Missing in Action

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Andrew Miller is a paradoxical novelist. He writes eloquently about isolation in a way that feels modern and relevant, and yet, more often than not, he dips into the past in order to do so. He does it again in his eighth novel, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free. Set in 1809, the story begins with the return to Somerset of Captain John Lacroix, an English soldier who is brought

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Love at First Bite

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

William Ewart Gladstone, visiting the Bourbon kingdom of Naples in 1850–51, famously damned it as ‘the negation of God erected into a system of government’. He might have said the same, a hundred years later, about English boarding preparatory schools. With their inadequate sanitation, appalling food and draconian discipline administered by half-mad sadists, they seem, […]

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Notes to Shelf

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

This is the first book devoted to the history of the British country house library. Mark Purcell was the libraries curator at the National Trust from 1999 to 2015, and his text is naturally arranged around libraries now in National Trust ownership. The National Trust owns over 300,000 books disposed in 160 historic libraries across […]

Loom & Bust

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Exactly three hundred years ago, Paris was the centre of a radical fiscal experiment. The Scottish economist – or, perhaps more correctly, speculator – John Law had been given powers by the regent of the young Louis XV to create the first French national bank. He replaced specie with paper money and began issuing stock […]

Confessions of a Love Doctor

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Any number of inconvenient feelings and behaviours are now pathologised. You can be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, or as a gambling, shopping or internet addict. Yet, oddly, it seems quaint to us that in the ancient world you could have complained to your doctor of love sickness and been offered a variety of remedies. Frank Tallis

Pod Casts

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Whales are older than us, know the world better and have made better choices. All life began in the sea. Later, the common ancestors of humans and whales crawled out and began to stomp. And then, some fifty million years ago (about twelve to eighteen million years before hominids diverged from gibbons), whales the size […]

Behind the Tiara

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

The papacy is the oldest and most complex ecclesiastical and monarchical institution in Europe. Thus writing what Paul Collins describes as ‘the remarkable story of the last two centuries of the papacy’ is no easy task. It is also not necessary if your primary objective is to show how ‘the pope became the most influential […]

Get with the Programme

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Seven years ago, Yuval Noah Harari was a little-known lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in world, medieval and military history. Then, almost out of nowhere, he published Sapiens, which told the story of mankind’s entire biological and civilizational history in fewer than five hundred pages and became a colossal worldwide

Chapters & Verse

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Robin Robertson’s wonderful new book is hard to classify. It would be possible to review The Long Take as if it were a novel, even a thriller of sorts. It has a compelling narrative and a central character, known only as Walker, whose efforts to make sense of his life eventually merit the description ‘heroic’. […]

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Living on the Edge

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Alan Garner called his grandmother Mrs E Paminondas on account of the story she would tell schoolchildren during the air-raid drills about a boy called E Paminondas who ‘never did have the sense’ he was born with. Born in 1934, Garner has lived within walking distance of Alderley Edge, fifteen miles south of Manchester, all […]

To Be a Pilgrim

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Part-travel book, part-confessional, Guy Stagg’s debut has earned him a slot on Radio 4 and a Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award (2016). Philip Hoare describes it as ‘a timely antidote to our disconnected times’, which hits the nail on the head. Disconnection lies at the heart of Stagg’s book. It is what motivated him to […]

Spying through History

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Christopher Andrew is the doyen of the academic study of intelligence in the UK. He has some serious progenitors, among them Professor Sir Harry Hinsley, but Andrew has really made the field his own. Indeed, there are few academics working on intelligence in the UK who cannot trace the origins of their work back to […]

Hour of the She-Intelligencer

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

In September 1656 a London apothecary, Anthony Hinton, was arrested on suspicion of using his premises beside the Old Bailey as a clearing house for letters on their way to exiled Royalists on the Continent. Interrogated by Cromwell’s own intelligence officers, Hinton quickly confessed his guilt and gave up the names of a number of […]

From Riga with Love

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

As Gill Bennett relates in this superb book, a compelling mixture of history, anecdote and historiography, the Zinoviev Letter arrived in Britain in 1924 and has never really gone away. Three weeks before the general election of October that year, a decoded telegram reached the headquarters of Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in a villa in […]

When Greed Was Good

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

I must admit that at first I wondered why anyone would care enough about the subject to buy a heavy volume on the recent history of Barclays. The bank’s main distinction in the last decade was managing to survive the financial crisis without being bailed out by the government. This meant that Barclays didn’t spend time […]

Après le Déluge

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Adam Tooze, who is now a professor at Columbia University in New York, has published two brilliant books of 20th-century economic history. The first, The Wages of Destruction, a highly influential analysis of the economics of Nazi Germany, revealed in particular the impact of raw material shortages on the German war strategy and highlighted the […]

United by a Common Language?

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

On 27 June, an extremely rare event took place in central London. The Anglosphere officially took to the stage for a morning of self-aggrandisement. The occasion was the gathering of a panel at the think-tank Policy Exchange to discuss the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, essentially the bedrock of Western defence. Present was an imposing collection […]

On the Road Again

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Elizabeth I’s second parliament, which met early in 1563, embarked on a busy legislative programme. There was an act reinforcing the royal supremacy, another regulating the navy and the famous Statute of Artificers, which set out the regulative framework for the economy and what we would now call industrial relations. There were also statutes making […]

From Great Power to PLC

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

David Edgerton is a myth-buster extraordinaire. Whether explaining how new technologies did not at once supersede old ones (steamships were slow to overtake clippers) or demonstrating that Britain was more than an industrial match for Germany in 1940 and by no means caught up in a spiral of terminal decline, he overturns long-cherished assumptions about […]

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