy, surely, rather than cowardice exists potentially within us all. Individual and collective stories of acts of altruism, humanity and courage are inspirational. I know there are, sadly, quite a few biographical accounts of ‘how i bravely resisted’ which are proved to be spurious and willful inventions by the authors. Karski’s account is verified and interestingly, there is a modesty in these pages which itself points to veracity.

Story of a Secret State Amazon UK
Story of a Secret State Amazon USA