Bibliography, November 2020

BOTM: C. Stevens, Born Brilliant: The Life of Kenneth Williams (2010)

M Lynas, Six degrees (2009)
D. Goulson, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees (2013)
S. Mukherjee, The Emperor of maladies (2010)
J. Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland (2014)
F.W. Crofts, The Cask (1920)

I enjoyed almost all of these. Meadowland was a moving evocation of the life and rhythms of a tiny scrap of the world; Goulson's memoir-cum-bumblebee guide was also and unexpectedly charming, as well as fascinating. All were books I'd recommend, though Six degrees was deeply depressing. My favourite though, even if I'm not actually sure it was the best, was Kenneth Williams' biography. 

Having finished it, and checked the reviews, it is clearly flawed. It's a meticulous and well written book, but It does suffer slightly from an author who is clearly a huge fan: part of the narrative suffers from a desire to explain away some of the fairly awful behaviour, and it is also quite long, corresponding to the figure that the author believes he could have been, not necessarily that he was. But, but, but ... Kenneth Williams is iconic, and he's iconic for a reason. He occupies a huge place in popular culture (probably now receding among the under 30s, er 50s?), and I've always loved his work, much of the best of which absolutely stands up. It was thus a great pleasure to read, though not without without sadness. It's hard not to read it wistfully now, wondering if his life could have been different, or would have been different at a different context. Part of me wishes he could have gone to grammar school (he didn't go to as his parents couldn't pay for the uniform) and we could have seen one of the great eccentric dons of our age which the author thinks he could have been. But then we'd have missed the rest; and I wouldn't have wanted that.

Bibliography, October 2020

BOTM:  M. Mengiste, The Shadow King (2019)

B. Carruthers, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (2011)
T. Dangarembga, Nervous conditions (1988)
-----------, The Book of Not (2006)
-----------, This Mournable Body (2020)
M. Engle,  A wrinkle in time (1962)
R. Kapuscinski, The Emperor (1978)
P. Lay, Providence lost (2020)
E. Orczy, The scarlet pimpernel (1905)

When the Booker shortlist came out, I agonised over whether to read all of Dangarembga's trilogy (the third was nominated). I'm so glad I did, because the original is overwhelmingly the best, and it's pretty clear that they've given the nod to book three (which is fine, but only fine) because they didn't give it to Nervous conditions. That was excellent, and I'd recommend stopping there. Book two is appallingly structured and while not without good scenes, pretty poor. I spent a bit of time deciding between Dangarembga and Mengiste for BOTM, but in the end I felt that the story in The Shadow King edged it. I am not firm in that conclusion, but it is an excellent book. The narrative flows nicely, the writing tidy and, impressively, simultaneously understated and horrifyingly evocative of the brutality its describing. It's deceptive in its approach, often seeming to be heading one way before shifting focus and direction - the shadow king in question, is a) pretty shadowy in plot and significance terms and b) not mentioned till halfway through the book. I'm going to read more of hers. 

No surprises then, that this is my preferred Booker winner. It was a pretty solid (if not outstanding) list though and I'd be unable to make a strong case for my rankings 2-4. As follows:

1. Mengiste
2. Stuart
3. Cook 
4. Taylor
5. Doshi
6. Dangarembga

I'm pretty uncertain who will win. It may well be Shuggie Bain, but I think they will want to push for a black voice in which case they may like Brian Taylor's Real Life. On balance, I ultimately think it will be The Shadow King, which would be my third in a row.

Bibliography, September 2020

BOTM: J. Gillingham, The Wars of the Roses (1981)

D. Cook, The New Wilderness (2020)
A. Doshi, Burnt Sugar  (2020)

E. John, Me (2019)

N. MacGregor, Germany: memories of a nation (2014) 
M. Morris, A great and terrible king: Edward I and the forging of modern Britain (2010) 
V.T. Nguyen, The refugees (2017)

E. Shafak, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division  (2020)
D. Stuart, Shuggie Bain (2020)
B. Taylor, Real Life (2020)

Rock solid list (except for Shafak, which was facile). The fiction was no more than solid, but some of the non-fiction was very good indeed. Elton John's autobiography was deliriously enjoyable, and generous in his descriptions of most people in it. MacGregor was elegant and insightful about Germany. 

Elsewhere, I'm catching up on British medieval history, and my favourite this month was from one of my favourite historians. John Gillingham's work on Richard I is pretty much solely responsible for my strong performance in my English medieval history paper in finals, and I'm forever grateful for his deployment of charter statistics to understand Richard's reign. He shows the same trademark ability to count, and brilliance to look for data, in his account of the Wars of the Roses. I found his opening chapters on the nature of the wars, and their peculiar character as battle-seeking campaigns, highly convincing; and I loved his use of city wall-tax rates as evidence. The rest of the book, on the events of the wars themselves, was done well, and made a complicated saga relatively easy to follow. It's also not very long.

Bibliography, August 2020

BOTM: L. Lee, A rose in winter (1955)

N. Alderman, The Power (2016)
J.D. Carr, The Hollow Man (1935)
D. Coyle, GDP: A brief but affectionate history (2014)
B. Duffy, The perils of perception (2018)
G. E. Mitchell, H. P. Schmitz, and T. Bruno-van Vijfeijken, Between power and irrelevance (2019)
V.T. Nguyen, The sympathizer (2016)
D.L. Sayers, Clouds of witness (1926)
D.L. Sayers, Unnatural death (1926)
E. Waugh, The ordeal of Gilbert Penfold (1957)
C. Wolmar, Are trams socialist? (2016)

Let's face it. I'm a sucker for the travel literature of the 1950s (and building on what had gone before). To me, it is the golden age, when encounters with the fringes of the European world were still exotic enough to be interesting (this is Spain, but it could happily be the middle east - the cultural distance was less then), and the writing suffused by the historical and cultural bedrock that we have now lost. This is part of that flowering. I also very much liked Duffy's book on misperception, but it was too long, and The Sympathizer, which I thought was excellent, even if you could see the ending a mile off. But they didn't have passages that begin by suggesting that the hotel was 'as commercial as the cave of Ali Baba.' I'm very fond of Lee generally, and this one was no exception. I accept happily that this will be niche; other people should probably read the Vietnamese Pulitzer winner.

The long dawn of the dukes of England

I read Mantel's trilogy last month, and was immediately struck by the intimacy of the inner circle around the king, and specifically the very presence of the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the only two adults to hold a title at the top of the peerage. Until I started looking into it, I hadn't realised quite how lonely it was to be a duke. In the 1530s, and in every other point in the history of England before 1663, there were never more than four non-royal dukes. Between the first non-royal dukedom in England (incongruously, Ireland. Created 1386) and the Restoration, only 35 people who weren't royal held a ducal title.

That feels very jarring to me. Partly that's because we're used to so many dukes - there were forty at one point in the eighteenth century. It's also because we think of the Tudors as relatively modern so we don't think about how very un-modern aspects of their peerage and court are. Our, or at least my, historiographical instincts are not friends to our understanding. But it's also because the story of the ducal numbers is counter-intuitive. It took three hundred years of using ducal titles for it it really catch on. I think we can see it in five phases.

The first dukes. Royal dukes come in under Edward III. The dukedom of Cornwall (for the Black Prince) in 1337, then Lancaster (for his male line second cousin Henry, then John of Gaunt) in 1531. I don't know why this happens. I've seen it written than it's in response to the loss of Normandy, but the chronology doesn't work. I suspect it is to do with the wars in France, but exactly how, I'm not sure. Inevitably, title inflation means that Richard II then makes more royal dukes (for his uncles: York, Gloucester) in 1385 and then non-royal dukes for his favourites. But this doesn't last. Of the five are created 1398, one becomes Henry IV, the others are all attainted by Henry IV. By 1400, only royal dukes remain.

Generals. Some of the families raised to ducal status in 1398 do make comebacks. In 1425, the son of the attainted Duke of Norfolk secures his father's title, primarily due to his military and political record; and I gather, critically, this resolves a dispute with the Earl of Warwick over precedence. For a while he is the only one, but in the 1440s, five new dukes are created. Exeter (also a 1398 restoration), Buckingham, Warwick, Suffolk and the royal dukes of Somerset. These are obviously, like under Richard II, rewards in an increasingly unstable political structure, but are also, apart from Warwick, leading figures in the Hundred Years War.

Dynastic imperatives. After the 1440s, there is a retrenchment of ducal titles, though some of the earlier creations endure for a while. Five dukedoms are created between 1450 and 1550 and all are dynastic. 

• Two are created for individuals who are intended to marry royalty: the Duke of Bedford (1470) who never got to enjoy it, and the Duke of Suffolk (1514), who did. 
• Two are for family: Jasper Tudor, Henry VII's uncle (1485) and Edward Seymour, Edward VI's uncle (1547). The purposes are different, but they are clearly aimed at burnishing the royal dynasty they are linked to. 
• One is for the illegitimate son of Henry VIII (1525). The first, but not the last, time a King's bastard is made a duke. In this case, it's a response to the lack of male Tudors.

In all of these, the factional rationale behind the 1390s and the 1440s seems to take second place to royal proximity. At this point, Norfolk is the only surviving older ducal line, and - I suspect - beginning to feel like a category all of its own.

A ducal desert. In 1551, the last ducal creation for seventy years was made. Northumberland's title is clearly factional, though he did try to get his daughter in law (Lady Jane Grey) onto the throne, that post-dates his elevation. Given how that ended, it's hardly surprising that neither Elizabeth and Mary felt no need to add any more. After the execution of the 4th Duke of Norfolk in 1572, there were no extant non-royal dukes in England for fifty years, though James I does makes his sons dukes.

Stuart profligacy. The early Stuarts do bring dukes back, but very slowly. James I makes but no non-royal dukes till the last years of his reign, in 1623, when he makes his second cousin Ludovic Stuart, the only Duke in the peerage of Scotland (of Lennox) also a duke in England (of Richmond). He does so at the same time as he makes George Villiers Duke of Buckingham. Presumably, this is to soften the blow of Buckingham's elevation. But they were both effectively unprecedented in living memory, and we would do well to remember that when we think about Buckingham's reception. Charles I makes no non-royal Dukes, only his children and his nephew. 

Then Charles II makes fourteen; more new ducal titles than have, at that point, ever been created in the entire history of England. He restores some old ducal titles (Norfolk is back!), he makes his allies dukes, he makes his bastard sons dukes, he makes his mistresses dukes. I'm sure much has been written on this, but to me, I think there are two obvious reasons. Firstly, he wanted to emphasise the Restoration. Nothing says monarchy more than titles, especially if you give them to old families as well as new ones. Secondly, I think it's the French. France has had loads of dukes for ages. It certainly wouldn't have been the only thing that Charles II imported from the French court. As a result, after three hundred years of profound ambivalence about ducal titles, Dukes properly enter the peerage and the political landscape of England. I still remain surprised it took them so long.

Bibliography, July 2020

BOTM: H. Mantel, Wolf Hall (2009)*

G.K. Chesterton, The innocence of Father Brown (1911)

E. David, English bread and yeast cookery (1977)

M. Edwards, The golden age of murder (2015)
S. Lewis, It can't happen here (1935)
H. Mantel, Bring up the bodies (2012)

H. Mantel, The mirror and the light (2020)
S. Marai, Embers (1942)
H. Metar, A month in Siena (2019)
C. Slocock, People Like Us (2018)

Lots of very good things in here. I liked Metar and Slocock a lot; and Lewis' 1930s fable of how America can slide into fascism - though it struggled with poor chronology - was compelling. However, their misfortune was to compete with a full read through of the Mantel trilogy which was pretty much as good as it's held to be. I had held back from reading the second in anticipation of reading the three of them. Given the time it has taken for the third to arrive, I could hardly remember the first, so I'm glad I did. On rereading, it was, just, the best, edging out the Mirror and the Light, essentially because I think it had to do the hard work of entering the Tudor world. Thousands of words have been written on all of them and I have nothing to add.

I assume the final volume will win the Booker. I'm not sure the second one should have. I felt Bring up the bodies was the weakest of the three, largely because of its structure, which was tightly built around the fall of Anne Boleyn. As a result, I think that meant we lost the broader immersion, and it had fewer standout passages of writing. Still good, but off a peak.

And so, with a heavy heart, I think that means Will Self should have had the 2012 Booker. My shortlist ranking. It was a fine year, though.

1. Self, Umbrella
2. Mantel, Bring up the Bodies
3. Tan, The Garden of Evening Mists
4. Thayil, Narcopolis
5. Moore, The Lighthouse
6. Levy, Swimming Home

Bibliography, June 2020

BOTM: J. Pope-Hennessy, The quest for Queen Mary, ed. H. Vickers (2018)

D. Adams, Life, the Universe and everything (1982)
R. Garrett, Too many magicians (1966)
--------, Murder and magic (1979)
--------, Lord Darcy investigates (1981)
J. Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary (1959)
L.E. Major, Social mobility and its enemies (2018)
M. Savage, Class in the 21st century (2015)
P. Kidambi, Cricket country (2019)
D. Tossell, Nobody beats us (2009)

It's fashionable to question whether the gatekeepers of the cannon are right. I read a couple of books about class and social mobility that were interesting on this, but frustrating in their studied relativism. However, I find that reviews and analysis are usually entirely right. Case in point: James Pope-Hennessy's biography has long been held as the gold standard for royal biography, and so it is. Judiciously skipping over the familiar bits, but filling out the rich texture of the Protestant German royalty and the routine lives of royalty, minor and major in the period covered. For those of us who are not nineteenth century specialists, I thought it was a fascinating reach back into an era where the last of the daughters-in-law of George III were still alive, and a highly effective run into the reign of the current monarch. Of course, it was also written two or three generations ago, so it has an additional layer of interest. 

However, outstanding though the biography was, the best thing I read were the edited notes, or really the write ups of selected interviews. These are literary pieces - Pope-Hennessy did write them up with an eye to posterity - but convey the immediacy of the interviews and the emerging pattern of the research. He suggested that they would be published 50 years later. At nearly sixty, the revelations themselves are not shocking (who now cares that Queen Mary had an infatuation before George V), but the trenchant commentary and the detail of the individuals is beautifully done. It is highly amusing, brimming with interest, and nice and short (the biography itself weighs in at over 600 pages). Start here.