Jonathan Sumption The reputation of Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916, has never recovered from the pasting he received in Lloyd George’s war memoirs. Lloyd George thought that his deliberate ambiguity about Britain’s intentions led us into the first world war. If you read just one book of history this Christmas,
Rose Tremain’s 15th novel begins with a favoured schmaltzy image of high Victoriana: it is a night (if not dark and stormy, then certainly dark and wet) in the year 1850, and a baby has been left at the gates of Victoria Park. Then we have an uncanny detail: the baby is sniffed out by
One of Adrian Tinniswood’s recent books, The Long Weekend, is a portrait of country house life in the interwar years. Hedonistic, carefree, fuelled by an army of servants, such an existence now seems a distant dream. In this companion volume he takes the story further, looking at what happened to the country house after 1945.
This is the best of times to be writing history, since so much of what has been taken for granted, especially in the West, is being revised. Assumptions about the past that we accepted as fact, and events we once looked upon with pride, are now being questioned. A dark cloud hovers over the Benin
It’s almost a shock to admit it, but this year’s gift books aren’t bad at all. It’s even possible that, should you be given one of these for Christmas by the aunt who hates you or the brother who merely despises you, you might actually enjoy it — more than the acrylic scarf or the
