"Elizabethans" by Andrew Marr

 Taking as his frame the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, Andrew Marr attempts to draw a portrait of the UK, using many little biographies of those whom he considers to be the most influential change-makers, changing the 'culture' of Britain.

He makes two important points.

• Many of the social changes of modern society were heralded in important legislative changes (though he doesn't really give the credit to the revolutionary Labour government of 1964 - 1970).
• The culture of a society depends on how (and even if) we work so that the huge workplaces of the 1950s in which massive factories produced a vast amount of manufactured goods had a major effect on how the people of the time thought, and that our post-industrial society must inevitably think differently. 

But his choice of biographies is inevitably biased. He includes many politicians and activists but very few scientists. He repeatedly talks about the massive societal changes wrought by the technological revolution and he includes Clive Sinclair and the inventor of the Raspberry Pi but not Tim Berners-Lee and nobody from the biological and medical sciences (save Francis Crick, in passing) so the incredible changes in health-care caused by the discovery of DNA seems to have passed him by. David Attenborough is there, of course, but what of the British Scientists who spotted the hole in the Ozone Layer and brought about a world-wdie reductions in CFCs, not to mention James Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis which heralded concerns about climate change. Surely the last seventy years have been dominated by science; perhaps Marr doesn't really understand science and that is why he fought shy of it.

There are a lot of entrepreneurs and businesspeople which is odd because he criticizes our obsession with 'The Market': “We have become an increasingly market-saturated society. Relentless consumers, we are schooled to see most of our human exchanges in terms of price and profit. We measure success by wealth.” (Ch 62)

But what about the arts? Pop Music gets a mention (Freddy Mercury, the Beatles, Victoria Beckham, Bob Geldoff) but literature doesn't (no mention of British-resident Nobel Laureates such as Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Golding or Abdulrazak Gurnah). It can't be that he thinks that literature doesn't influence modern culture or why would he mention the Eagle magazine and encourage us, in the last chapter, to read? Perhaps even more shockingly, he doesn't mention TV soap operas except in passing: the man who invented Coronation Street surely had a huge influence on how we think about issues.

It's well-written and interesting but I thought that it was limited, biased and flawed.

Selected quotes:

• “Textbook sociology suggests that we become less religious together, we become more accepting of sexual minorities together and so on, a swooping, twisting, thickening murmuration of attitudinal starlings moving through human history.” (Introduction)
• “ British journalism is, in short, a slapdash preparation for serious politics.” (Introduction)
• “There is nothing so irritating as looking back at previous generations in a spirit of moralizing self-righteousness.” (Ch 1)
• “If people can buy advancement, through better teaching and a vast web of social contacts, then a truly meritocratic society is impossible.” (Ch 13)
• “In Sweden it [Monty Python's Life of Brian] was advertised as the film that was so funny it had been banned in Norway.” (ch 15)
• “One had so many love affairs that it was delightfully said of her, ‘My dear, that woman knew every ceiling in England’.” (Ch 16)
• “The culture of the mid-twentieth century was also one of personal restraint, which didn't see individual sexual fulfilment as one of the great goods of life, and in which self-repression could be seen as admirable rather than simply sad.” (Ch 16)
• “Despite the Luftwaffe, in 1952 Britain turned out a quarter of all the world's manufacturing exports. It's around two per cent today.” (Ch 43)
• “Compared to France or Germany, or indeed the US, Britain had far more people at the top of the tree educated in Greek, literature or history rather than in engineering or the sciences.” (Ch 49)
• “In March 1976, she opened the first branch of the Body Shop ... Unhappily, given its name, it was sandwiched between two funeral parlours. Local people thought, and some hoped, that it was going to be Brighton first sex shop.” (Ch 54)
• “‘The market’ during the 1980s had become a quasi-religious metaphor for profit-driven capitalism.” (Ch 54)
• “The way to the top smelled only of sweat.” (Ch 61)
• “Why should those of us in work care about those on the breadline? Why should any of us in relatively safe and well-ordered Britain concern ourselves with refugees? The market, our dominant economic order, has no answer to these questions and no way of even beginning to think about them.” (Ch 62)

Also by Andrew Marr and reviewed in this blog:

• The Making of Modern Britain
• A History of the World

January 2022; 449 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Castlereagh" by John Bew

 A huge and exhaustive scholarly biography of one of Britain's most influential politicians never to become Prime Minister. 

Castlereagh was born into the protestant landed elite of Ireland; his father soon became Lord Londonderry. After a year in Cambridge, the young Viscount became an MP in the Irish parliament; his career there ended when he fostered the Act of Union which abolished it on which he transferred to the UK parliament. As a protege of Pitt he soon rose through the Tory ranks and eventually became Foreign Secretary during the last few years of the Napoleonic Wars and, crucially, at the Congress of Vienna that determined the shape of much of Europe from 1815 until the end of the First World War. Seven years after that triumph he suddenly (in about a fortnight, it seems) became weary, paranoid and he finally committed suicide by cutting his throat.

His reputation, which is probably unfair, then and still, is of a right-wing reactionary. Bew spends a lot of time and amasses what I feel is significant evidence to counter this. 

To be honest, the biography that would have had me riveted was that of Castlereagh's younger brother Charles who, as well as being an aide to Wellington in the Peninsula campaign and sending letters to his brother undermining his boss, was a bit of a ladies man for whom the Congress of Vienna was the perfect opportunity for, well, congress. His conquests included one of Wellington's nieces, a Russian princess and the former mistress of Metternich; he also paid multiple visits to the local brothels, Later, while investigating the infidelities of Princess Caroline so that the Prince Regent could get a divorce (set a thief to catch a thief?) he bought a fake Titian for £1200 and suffered the humiliation of having the small son of his listress tell him that the man they had met in the street "comes to Mama when you go away". The fact that one of his amours turned out to be a spy was almost incidental. Later, back in England, he was ejected from the bedroom of an 18-year-old heiress (he was 38) by her governess, though, to be fair, he did go on to marry her. So much more colourful than his monochrome brother.

As usual I have quibbles about the use of foreign expressions without translation. Castlereagh is more than once described as having "mauvaise honte": it is French for bashfulness. Chapter 15 is entitled "A Lavaterian Eye": this relates to Johann Lavater (1741 - 1801) a Swiss theologian and physiognomist who popularised the belief that a person's character could be read from their face. If I, as a Doctor of Philosophy, need Google to understand a book, then it seems safe to conclude that it is not written for the general reader. The biography of Robert Peel, a younger contemporary of Castlereagh, by Douglas Hurd that I read recently was rather better written. 

There seem to me to be a few mistakes. In Chapter 2.19 Bew says that Spenser Perceval was "gunned down in the chamber of the Commons" when all other sources say it was in the lobby. In Chapter 2.20 he describes the ruler of the Prussians as an Emperor rather than a King. In Chapter 3.10 Castlereagh wears a "Whig".

Selected quotes:

• "All the genius and capacity to be found in the world are produced by that class of men who must study or be starved" (Lord Camden; Ch 1.4)
• "Castlereagh also expressed the view that all revolutions ... had been caused by 'the obstinacy with which government in all countries has opposed itself to every alteration in  the constitution'." (Ch 1,6)
• "Jerusalem Whalley ... had once walked from Dublin to the Holy City to play Eton Fives against the ancient walls for a wager." (Ch 1.17)
• "the most poignant of regrets, the remorse for a crime committed in vain." (Ch 1.17; after Samuel Johnson)

When Castelereagh went to the continent at the end of 1813 to negotiate with the allies he travelled in HMS Erebus, whose own biography I read recently.

Authoritative but lengthy and rather heavy going.

August 2021; 587 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Robert Peel: A biography" by Douglas Hurd

 Hurd traces the life and career of the first 'Conservative' Prime Minister, a man whose career started in the days of Rotten Boroughs and a monarch (George IV) who played an active part in government to the beginnings of the party system with mostly-contested elections and manifestos and a monarch (Victoria) who was soon sidelined after her initial meddling. And on the way he helped ensure that Roman Catholics could become MPs, he created the first organised police force, he reformed a chaotic penal code, he sorted out the US-Canada border, he helped the Whigs bring in the Great Reform Act, he reformed working conditions for women and children in mines and factories, and, during the Irish famine, he repealed the Corm Laws which imposed tariffs on imported corn, keeping the price of bread artificially high. In order to get this last piece of legislation through he had to battle against his own right wing; he split his own party and carried the vote with the help of the Whigs and Radicals in opposition. He was therefore remembered in two ways: as a turncoat who twice (Catholic emancipation and the Corn Laws) abandoned earlier principles and the self-interested principles of his own party and as a man who put the well-being of the ordinary people, particularly those who had no vote, before the interests of faction.

Unfortunately, Hurd is writing in 2007. He assumes that the Tory hard right (the 'Ultras' as Peel called them, the 'sour right' as Hurd labels them) are a self-destructive lot who will never win power as mainstream Conservatives; in the aftermath of Brexit we now know that to be wrong. He also assumes that Peel's repeal of the Corn Laws, a unilateral abandonment of a key tariff, was the first step in an unstoppable journey towards globalisation and free trade. In the aftermath of Brexit this is another conclusion that now looks unsupportable.

Some great moments:

• "The Conservative Party will always include within its ranks those who in Peel's time were called the Ultras - men, and now women too, who instinctively resist change and pine for a golden age that never was." (Introduction)
• "If a man was clever and not ashamed of it, then it was thought almost certain that he was using his cleverness for manoeuvres and deceits from which decent men should recoil." (Ch 7)
• "Croker though Canning should be Prime Minister, but believed 'he could hardly take tea without a stratagem'." (Ch 7)
• "The second and smaller group of Ultras are the sour Right. There is nothing warm or nostalgic about their politics. Many of them are intelligent and sincere; but there appeal is to the prejudices and cruelty which are part of human nature." (Ch 7)
• "Politicians are often in a state of outrage. They find it a convenient condition for a day or two. They usually recover quickly and get on with the other pleasures of life." (Ch 9)

A well-written and eminently readable biography of a politician whose multiple achievements deserve to be better known.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

July 2021; 397 pages