"Goodbye to Berlin" by Christopher Isherwood

This isn't a novel, nor is it a series of short stories; it isn't a diary and it is clearly fiction so it isn't a memoir. It is a somewhat ramshackle portmanteau of vignettes designed to show Berlin between 1930 and 1933. 

In the second paragraph, the author states his ostensible purpose: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed." (A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930) As this conceit suggests, this book contains a lot of quite wonderful descriptions:

• "Yesterday morning I saw a roe being chased by a Borzoi dog, right across the fields ... the roe went bucketing over the earth with wild rigid jerks, like a grand piano bewitched." (On Reugen Island)
• "The cheap jewellery of the Kurhaus lights reflected in the black water." (On Reugen Island)
• "They all thronged around us for a moment in the little circle of light from the panting bus, their lit faces ghastly like ghosts against the black stems of the pines." (The Nowaks)

But 'the camera' isn't as passive as the author pretends. It's not just that it records conversations (and Isherwood has a delightful ear for dialogue, many of the characters are defined largely by the way they talk). Isherwood is author, and narrator, and the lead character, making this an early example of autofiction. I wonder whether this conflating of author and protagonist might have been suggested by the interaction of subject and object in quantum physics, which was being discussed in the mid to late 1920s.

Nevertheless, the 'camera' conceit enables the narrator to be non-judgemental. He is remarkably tolerant of the wide variety of people he encounters, and he stays scrupulously neutral for most of the book (not perhaps in the final section) despite the period covered by the book being a time of tremendous social and political upheaval which culminated in the rise of the Nazi party. Some of my fellow book club readers felt that such neutrality meant that Isherwood was condoning Nazism but it seemed to me that this was not the case. He frequently makes observations, almost in passing, which record Nazi thuggery. He describes a Nazi parade and the impression it makes on him thus: “In a few days, I thought, we shall have forfeited all kinship with ninety-nine per cent of the population of the world, with the men and women who earn their living, who insure their lives, who are anxious about the future of their children. Perhaps in the Middle Ages people felt like this, when they believed themselves to have sold their souls to the Devil. It was a curious, exhilarating, not unpleasant sensation: but, at the same time, I felt slightly scared. Yes, I said to myself, I’ve done it, now. I am lost.” (Sally Bowles) Forfeiting kinship, selling souls to the devil, and being lost seem to me to be condemning the Nazis. The final section of the book is hard-hitting. But most importantly, he was writing at a time when many of the characters he describes, such as the promiscuous Sally and Otto the rent boy, would have been vilified by the English society in which his readers lived and his profession of neutrality was perhaps the only way, or so he might have believed at the time, for these characters to be accorded respect.

The Guardian said: "Reading this novel is much like overhearing anecdotes in a crowded bar while history knocks impatiently on the window." George Orwell called it "brilliant sketches of a society in decay."

Much of the book explores the difference between what appears to be and the reality beneath (not something that a camera can do). The first paragraph describes Berlin: "From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops, where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scroll-work and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class." (A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930) This is a town of faded grandeur. It is a city that had become a byword for decadent night-life, both straight and gay (the author is homosexual) and all the possibilities of the rainbow. But this was a background of serious economic weakness following Germany's defeat in the First World War and the subsequent political turmoil. This first paragraph seems to encapsulate the idea of faded grandeur, and the idea that the city was rotten behind its impressive frontage.

This theme of superficiality versus reality is found throughout the book. For example, in the first section we are introduced to Christopher's landlady Fraulein Schroder, who pretends that her lodgers are guests and that she was, and is, better than she appears. She insists that she has “got the money to be independent” but she spends her days cleaning and gossiping and empties chamber pots. She talks about past lodgers including “a Freiherr [Baron] once, and a Rittmeister [a captain in the cavalry] and a Professor”, and the son of a surgeon. Now she has “Herr Issyvoo”, a barman, a lady who yodels in music-halls, and a prostitute. Her best friend Fraulein Mayr is another such who talks about the days when she was “a slip of a girl”; now “the muscles of Frl Mayer’s nude fleshy arms ripple unappetizingly.” Outside the lodgings, Christopher gives private tuition in the district in which they rich live; this provides another contrast between the dream and the reality: "Most of the richest Berlin families inhabit the Grunewald. It is difficult to understand why. ... Few of them can afford large gardens, for the ground is fabulously dear: their only view is of their neighbour's backyard, each one protected by a wire fence and a savage dog. Terror of burglary and revolution has reduced these miserable people to a state of siege. They have neither privacy nor sunshine. The district is really a millionaire's slum." (A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930)

In the second section we are introduced to the marvellously over-the-top Sally Bowles, and again we see the contrast between hope and truth: her clothes Sally’s clothes “produced a kind of theatrically chaste effect, like a nun in a grand opera”; Sally paints her fingernails bright green which only draws attention to her dirty fingers. Sally is a wannabe actress and sings in night-clubs, she is promiscuous with a succession of boyfriends, all of whom she exploits but she is a hopeless gold-digger, a poor lover abandons her for richer pickings, a rich man promises to take her for a tour of Europe but departs alone, a sixteen-year-old con artist swindles her out of some savings.

The third and fourth sections focus on Otto, a poor young boy who goes 'gay for pay'. We first meet him as the 'companion' of Peter in a seaside resort; he torments Peter by repeatedly going dancing with girls and later dumps him. We rediscover Otto in his poverty-stricken working-class family when Christopher, down on his luck, lodges with them, sharing Otto's room. The family is one of contrasts: the father a communist, the elder son a Nazi who earns a few pennies where he can, Otto, who sleeps in and doesn't work, until he returns home with twenty mark notes, having done something his mother knows is shameful. In some ways Otto is a male version of Sally.

Apparently, Otto was in real life Walter Wolff, a young man with whom Isherwood had a sexual relationship.

In the fifth section we meet the Landauers, a rich Jewish family who own a posh department store. The young girl, Natalia, who, when perplexed, says “Then I’m sorry. I can’t help you.” (whatever that means) is a perfect innocent in contrast with Sally. It’s never quite clear what she means by this (her English is imperfect) but this doesn’t seem to matter. The father of the family wanted to be an academic, Bernhard's ambition was to be a sculptor, but they both spend their lives working for the family firm: it doesn't really matter if you are rich or poor, your dreams are undermined by economic reality.

The final section, set in the winter of 1932 - 1933, is one of bleak despair ... and scarily appropriate to today.

• "Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold ... I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railways, in the iron work of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)
• "People like Bobby are their jobs - take the job away and they partially cease to exist." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)
• "Everybody stole. Everybody sold what they had to sell - themselves included." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)
• "Most of them, if they cannot get work, will take to crime. After all, people cannot be ordered to starve." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)
• "You see those two buildings? One is the engineering-works, the other is the prison. For the boys of this district there used to be two alternatives ... But now the works are bankrupt. Next week they will close down." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)

The characterisations are brilliant. The dialogue, often at cross-purposes, adds tension and complexity and depth to the characters. And the descriptions are stupendous. This is a writer at the top of his form.

But I've said it before in this blog and I will repeat it here: I hate it when author's use untranslated foreign language. Is every reader supposed to know German? Or is the author just showing off? Why doesn't an editor at least add a footnote translating the words? I either have to get out a dictionary or use Google Translate or just skip that bit and wonder whether it was important. All of these actions disrupt the free flow of the reading process and make me dislike the book a little tiny bit; dislikes which can accumulate (as they did, for example, with Trilby by George du Maurier).

Selected quotes:

• "Where, in another ten years, shall I be myself? Certainly not here. How many seas and frontiers shall I have to cross to reach that distant day; how far shall I have to travel, on foot, on horseback, by car, push-bike, aeroplane, steamer, train, life, moving-staircase, and tram? How much money shall I need for that enormous journey? How much food must I gradually, wearily consume on my way? How many pairs of shoes shall I wear out? How many thousands of cigarettes shall I smoke? How many cups of tea shall I drink and how many glasses of beer? What an awful tasteless prospect! And yet - to have to die ... A sudden pang of apprehension grips my bowels." (A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930)
• “Most rich people, once they have decided to trust you, can be imposed upon to almost any extent.” (A Berlin Diary)
• "The old man had a nervous tic and kept shaking his head all the time, as if saying to Life: No. No. No." (The Nowaks)
• "All day long he made his rounds of the tenements in the district, collecting fifty pfennigs here, a mark there, scratching up his precarious livelihood, like a hen, from this apparently barren soil." (The Nowaks)
• "If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be an omnibus." (A Berlin Diary)

The Sally Bowles section of this book formed the basis for the brilliant must-see musical Cabaret.

September 2022; 256 pages

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

"The end" by Ian Kershaw

This is the story of the last 10 months of Nazi Germany, starting with the failure of the Stauffenberg plot to  assassinate Hitler and overthrow the government. Kershaw seeks to understand why Nazi Germany  unlike almost any other regime, should have fought to the bitter end when it was plain to most outsiders that the Reich was doomed. By this time the Allies had established themselves in Normandy and the Russians were pushing the Eastern front back. Mussolini had been deposed and Rome had fallen. The devastating bomb raids on German cities were destroying civilian morale; the Luftwaffe could offer no significant resistance. The German troops were clearly outnumbered and, despite the incredible efforts of armaments minister Speer, were also massively outgunned. Yet the Germans fought on. Roughly as many Germans died in the last ten months as in the four years previously.

The reasons Kershaw advances are several. He dismisses the idea that it was the Allies unprecedented requirement for unconditional surrender that led to the bitter resistance: many Germans did in fact try to negotiate with the Western allies. However, this uncompromising stance may have hardened Hitler against any possibility of capitulation.

Other possibilities include the fear of the Russians, bolstered by the success of the Nazi propaganda campaign to demonise the Bolsheviks and helped by the Russian predilection (to some extent in revenge for what the Nazis had earlier done to them) for raping, looting, killing and generally terrorising the civilian population of the towns they occupied (only one in three German soldiers captured by the Soviet forces made it back to Germany after the war). Certainly, most of the Reich leadership's discussions around surrender involved the vain hope that they might be able to surrender to the Western Allies and then join forces with them to fight the Russians. This hope continued after Hitler's suicide.

Kerhsaw also considers the possibility that Germans are, simply, obedient to authority. He does not put it as crudely as this but he talks about the cultures of loyalty in both the army and the efficient civil service bureaucracy.

He also points out that many people were simply terrorised into continuing to fight. People who tried to surrender were shot or hanged, sometimes only minutes before the Nazi executioners themselves fled from the approaching enemy forces. He suggests that most of the population wanted to capitulate but that the few who wanted to fight on, for whom their past crimes meant that they had no future after the warm, were those with the power of life and death.

The main reason that Germany fought to the end seems to be because Adolf Hitler created a government that could not disobey him. He was head of government, head of state, commander in chief and head of the Party. He governed for years without a cabinet. When he made a new appointment he would ensure that whoever was appointed had their powers balanced by someone else; blurred responsibilities were endemic. In the end everyone had to check with Adolf. And the people in his inner circle were mutually antagonistic. The only person to whom they were all loyal was himself. In the bunker the day after Hitler's suicide, Goebbels killed himself, his wife and his six children. Goering and Himmler both were dismissed in the final week for attempting to usurp Hitler but both did it by mistake. Speer, who recognised early that the war was lost and attempted to undermine Hitler's scorched earth policies so that the industrialists he worked with would have something to begin again with after defeat, made an incredibly risky flight back to Berlin in the final week to say goodbye. Kesselring refused to surrender Italy until Hitler had died (although hjis second in command did surrender on his behalf).

The proof is that the final surrender came just one week after Hitler's death (and would have come earlier had Eisenhower agreed to any of the requests that Hitler's successor Donitz put to him).

There are haunting images of pointlessness. There are the starving and pathetic concentration camp prisoners, too weak for forced labour,  who are force-marched from one camp to another for no obvious reason. There are the efficient bureaucrats in the German civil service who are still shuffling paper as Berlin is surrounded. There is the Donitz regime who discuss the new Reich flag in the two weeks after unconditional surrender and before they are imprisoned by the Allies.

One criticism I would make is that there are two few maps. Towards the end there were many references to Berchtesgaden where the Germans might have made a last stand. It was clearly an important place. It isn't on any provided map; I had to find it using Google.

There are moments when this book is gripping. There is also much scholarship here and this sometimes makes the book drag. But overall this is a fascinating read.

April 2013; 400 pages

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

More books about war in this blog can be found on this page.

"The Three Emperors" by Miranda Carter

George V looked so like
 Tsar Nicholas II of Russia
that they were
sometimes confused.

This book considers the three cousins who became Nicholas II tsar of Russia, George V, King and Emperor, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. All three had similar childhoods, isolated from normal people (although George, as second son, served in the Navy for ten years and so at least met sailors) and brought up to believe that they were special. They were clearly lonely. Able to understand only royalty, their family formed a sort of pan-Europe business with the belief that family loyalties would trump national interests and ensure peace.

But their world was changing. Each empire needed to grow and there were inevitable tensions as their colonists and merchants clashed in various parts of the world. More particularly, the industrial revolution had created a working class that increasingly demanded a share in power. With their educations, isolated by privilege, they were unable to understand and were all fundamentally reactionary.

At least George was powerless. The British constitution ensured that he understood that he had to work with parliament and obey 'his' prime minister. Nicholas and Wilhelm were autocrats. They believed in personal rule (Nicholas was the only man in Russia who could authorise divorces and name changes) and attempted to enforce their will on 'their' people.

Not only was it fundamentally absurd that a single person could possibly rule complex modernising countries such as Germany and Russia but their isolation from the governed both because of the layers of courtiers through whom all information was filtered and distorted and because of the conceptual gaps between emperor and plebeian meant that autocracy was doomed.

In the end they didn't want the first world war. The Russian defeat by the Japanese in 1905 had sparked revolution and the Russian ministers were well aware that another war risked revolution (although Nicholas seems not to have had any idea that he could possibly be deposed). Wilhelm, for all his aggressive posturing, was frightened of war and tried at the last minute to back out of it as he had done several times before. But the Austrian's aggressive response to the Serbians abject apologies after the assassination at Sarajevo tipped the balance. War was inevitable. The colonial clashes and the militarisation of German society (which had been encouraged by Wilhelm) had led to several crises in the previous few years in which last-minute diplomacy had just averted war. At some point the tipping point would be reached.

The war destroyed the idea of empire. Although George V clung on the Tsar had abdicated and been assassinated before the armistice. Kaiser Bill abdicated on armistice day as did the Emperor of Austria-Hungary. Also in 1917 the 'tsar' of Bulgaria and the king of Greece both abdicated. The last Ottoman Sultan was deposed in 1922.

A beautifully written book about a fascinating period in history.

June 2011; 500 pages

"Faustus" by Leo Ruickbie

In this readable yet authoritative text Ruickbie tries to reconstruct the life of Faustus (who isn't actually called Faustus) from the seven or so contemporary references that actually seem reasonably straightforward and therefore genuine. Most of them say little more than 'I saw Faustus' and not one mentions the pact with the devil. Mephistopheles himself is a new demon first mentioned in the Faust legend and the derivation of the name

As well as eking out the story (and from time to time mentioned the legend) Ruickbie details the sometimes fascinating background of a Holy Roman Empire trapped between the powers of France and the Ottomans, eternally feuding with itself about both who is going to be the next Emperor, whether the Emperor or the Pope should be top dog, and the nascent stirrings of Lutherism, Protestantism and the Reformation.

Quite heavy going but sometimes a fantastic read.

January 2011; 226 pages

"Alexander the Great" by Robin Lane Fox

This is, apparently, the book that inspired Oliver Stone to make the biopic. It was first published in 1973. I found it slightly heavy going.

Interesting things

• It starts with the drama of the assassination of Phillip of Macedon; was it organised by Olympias, the wife from whom he had separated or by her son Alexander, his heir but soon to be supplanted by a new born baby to Phillip’s new wife?
• We learn how Alexander tamed Bucephalos, the horse whose head looked like that of an ox, who would be Alexander’s faithful mount almost to the end of the Earth.
• We discover that the Macedonian court, whilst on the fringes of civilised Greek society, attracted the great people of the day: it was probably in Macedonia that Euripides composed his Bacchae.
• Aristotle was Alexander’s tutor and also probably taught Hephaistion, the fellow pupil with whom Alexander had a homosexual relationship which lasted until Hephaistion, now a general, died.
• “’Sex and sleep’, Alexander is said to have remarked, ‘alone make me conscious that I am mortal.’” (p57). Hmm. Sex is what makes feel divine.
• Cleopatra was the daughter of Olympias who was Alexander’s mother. Does this make Cleopatra his sister or his half/step sister? (91)
• The Suez canal was d]created by the Pharaohs (96)
• Alexander followed the Royal Road into Persia, following the route previously written about by Xenophon (103)
• Persians called their gorgeous gardens paradeisoi (103)
• The Babylonians were compliers, the Greeks analysers: the Babylonians recorded the heavens for nearly 2,000 years but it was only after 330 BC and Alexander’s conquest that the Greeks began to develop a theory of the heavens and calculate a more accurate value for the year (248)
• Alexarchus, son of Antipater, Alexander’s regent in Macedonia, followed a faith healer called Menecrates. Alexarchus called himself the Sun and after Alexander died founded a religious community on Mount Athos (446)
• In Babylon, if an astrologer foretold the death of the king, the king chose a substitute who would reign for 100 days. If the king died in the meantime the substitute, even if he was a gardener, would become king (p459)
• Ice-cold water from the river Styx was believed to be poison although the modern Mavroneri falls suggest this is not so (463)
• Alexander’s coffin was carried in a chariot which resembled “the ritual chariot of the god Mithras” (p478)
• The Greeks were responsible for much technological invention when they came to India. “A simple cell for electroplating silver on to copper has been found in Parthian Babylonia and it is natural to credit its invention to a Greek.” (p491)

"Millennium" by Tom Holland

I came to this book with great anticipation having read "Rubicon" (about the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire) and "Persian Fire" (about the wars between the Greeks and the Persians) by the same author. The latter of these was particularly brilliant, engrossing and informative.

I suppose that with such high Expectations "Millennium" was bound to disappoint. It rambled. Having started with the humbling of Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV by Pope Gregory at Canossa, which Holland believed to have been a turning-point in the fortunes of Europe, it then took over 350 pages to get back to it. I was never quite certain whether this was his theme or whether it was the concept that Europe was conditioned by the belief that the Millennium would see the appearance of the Anti-Christ (even more than 50 years afterwards) or whether everything was leading up to the Crusades (he ends with the massacre when the Crusaders take Jerusalem).

Nevertheless, "Millennium" has loads to enjoy. Like a Hollywood epic it has a cast of thousands, including the pope, Octavian, elected at 16,  notorious for promiscuity who installed a brothel in his palace and died "from a stroke, the result of overly strenuous grapplings with a married woman" (p69, well it had to be!). We also discover that King Harold (a Saxon with a Viking name) was much less entitled to the throne of England than either Harald Hardrada or William the Conqueror and that Hardrada, who was killed at the battle of Stamford Bridge, made a fortune in Constantinople, married the daughter of the Prince of Kiev and then became King of Norway. The town of Verdun, meanwhile, was famous for gelding Wends and then selling them as slaves to the Saracens of Spain They specialised in carzimasia who were eunuchs deprived of their penises as well as their testicles; the considerable medical risks causing wastage which "served only to increase the survivors' value" (p102). Ethelred the Unready became king aged 10 when his half-brother was assassinated, probably at the command of his mother. England was a united, stable, prosperous kingdom (apart from the Viking raids) whereas France was ruled by warlords who set up castles for their own defence and to terrorise and rule the peasantry; at this time the peasants declined from being fairly independent farmers to being robbed and taxed until they were forced to sell themselves into serfdom.

So actually it was a cracking read but still not as good as "Persian Fire".

September 2009, 413 pages

"Mutual Aid" by Peter Kropotkin

Prince Pyotr Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist ("The Anarchist Prince") whose studies of zoology led him to the belief that cooperation between individuals is at least as important a factor in evolution as cooperation. He then extended this concept to a consideration of history and society: he endeavoured to show that, if left to themselves, individuals will cooperate and that therefore a society free of laws is possible (hence the anarchism). Mutual Aid is his principal scientific offering to back up these ideas. It was written in England in the 1890s.

The discipline of sociobiology has now superseded Kropotkin's work. It is now clear that altruism and cooperation have evolutionary advantages; it depends on your ecological niche. Certainly it would be surprising if social animals such as humans did not have some instinctive programming towards cooperation within their family, group or tribe. It seems to be a case of in-group/ out-group: soldiers will sacrifice themselves for their comrades whilst doing their utmost to kill their enemies. Mutual Aid is interesting in the extensive evidence that it chronicles for co-operation and for the its interpretation of the history of mediaeval guilds but it is not astonishing to most people.

Points of interest:

• In bees "both periods of scarcity and periods of an unusually rich supply of food lead to an increase of the robbing class." p19 This is an interesting fact which, if true, needs explanation.
• His interpretation of "savage" and "barbarian" history seems to fail to acknowledge the necessary difference between hunter-gatherers and agriculturists. His village is essentially a tribe with land attached. p80
• He sees the dark ages as a time when individual communities developed democratic institutions which were only later destroyed by the nation building of post-mediaeval war-lords. p103 and p105
• Markets enjoy special and necessary protection from feuds: trading necessitates trust. He shows that, in history, markets enjoyed legal immunities. p118
• He claims that workers only worked 48 hours per week (or 8 hours per day; Sunday off) in the middle ages. p121
• "At the beginning of the eleventh century the towns of Europe were small clusters of miserable huts .... Three hundred and fifty years later .... the land was dotted with rich cities ..." p128
• He describes the Eiffel Tower as "a meaningless scaffold" p130
• He believes that modern society has abdicated responsibility for justice to policemen and for looking after other people to taxes; quite a modern Tory point of view! p140
• "To speak of the natural death of the village communities in virtue of economical laws is as grim a joke as to speak of the natural death of soldiers slaughtered on a battlefield" p144
• "Henry the Eighth not only ruined the organisation of the guilds but also but also confiscated their properties, with even less excuse and manners ... than he had produced for confiscating the estates of the monasteries. Edward the Sixth completed his work." p160. A historical fact of which I was unaware.

I enjoyed this book much more than I thought I would and there were some interesting insights. However, whilst it might have been revolutionary at the time it has rather been superseded by the principles of sociobiology as articulated by eg Stephen Pinker.

"The Perfect King" by Ian Mortimer

This is a biography of Edward III. It is most noticeable for the astounding suggestion that Edward II was not murdered after his assassination (by a red hot poker inserted into his anus) but was taken to Italy and kept there for many years until his death. Edward III was told that his father had died (after being deposed and held captive), accepted the story, told it to others, accepted that he was true king (initially a puppet of his mother, Isabella, and her lover Roger Mortimer) and did not find out until after Edward III had in turn deposed Mortimer.

The book is well written. It begins with the breathtaking coup against Mortimer in which some bold knights entered Nottingham Castle through a secret passage and kidnapped Mortimer. One cannot keep up at this sort of romantic level but there is loads of excitement in Edward's life: he won battles in France and Scotland against all the odds using the then revolutionary tactics of projectile warfare (Britain had longbowmen); there were jousts and tournaments and chivalric knights battling alone against many opponents and then escaping and swimming the moat; there were intrigues and politics and important new laws; and Edward invented the Order of the Garter. This is a film script waiting to happen.

Mortimer starts with Edward's childhood, pointing out that "of all the stages in the life of a resourceful and imaginative individual, childhood is the most important and the most difficult to understand." Even for a king. Edward's childhood was in particular conditioned by the deposition and imprisonment of his close and affectionate father by his mother and Roger Mortimer, a man (and more or less a step-dad) whom Edward must have admired for his courage and administrative and political skills but must also have feared and hated for keeping him, Edward, a subservient puppet.

Edward, born in November 1312, was brought up first in the manor house at Bisham which had belonged to the Knights Templars until their 1312 dissolution and then taken to Wallingford Castle which had been the home of his father's 'friend' Piers Gaveston.

In January 1324 Mortimer persuaded parliament to depose Edward II. Edward III refused the throne until Edward II had abdicated (which he did reluctantly having been convinced that he could abdicate in favour of his son or he could let Mortimer seize the throne). For the next few years Edward III was a puppet king, even after the announcement that his father was dead. Mortimer fought with the Earl of Lancaster (one of Edward II'scousins) until the Earl capitulated "near Bedford" (I cannot find a clearer reference than the Annales Paulini) in 1328. Soon after, in 1330, the Earl Of Kent (a brother of Edward II) discovered (some say he was set up) that Edward II was still alive and conceived of a plot to spring him from Corfe Castle; this being discovered, Mortimer demanded that Kent be executed for treason and Edward III was obliged to confirm this sentence although the soldiers all refused to carry out the sentence and they had to find a latrine cleaner, himself sentenced to death, to behead the Earl in exchange for a pardon.

This was March. By October the coup against Mortimer had been staged; he was taken to the Tower and, because he had escaped there in 1323, he was walled in. He was hanged at Tyburn.

By 1332 Edward was sponsoring Edward Balliol who was trying to regain his father's Scottish crown. At Dopplin Moor, Balliol's army was well out-numbered by that of Donald Earl of Mar but the English archers destroyed the force of the Scottish cavalry, for the first time showing the destructive power of longbows. In this campaign a Scottish pirate called John Crabb who was harassing English ships off Berwick was captured by Edward's Sir Walter Manny; he became Edward's expert on naval warfare. Still later, Edward Balliol was surprised at Annan and escaped by riding bareback in his nightshirt to Carlisle. Edward also developed cannon. Already, in 1327, when Edward was on campaign in Scotland with Roger Mortimer, the army had used what they called 'crakkis of wer' which were probably bronze, vase-shaped cannon which shot arrows more than 1km. Edward manufactured both cannon and gunpowder at the Tower of London. Edward finally led his men into battle against the Scots at Halidon Hill outside Berwick where the English annihilated the Scots in a fight to the death.

Religious debates were important in Edward's time. Wycliffe attended his court and William of Ockham was around.

In March 1337, Edward created his son Duke of Cornwall. This was England's first Duke. Ian Mortimer argues that the boy could not become Prince of Wales until Edward II (who had not abdicated that title) was truly dead; this is ancillary evidence to the theory that Edward II survived (on 6 September 1338 Edward met 'William le Galeys' (William the Welshman) who Mortimer believes was his father). Edward also created six Earls choosing mostly men who had helped him overthrow Mortimer: Montagu (Salisbury), Henry of Grosmont (Derby), William Bohun (Northmapton), Hugh Audley (Gloucester), William Clinton (Huntingdon) and Robert Ufford (Suffolk).

There is a suggestion that Edmund, Edward's seventh child, was illegitimate. He was born at least 16 days pre term if Edward conceived him. He was born at King's Langley (which had been Edward II's favourite manor); he was belatedly made an earl at an age much later than his brothers; he was not mentioned in his father's will.

Edward supported John de Montfort in his claim for the Duchy of Brittany against his half-niece Jean who had married the French king's nephew Charles de Blois.

The Prince of Wales crest of 3 Ostrich feathers originally belonged to the blind King John of Bohemia who had commanded the French vanguard at the battle of Crecy (yes, despite being blind) and, realising the battle was lost, had ridden into battle and died with his knights holding his bridle. When Edward II met the Black Prince after the battle the Prince handed his father the ostrich plumes with the words Ich Dien (I serve). The archery-led English victory at Crecy annihilated the French, killing eleven potentates and many thousands of Frenchmen for an English loss of 300 men. Crecy was the victory of dirty little commoners with longbows against aristocratic knights; it led to the death of feudal society. The power Edward had now led to the capture of Calais (despite King Phillip of France bringing an army to Sangatte; he retreated before fighting). During the siege in 1348 Edward was told that King David II of Scotland had been captured after the battle of Neville's Cross in Durham. King David lived in various places during his long captivity (11 years) including Odiham Castle which had been built by King John's, probably because it was half way between Windsor and Winchester.

William of Wykeham directed the rebuilding of the royal apartments in Windsor Castle in 1358. Wykeham also worked on Sheen Palace in 1358. Edward also built Eltham Palace in 1350, Henley in 1351 and, in 1353, a manor house at Rotherhithe where he spent £1,064. All this was during the aftermath of the Black Death. Wars, plague; England must have had a fundamentally very sound economy!

At the Battle of Poitiers, in 1356, the Black Prince commanded an outnumbered army which again destroyed a French army, this time capturing the King of France (by now John). So Edward had two kings in captivity at the same time, surely an unequalled feat. The French King John was lodged in the Savoy Palace.

Edward started JPs and Quarter Sessions. This legislation which he enacted in 1361 set up a system which is still going today more than 600 years later.

Edward's son Lionel married the daughter of Galeazzo Visconti, Lord of Milan; Petrarch attended the wedding. Chaucer's father was Edward's butler; Chaucer got captured on one of Edward's French campaigns and Edward contributed to the ransom. Langland wrote in Edward's time. It was during Edward's days that English became used in parliament and a law required court proceedings to be in English; this was the moment that English became the dominant language of England as attested by the birth of English literature at this time.

Edward held many (almost annual) parliaments and became the first monarch to regularly grant parliamentary requests; his legislative programme was therefore mainly shaped by the people. In return for this he received generous taxes to prosecute his wars and build his palaces. The first speaker (who became quite critical of Edward) was the steward of the Earl of March (Roger Mortimer's great-grandson!) called Peter de la Mare.

Finally, Ian Mortimer believes that the majority of English people of English ethnicity will have Edward III in their family tree! He might have been my ancestor!

A brilliant book.

August 2009, 402 pages

"The Ascent of Money" by Niall Ferguson

This book is subtitled A Financial History of the World and tells the story of finance from Mesopotamian days to the 2007 credit crunch. It accompanies a Channel Four TV series, traces of which can be seen in the prose (there are frequent references to places which are clearly camera shots: the East End of Glasgow, Memphis, and Stowe House for example).

It is not organised as history but in themes (presumably the programmes). Thus: one chapter considers government bonds, one traces the history of shares, one considers insurance and one property. There is a considerable emphasis on the recent turmoil on the financial markets; as a history it has a definite bias to the more recent. There are many interesting moments; I was, for example, charmed by the anti-capitalist antecedents of Monopoly. But there are also occasions when I wanted to know more, more, more: he mentions the Dutch Tulip bubble and the South Sea bubble both of which I know something about but I wanted more; he tantalisingly mentions (twice) the collapse of Overend Gurney but he never tells us what happened. Not only this but I was left floundering by his explanations of what a hedge fund is; and of put,call and swap options.

All in all this was an interesting book but not a fascinating one and it left me frustrated with a lot of unanswered questions.

July 2009, 362 pages

"Edward I: A great and terrible king" by Marc Morris

This is a biography written about a fascinating king whose life was full of chivalry and derring do: this is a swashbuckler of a biography. I absolutely loved this book. It is exactly my sort of history: kings, battles and politics. But there were also loads of interesting snippets about the middle ages and items that raised questions about what happens nowadays. Here are many snippets I adored:

Edward's father was Henry III, son of King John. Henry was a pretty feeble king, not very good at warfare and prone to policy reversals that veered from wimpishness to ferocity: the classic poor leader. One of the few good things about Henry was his reverence for Edward the Confessor, after whom he named his son (Edward was the first king to be given a Saxon name since the Conquest - there had been two Guillaumes, three Henris, a Ricard and a Jean). This reverence also led Henry to rebuild Westminster Abbey in the gothic form with which we are now familiar.

Edward's mother was Eleanor of Provence whose maternal uncle, Peter of Savoy, came to England to advise her. Henry gave Peter a house on the Strand in London (p7) which later became Savoy House and is now the Savoy Hotel and Theatre.

The later part of Henry's reign, whilst Edward was an active teenage prince, was taken with the struggle against Simon de Montfort. This was the 'Baron's War', a civil war in which de Montfort fought for the administrative reforms known as the Provisions of Oxford (1258). De Montfort won the Battle of Lewes (1264) against a numerically superior royalist force but was the defeated and killed at the Battle of Evesham (1265). In the intervening year, de Montfort ruled England at the head of triumvirate who 'advised' the king; he also summoned a parliament. This was not the first parliament (Henry had already been summoning parliaments which he expected would agree to new taxes but didn't). What made de Montfort's parliament a first was that he asked every county and selected boroughs to elect two representatives each and send them to Westminster. This was therefore the first elected representative parliament. His intention was clearly to pack it with his men because his support was strong among the towns but weak amongst the aristocracy.

Simon de Montfort's son, Guy, later took revenge for the death (and mutilation) of his father by assassinating Henry of Altmain, his cousin, in the church of St Silvester, in Viterbo near Rome (p106). For this act of wickedness he was placed in the seventh circle of Hell by Dante in the Inferno.

Hugh Bigod was the younger brother of Roger Bigod, a leading member of the council of fifteen set up by the provisions of Oxford. His father had been one of the 25 "sureties" of the Magna Carta. In 1258, Hugh was sent out on a "countrywide judicial tour to correct all manner of wrongdoings" (p41). He became Chief Justiciar of England between 1258 and 1260 and was succeeded by Hugh Le Despencer.

It was during Henry III's reign that the legends about Robin Hood began. When Henry wanted money he found himself unable to raise it via loans or taxes so he encouraged his officers (eg the sheriffs) to raise money via fines. The story about young Robert of Locksley, Earl of Huntingdon, being deprived of his inheritance may reflect the punitive measures adopted by Henry III after the Battle of Evesham: rebels were deprived of their lands and known as the Disinherited. "One group laid waste to the counties of East Anglia; others began to create similar havoc in the Midlands and in Hampshire." (p76) The Hampshire leader, Adam Gurdon, was based in Alton Woods. Prince Edward, heir to the throne, personally defeated Adam but was "so impressed with the skill of his adversary that he allowed him generous terms of surrender" (p76). Robin Hoodlike indeed!

When Edward decided to go on crusade he summoned a special parliament to Northampton, presumably "because of its spectacular Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built by a knight of the First Crusade [Simon de Senlis] in imitation of the original he had seen in Jerusalem" (p83).

When Edward's queen (Eleanor, just like his mother, but she was Eleanor of Provence whilst he married Eleanor of Castille) dies Edward erected an Eleanor Cross at every place the funeral procession stopped overnight on the way from Lincolnshire to Westminster Abbey. Some crosses still survive (eg at Hardingstone in Northamptonshire) whilst others (Charing Cross) don't. After the funeral, Edward spent Christmas 1290 in Ashridge in Herfordshire. He held a parliament there.

About this time the Maid of Norway, who was the last heir of King Alexander III of Scotland, who had conquered the Isle of Man before riding his horse off the edge of a cliff during a storm, died on the sea voyage from Norway to claim her kingdom. As well as becoming Queen of Scotland she would have married Edward of Caernarfon, Prince of Wales, Edward I's last surviving son (one of his now dead elder brothers had been called Alfonso, Queen Eleanor having come from Castille, so we might have been ruled by King Alfonso!). Not only did the Maid's death ruin the chances of uniting the kingdoms of England and Scotland but it also threw the succession for the Scottish crown into complete confusion with 13 different claimants including Florence, Count of Holland (so Scotland could have had a King Florence!; later Edward arranged for Florence to be kidnapped, in the course of which he was murdered). Edward manipulated this confusion until he was granted overlordship of Scotland and appointed chair of the committee that eventually awarded the throne to John Balliol, son of the man who founded Balliol College in Oxford.

Scotland was, at this time an ethnic melting pot of ancient Britons (around Galloway), Anglo Saxons from Northumbria (around Edinburgh), Vikings (Hebrides and Orkneys) and Irish (the 'Scottii') (p241).

In 1293 Edward married his daughter Eleanor (confusing family, mother, wife and daughter all called Eleanor) to Henry III Count of Bar. Bar was where Joan of Arc came from some centuries later.

Edward used Italian bankers called the Riccardi. Basically he granted them customs duties from wool in return for loans. But when their bank failed (classically, by being unable to cash in investments when required to return deposits) Edward arrested them. Banking was still a dodgy business; only the Jews were allowed to practice usury. But anti-semitism built up in England partly because people borrowed from the Jews and then couldn't repay so their estates were forfeit but because the Jews couldn't hold land the estates were bought up for a song by speculators who included Edward's Queen. This got to the point at which the landowners who made up the parliament more or less forced a not very unwilling king to expel the jews in return for being granted a tax.

In April 1299 Edward held a parliament in Stepney! (p317)

In 1304, during the siege of Stirling Castle, Edward's troops used gunpowder (p343). They also used a huge trebuchet called the Warwolf (lup de guerre).

In 1303 the crown jewels were stolen from Westminster during a nationwide crime wave which included thugs called trailbastons (because they dragged big clubs called bastons along the ground behind them) (p 346).

Edward of Caernarfon (Prince of Wales) had a manor in Kennington (which was turned into a Palace by his great grandson the Black Prince) where today the Oval is part of the Duchy of Cornwall and thus owned by the present Prince of Wales.

Another royal residence mentioned is Sheen. This was a manor house just to the east of what is now Richmond Bridge; it later became Sheen Palace and then Richmond Palace. This was where, in 1305, the Commissioners for Scotland went down on their knees to pay homage to Edward I.

When Edward II was knighted vows were said over two golden swans which "set a fashion for swearing oaths on birds for the next two centuries." (p355)

Edward I died at Burgh on the Sands in Cumbria whilst preparing to invade Scotland again. His body was buried in Westminster Abbey in a plain box of black Purbeck marble. An inscription was added in the sixteenth century but this seems to have been a copy of one that dates from at least 1320. The inscription reads EDWARDUS PRIMUS SCOTTORUM MALLEUS HIC EST PACTUM SERVA. This translates as Edward I Hammer of the Scots is here. Keep the Vow. This would have been the vow that the nobility of England "had all sworn at Whitsun 1306 ... to avenge the rebellion of Robert Bruce" (p378).

Gosh I enjoyed this book.

July 2009, 378 pages

"Iron Kingdom" by Christopher Clark

Iron Kingdom is subtitled The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1947. It tells the history of the Hohenzollern dynasty and beyond from their days as Electors in Brandenburg, the Mark around Berlin through their becoming kings in Prussia, one of their possessions which lay outside the Holy Roman Empire and so could become a Kingdom, through the Bismarckian conquest and unification of Prussia into Germany and the Hohenzollerns becoming Kaisers of the new Reich, through the dynasty's end with the closure of the First World War, to the decreed abolition of Prussia after the Second World War.

It is a well written book in that it alternates my kind of history (kings and battles) with social history so that I never got too bored by the latter. It is however, long (688 pages); despite this there were times when I wanted to know more. There were moments when I felt the author assumed I knew more than I did: for example, he talks about thalers and groschen as if I can understand their relative values. At other times he is simply too brief. There is almost no mention of either the First or Second World War as if these were German events which did not affect Prussia. I would have liked to know more about Kaiser Bill and the Franco-Prussian war.

There are times when the language departs from academic and becomes more compelling: his description of a poetic epic containing fragmented scenes as being like a film shot with a hand-held camcorder is evocative.

The author does not like Hindenburg! Hindenburg was c-in-c of German forces on the Eastern front during the First World War. "He blackmailed the Kaiser, to whom he professed the deepest personal loyalty .... it was a systematic insubordination born of vast ambition and an utter disregard of any interest or authority outside the military hierarchy he himself dominated ... Hindenburg deliberately cultivated the national obsession with his own person, projecting an image of an indomitable German warrior .... Although Hindenburg was among those who urged William II to abdicate and flee to Holland in November 1918, he subsequently shrouded himself in the mantle of a principled monarchism .... In the last days of September 1918, Hindenburg urgently pressed the German civilian government to initiate ceasefire negotiations, yet he later disassociated himself entirely from the resulting peace, leaving the civilians to carry the responsibility and the opprobrium. On 17 June 1919, when the government of Friedrich Ebery was deliberating over whether to accept the terms of the Versailles Treaty, Hindenburg conceded in writing that further military resistance would be hopeless. Yet .... he claimed in November 1919 ... that the German armies in the field had not been vanquished by the enemy powers, but by a cowardly 'stab in the back' from the home front .... As a military commander and later as Germany's head of state, Hindenburg broke virtually every bond he entered into. He was not the man of dogged, faithful service, but the man of image, manipulation and betrayal." (pages 653-4)

June 2009, 688 pages