Killers of the Flower Moon - David Grann

 This is the book from which Martin Scorsese made his latest movie.   It's easy to see what attracted Scorsese.   Grann has unearthed a long-forgotten story about the abuse of a Native American tribe, the Osage. who purely by chance became incredibly rich when oil was discovered beneath the worthless land to which they had been displaced.   Briefly, those who could claim tribal rights became briefly some of the richest people on earth, with vast homes, fleets of cars and household servants, some of them white.   That was never going to be tolerated in early 2oth century America.   First came the bandits to steal Osage property, then financial advisers to shepherd the poor lambs into handing over their wealth, then came the men of business, notably William Hale, a middle-aged former champion cattle roper and failed business man who rapidly became the Friend of the Osage people and King of the Osage Hills.

Then the Osage started dying, by the bucketload.   Grann focuses on Mollie Burkhart, whose sister Anna is abducted and murdered in May 1921.   One of the Mollie's sisters has already died young.   Her mother soon succumbs, then her first husband, then Mollie herself starts to decline.   Mollie, of course, has become the heiress of her sisters and mother.   If Burkhart sounds an odd name for an Native American woman, she got it from her second husband, Ernest Burkhart.   Ernest is only important because he was the nephew of none other than William Hale.

Then the Mollie's final sister dies with her husband when their home is blown up.   Even the lacklustre law enforcement of the US West at that time cannot ignore this.   Even J Edgar Hoover, young leader of what was yet to become the FBI, becomes interested.   He sends agents to Osage County, Oklahoma, led by a tenacious Texan called Tom White.  White comes from a law enforcement dynasty.   He is a former Texas Ranger.   We find ourselves in a world of paradox where cowboys are protecting Native Americans from former cowboys.

White's pursuit of the truth is protracted.   It takes him several years.   But he gets there - and the scandal he uncovers almost defies belief.   Grann handles it all extremely well.   His measured journalistic prose carries us through revelations that otherwise might seem preposterous.   He also lets us empathise with both both the hopeless and the heartless.   It is a major work of revisionary US history.

Noble Savages - Sarah Watling

 

The subtitle tells you everything you need to know: Noble Savages is the story of the four Olivier sisters told in seven fragments.  That there were four sisters is indisputable; the need for seven sections is neither apparent nor especially useful.

The Oliviers were the daughters of Sir Sydney, an upper middleclass socialist, diplomat, and governor of Jamaica, where the girls spent parts of their childhood.  This made them exotic, slightly savage, and the talk of the town when they arrived in London for their advanced education.  They were also extremely beautiful, which helped, and given to nudity, which helped even more.

Brynhild was the most beautiful.  She was also the least bright.  She married earlier and had a child almost straightaway.  The unlikely star of the quartet was the youngest, Noel, whom Rupert Brooke fell for when she was only 15.  In fact, she is the only reason for this book.  For forty years, since John Lehmann and Paul Delany launched a wave of 'new' Brooke biographies, Noel was the focus of attention, largely because she doubled the number of women Brooke was known to have courted and indeed proposed to, whereas hitherto he had been assumed to be gay, largely because so many of his circle were.  Now Noel is known to be just one of many and Rupert Brooke was propositioning simultaneously.  Indeed, he courted three of the four Oliviers and we must be grateful he didn't set his cap at their beautiful and vacuous mother.

The fact is, the sisters were neither happy nor successful.  They were the centre of attention of a circle of gay and lesbian dilettantes who were easily bored.  They had plenty of admirers from roughly 1908 to 1914.  After the war they were peripheral figures from a very different past.  Noel, to her credit, refused to have anything to do with the insane hero-worship which grew up around Brooke.  She had a successful medical career, a much less successful private life, and ended up surly and eccentric.

Sarah Watling does a great job with unpromising material.  She makes all the sisters likeable to an extent because she portrays them warts and all.  Watling is a very fine writer with a wide knowledge of the time of which she writes, and I look forward to whatever she chooses to write next.

Screenwriting techniques for success - Jimmy Sangster

Yes, another secrets of screenwriting book but this time with a difference - Jimmy Sangster actually wrote movies. Indeed, he was always more famous for writing movies than anything else he might have written. More incredible still, you actually know his movies. Dracula Prince of Darkness, The Curse of Frankenstein. Yes, for a very productive decade, Sangster was the Hammer house writer. Then he moved to America, and wrote lots and lots of American TV.

Another break with the form - he demonstrates what he means by writing original scripts, two of them, a full-length script for a darkish comedy film and a pilot episode for a sitcom.

For a beginner, what more do you need? For somebody who's read lots of such things, a referesher that's actually … well, refreshing. Great fun - which is exactly what Sangster insists creative writing should be.

The Five - Hallie Rubenhold

This book bills itself as "The Untold Lives of the Five Women killed by Jack the Ripper", which is not strictly true as the excellent bibliography demonstrates. What it is, however, is the breakthrough book on the subject, and it is done very well indeed. Rubenhold's thesis is that the canonical five victims (not including Martha Tabram) were not 'just prostitutes'. Even the two who were without doubt prostitutes (Stride and Kelly) were not only prostitutes, but women who had substantial lives, children in some cases, and certainly partners. They might be remembered today solely as Ripper victims but they left traces at the time for other reasons as well.

Polly Nicholls and Annie Chapman were both respectable married women before misfortune struck. Drink was Polly's downfall and Chapman lost everything when her husband died. Rubenhold is right to point out that neither was ever arrested for prostitution and both had legitimate ways of making the few pence needed to fund a bed in the doss house. Today they would simply be regarded as legally homeless and we do not automatically assume that middleaged homeless women are necessarily prostitutes. I can assure you that we see a dispiriting number of them in court and prostitution is never assumed and rarely alleged. Rubenhold's secondary theory is that the Ripper was able to dispatch his victims swiftly and silently not because they were stupid enough to solicit his custom but because he searched them out while they slept rough, in yards and dark corners - compelling reasoning in both the Nicholls and Chapman cases.

Liz Stride probably wasn't a Ripper victim and was certainly an occasional prostitute - she had a conviction for it back in Sweden, and about the only thing eyewitnesses seemed to agree upon was that she was touting for trade on the night of the so-called 'Double Event'. Kate Eddowes, the other victim that night, was a traveller, a female tramp, and an epic drinker. When she was turned out of the police station in the small hours she cheerfully announced that she would soon get her doss money. This has long been assumed to refer to prostitution, but again, relying on my personal court acquaintance with many contemporary women in her position, I would favour either petty theft or plain outright begging.

The weak link in Rubenhold's argument is the final victim, Mary Jane Kelly. For a start, that almost certainly wasn't her name - which Rubehold herself points out - and she was definitely a prostitute with no other means of support, who claimed (unreliably at best) to have recently been a much higher class courtesan with experiences of the maisons closes of Paris or perhaps Antwerp. Clearly the Ripper vented every last vestige of rage on Kelly's corpse. The extent of the injuries suggests, in  modern theories of violence on women, personal acquaintance, a relationship betrayed; but since we haven't a clue who Kelly was, and uniquely among the five no one ever came forward to claim her, we cannot follow up on any leads.

A fascinating book - a rare serious addition to the field of Ripperology and highly recommended. I have read dozens and dozens of books on the subject and put in hundreds of hours of personal research, which I will now have to go through again in light of Rubenhold's propositions.

The Secret Rooms - Catherine Bailey

This is a captivating and unusual book. Bailey was granted access to the extensive archive of the Manners family, kept at Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire, home of the Duke of Rutland. Her aim was to research a book on the men of the Belvoir Estate during World War I. The current duke's great grandfather, Henry, had been a noted recruiter of volunteers for the Leicestershire Tigers. He had even offered to pay their usual wages while they were away.

On arrival she discovered the mystery of the secret rooms. This is where Henry's son John, the ninth duke had died in April 1940, aged only 53. More than that, he had locked himself in these humble 'business' rooms - excluding his family and some of the best doctors in the land - in order to work on the vast family archive. Moreover, it wasn't just the Manners papers that were stored there in 1940. The ninth duke had campaigned hard to ensure that huge chunks of the National Archive were secretly moved to Belvoir for safe keeping.

John himself had served in the First War. His father Henry had boasted that his own son - his only remaining son - was serving at the Front like the humblest farm hand. But Bailey soon discovered that the archives had been systematically edited - filleted by John - to remove all mention of certain periods in his life, including the latter part of his war service. Why? And who on Earth broke into the sealed rooms three nights after John's death?

As I say, it is a compelling story of arrogance, cowardice, bereavement and entitlement. Bailey builds the key characters as well as any novelist. Yet she is equally diligent in recording the problems of archival research. She answers the questions she set herself. Some solutions are sad, others downright extraordinary. She doesn't answer the one question I have always had about this truly ghastly family. How did they become dukes in the first place? They weren't warlords, nor royal by-blows. Sure, they owned and amassed inordinate land banks but so did many other families who came over with the Conqueror, and none of them became dukes. Other than pile up - and later lose - unimaginable fortunes, what did any of them ever do?

The Devil in the White City - Erik Larson

I first found Erik Larson when I acquired his book about Crippen and Marconi, Thunderstruck, reviewed here in February 2016. In that review I alluded to this book, which likewise combines the US serial killer H H Holmes with the building of the Chicago World's Fair, which effectively supplied him with victims during the summer of 1893.

The idea, on first glance, seems terrific, but like Thunderstruck there are problems. In Thunderstruck it was the fact that not only did Crippen and Marconi never meet, they were rarely in the same country. Marconi did not invent wireless telegraphy in order to catch Crippen, it just happened that his invention was used in Crippen's capture. Also, the point of interest with Crippen is that he was such a meek man, the worm who literally turned on his appalling wife. No one can accuse H H Holmes of similar shortcomings. He was the ultimate predator, killing for the simple pleasure of being there at the death. Then there is his purpose-built hotel of horror, with its built-in gas chambers and chutes to the basement for easy disposal. On the other hand Marconi was always interesting in everything he did, whereas Daniel Burnham was only one of many architects who worked on the World's Fair, albeit he was the team leader. His partner John Root was the visionary behind the scheme but died before work began. Far more interesting than Burnham are the landscape designer Frederick Law Olmstead, driven mad by overwhelming toothache, and the mercurial George Ferris who came up with the awesome wheel which saved the fair's financial bacon and was probably the single defining legacy of the show.


The main problem, however, is that the six months of the fair was only part of Holmes's murderous career. In a sense it was a deviation from his usual practice, which was to kill wives, mistresses and business partners for their life insurance. Too little is known of Holmes for him to be anything other than an enigma. He was not caught until more than a year after the fair ended and during a long time in prison he wrote his own story for money - three 'confessions', each more appalling than the last. How much, if any, was true? How many did he really kill? We will never know. One mystery that sticks with me is who did he leave the money to? Tracing his heirs, several of whom he had almost certainly killed and others who probably were not as legally entitled as they assumed, would be a real tangle to unravel.


Larson's research is again hugely impressive. I love his declaration that "I do not employ researchers, nor do I conduct any primary research using the Internet. I need physical contact with my sources, and there's only one way to get it. To me every trip to a library or archive is like a small detective story." You and me both, Erik - not that I could afford to use researchers even if I wanted to. And he writes like a dream, always pitch-perfect, never remotely dull. I will certainly snap up the next book of his I come across. I quite fancy Dead Wake about the sinking of the Lusitania.

The Emperor - Ryszaed Kapuscinski

This Penguin Classic is a classic of reportage rather than fiction or indeed non-fiction. Kapuscinski was a Polish reporter who had spent time in Ethiopia but who was not a witness to the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. He knew, however, that the abolition of the Ethiopian Empire was probably the last there would ever be. Slipshod commentators often talk about 21st century empires in connection with Russia but there is a fundamental difference: Vladimir Putin might have absolute autocratic authority but not even the most servile Kremlin bureaucrat thinks that authority will pass to his son and heir, if he even has one. In Imperial Ethiopia all authority was vested in the emperor, whose main claim to power was that he had managed to beat all the other princely and ducal contenders. In his youth Ras Tafari had probably been the best of a bad lot. During his exile during the Italian invasion he had even managed to establish himself on the world stage, perhaps the first black ruler of the modern era to do so. But after forty-four years on the throne, four-and-a-half decades of sitting cocooned in his palatial nest of sycophants, what had he become? One of his retainers, referred to as F, provides the answer as early as page 5:

It was a small dog, a Japanese breed. His name was Lulu. He was allowed to sleep in the Emperor's great bed. During various ceremonies, he would run away from the Emperor's lap and pee on dignitaries' shoes. The august gentlemen were not allowed to flinch or make the slightest gesture when they felt their feet getting wet. I had to walk among the dignitaries and wipe the urine from their shoes with a satin cloth. This was my job for ten years.

Yes, the institution of monarchy had become so debased that significant people had to put up with being peed on, and a man was employed to wipe their shoes. This, however, was not the most ludicrous example of royal protocol. There was the Hour of Assignments during which the emperor doled out rewards to his courtiers; there was no penalty for those who had failed for some reason, they were simply not rewarded and that was the kiss of death for their career. Haile Selassie, it was maintained, had risen above the hurly-burly of actually conferring with his courtiers face to face. His face was immobile, his voice inaudible. Thus all power was invested in the Minister of Pen who alone stood close enough to hear the imperial whispers. But he too was dispensable. If His Venerable Highness should let it be known that the Minister of the Pen had misinterpreted his wishes...


The court has officers such as Keeper of the Third Door and Imperial Pillow Bearer, but no elected politicians and no serious ministers. Yet the palace was a hive of activity from early morning to late at night. Hundreds of people busied themselves with absolute nonsense and useless flummery whilst outside the compound the people starved to death in their thousands. This is the regime that Kapuscinski recreates through interviews with the former officials whose world fell apart when Haile Selassie turned out to be mortal after all.


A lesser hand might leave us feeling sorry for the senile old man in his palace. Certainly Kapuscinski has sympathy for the redundant servants who, in the post-imperial Ethiopia cannot walk safely in public and who have to hide behind their initials in his book. But he has no sympathy at all for Hailie Selassie and his corrupt ministers, the former under house arrest, most of the latter executed. At the end of the book he writes:

With state money the dignitaries built themselves palaces, bought estates, travelled abroad. The Emperor himself amassed the greatest riches. The older he grew, the greater became his greed, his pitiable cupidity. One could talk about it with sadness and indulgence, were it not for the fact that HS - he and his people - took millions from the state treasury amid cemeteries full of people who had died of hunger, cemeteries visible from the windows of the royal Palace.

 I wish I could think of a journalist that insightful writing today.

Return of a King - William Dalrymple

Obviously I'd heard of this book, which received a huge amount of cross-media free publicity when it came out in 2013. I approached with caution because that level of freebie usually means one of three things: the author is an ex Tory MP, the author is phenomenally rich and/or well-connected, or it really is an astonishingly important book. The name Dalrymple (actually a cut-down version of the hyphenated original) rightly suggests the middle category, but luckily for us he is also a writer of genius, a historian who delves into archives which average scholars couldn't begin to tackle and surprisingly even-handed in his judgments. For example some British military men were complete idiots, others were astonishingly brave. Some were just incredibly lucky or indeed unlucky. The Afghanis who sucked up to, repulsed and then were butchered by the British are duplicitous, chivalric, noble, homicidal and generous. Everyone here, even the inbreds of both camps, is a real, three-dimensional human being.

This then is the story of the First Afghan War 1839-42. For reasons never entirely clear, the British decided to replace Dost Mohammad Khan, the perfectly friendly ruler of the always fractious mountain people with the man he deposed thirty years earlier, Shah Shuja. The replacement itself went surprisingly well, but everyone including the man himself knew that Shuja was simply a puppet of the 'envoy' Sir William Hay Macnaghten. A dyed-in-the-wool diplomat who knew nothing about tribal culture, Macnaghten was given to machinations and, far worse, often late in paying the pensions (bribes) which kept the peace between the rival chieftains. Over time, the Afghani leaders waxed nostalgic for the long golden age of Dost Mohammad. There was a king who was approachable, fair, and who paid his bribes on time.  Rebellion broke out. The idiots in India and their envoy in Afghanistan all misread the situation, and unbelievable bloodshed resulted. Very few Brits and hardly any of their sepoys made it out alive.

This to me was the most emotive part of the story. Dalrymple pulls no punches and his description of the disastrous retreat through the Khyber Pass in January blizzards is truly shattering. The Afghans who enslave and mutilate their captives are named and shamed. Yet he contrasts the behaviour of the outlying villagers with that of Dost Mohammad's son Akbar Khan who personally slew Sir William Macnaghten but who protected Macnaghten's widow and the wives and children of officers who were in the field against him with courtesy that would shame the Geneva Convention.  One fascinating aside, expertly handled by Dalrymple, is the escape of these hostages and their long journey to freedom, effectively under the command of the more mature women.

Then comes the Army of Retribution - and we should be thoroughly ashamed that we ever had such a force.  The new Tory government in London could not let such an affront to British arms go unavenged. So the army returned, with capable commanders, killed all who could not prove themselves friends of the young Victoria's fast-expanding empire and reduced the historic cities of Afghanistan to sand.

But the Afghans were not conquered. The Afghans are never conquered. The Army of Retribution came, slew and destroyed, but then withdrew and left Dost Mohammad to it.  Dalrymple is right to draw the parallels with today.  We Brits have just 'withdrawn' from our fourth invasion of Afghanistan, so that's 4-0 to the Afghanis.  Those guys even saw off Soviet Russia for Pete's sake!

I knew nothing whatever about this subject before reading Return of a King. I am now fascinated. That is surely the aim of the popular historian. Job done, then.

The Man Who Was M - Anthony Masters

The subtitle of this minor classic from 1986 is "The Life real-life spymaster who inspired Ian Fleming". Well, we all need a hook, but the connection is wafer thin.  For one thing Maxwell Knight was never a field agent and never travelled the world in the hunt for foreign agents.  Max was strictly London-based and spent his MI5 career bringing down the enemy within, be it Percy Glading, communist co-ordinator of the Woolwich Arsenal spy ring of 1938 or the highly-connected Fascists of the Right Club two years later. In both instances Knight infiltrated glamorous young women agents (Olga Gray and Joan Miller respectively) whilst he stayed secluded in his flat in Dolphin Square.with his menagerie of snakes and aye-ayes and bugs.

It's not just the wildlife that distinguishes Knight from James Bond, it's also the sex life. Not only did Knight never have sex with Gray or Miller, albeit both were in love with him and the latter even lived with him, he was married three times and never consummated any of the unions. Knight was frankly weird. Masters ponders his subject's sexuality but of course cannot come up with a conclusion.

After the war Knight became, of all things, a freelance broadcaster on natural history with the BBC. Indeed it was as the much-loved Uncle Max, author of books for children such as The Young Naturalist's Field Guide (1952) that he was memorialised when he died in 1968.

Masters' account of the Right Club is a good as any.  His rendering of the Woolwich Arsenal case is better than most and I had never before across the case of Ben Greene, cousin of Graham and (Sir) Hugh, which ultimately ruined Knight's standing in spy-circles, although I suppose there are worse things than being ostracised by an MI5 run by the likes of Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Hollis. Masters spoke to people who knew Knight, including his two surviving wives, who can of course never be asked again.  The only trouble is, he says that Knight was 68 when he died.  No he wasn't; he was born in September 1900 and died in January 1968. He was therefore 67. A minor slip, perhaps, but it undermines confidence.  That's why I called it a minor classic. A bit more care and The Man Who Was M might just be a classic.

The Mistresses of Henry VIII - Kelly Hart

Hart started something of a trend when this book appeared in 2009.  Before that, everyone knew that King Henry had one illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond and Somerset (the double duke) by Bessie Blount, who became the king's mistress shortly after the birth of Princess Mary.  Most people also knew that Mary Boleyn preceded her sister Anne between the royal sheets.  Mary did not rise so high as her sister, nor did she fall so far and so fatally.  What Hart brings into the equation is the question of whether Mary Boleyn's two children, Catherine and Henry Carey, were actually the king's by-blows.  Sure, many people have thought they were, over the years, but Hart discusses the matter in detail, laying out the pros and cons without coming to any firm conclusion.  My suspicion is that she feels the Carey siblings were half-Tudor.  I base this on the lack of similar discussion about other proposed bastards, all of whom are dismissed out of hand.  It is interesting (and I did not know this) that Catherine and Henry flourished at court - but, of course, they were Queen Elizabeth's cousins in any event.  My own favourite potential royal bastard, Ethelreda or Audrey Malte, is one of those summarily dismissed by Hart.  But she too moved in royal circles (serving Princess Elizabeth during her time in Tower) and might have risen higher had she survived Mary's reign.  What is certain is that Henry VIII gave Audrey land and money - this from a man who didn't even pay for the funeral of his acknowledged bastard Richmond.  In the end, we can only speculate, which Hart does very well.

Her main problem, though, is that there weren't enough mistresses to warrant a full-length book.  So she speculates about who may or may not have slept with the king over the years.  Many are only snide remarks in Ambassador Chapuys' reports to the Emperor.  Others are confused within their own families - for example Mary, Madge and Margaret Shelton; only one did the deed with the dude, but which one?

She also fills space by tracing the family connections of her protagonists.  She makes too much, I feel, about cousins in an environment where everyone was to a greater or lesser degree the cousin of everyone else.  Similarly, she relies overmuch on what the Church considered a proscribed degree of consanguinity and the status of sisters-in-law.  The crowned heads of Europe were accustomed to give not a toss about such things, save where it suited them.

Nevertheless, this is a well-written and thoroughly entertaining read.

The King in the North - Max Adams

I've got one problem with this book, and that's the title.  It's not really about Oswald, king of Northumbria and, very soon after that, a saint.  He is just one of the many kings covered here, some of them (for example his brother Oswy) at much greater length.  OK, the subtitle "Life and Times" is supposed to deal with the problem but it doesn't because Oswald's reign was only eight years in the middle of a timescale of close on two centuries.

I understand Adams feeling the need to individualise his narrative but it doesn't work.  What we really have here is the story of the foundation of the late Saxon kingdom of Northumbria from two earlier kingdoms, Bernicia and Deira.  We have two royal dynasties coming together in Oswald and Oswy, their unity forged on early conversion to Christianity.  Their lasting achievement was probably the Synod of Whitby presided over by Hilda, a member of the royal house.  But Oswy called the synod, not Oswald.  In fact, Oswy was much more successful a king than his shortlived brother, not least by becoming the first king in the region to die in his bed.  Oswald was supposedly lucky, but not lucky enough to avoid being hacked to pieces on the battlefield.  Indeed Adams devotes almost as much narrative to the travels of the various body parts as he does to Oswald himself.  And again, it was Oswy who decided which head on a pole belonged to Oswald and thus began the cult which, four hundred years on, led to the relic being buried in Durham Cathedral alongside the uncorrupted remains of St Cuthbert.

Within the terms of what is, as opposed to what it claims to be, The King is the North is fascinating.  Adams knows his Anglo Saxons, he knows his Bede back to front, and he is a native of the region he describes so beautifully.  He has produced a major work of scholarship which has the added bonus of being eminently readable.

Operation Mincemeat - Ben Macintyre

I had seen Macintyre's TV documentaries and especially enjoyed the one about Kim Philby, so picking up one of his books was a no-brainer.

Operation Mincemeat is an update of The Man Who Never Was, the book by Ewen Montagu, filmed by Ronald Neame in 1956.  That was inevitably partial - Ewen Montagu was the man behind the Man Who Never Was - and circumscribed by the demands of British foreign policy and the Official Secrets Act.  Sixty years on, Macintyre is able to go into much greater detail and take an objective overview of events.

Essentially, this is the story of the misinformation by which the British were able to deceive the Germans about where the Allies intended to invade Europe in 1943.  A dead body was given an encyclopedic back-story and dumped off Gibraltar loaded with fake information that the invasion point was to be Greece or perhaps Sardinia but certainly not Sicily, which was the true destination.  The body washed up as intended in neutral Spain.  The neutral Spanish copied the contents to the Germans and then politely returned them to the British.  The German High Command was taken in, not merely by the quality of the faked documents but also because Hitler's favourite intelligence guru was actively conspiring against him on humanitarian grounds.

And that is where Macintyre's account achieves greatness - the expert way he is able to normalise the bizarre preoccupations and habits of spies.  Montagu, in this context, comes across as a fairly straight bat, unlike the recluses and obsessives and the cross-dressers who also crop up.  On the other hand, his brother Ivor, filmmaker and table tennis enthusiast, was a spy for Soviet Russia, something which everyone in the British secret service knew full well.  Well, everyone except perhaps brother Ewen.

Despite the complexity of his tale, Macintyre tells it smoothly and persuasively.  He obviously knows huge amounts about his subject but pulls off the really clever trick of not showing off his knowledge.  Highly recommended.

Disunited Kingdom - Ian MacWhirter

The story of "how Westminster won a referendum but lost Scotland" from a distinguished Scottish journalist tells us everything we weren't allowed to know south of the Border.  We all knew, for instance, that Cameron's instant backtrack on devo-max the morning after the vote was so callous that it almost certainly lost him next week's General Election and equally surely guaranteed that Scotland's disassociation will lead to a federal Britain in the coming decade.  My view of that possibility?  Good.  Can't happen soon enough, provided England is divided into regions too.

What MacWhirter tells me which I didn't know is how many community groups sprang up spontaneously in Scotland to take the campaign out of the hands of the professional politicians and, more importantly, bypass the lies and smears of Britain's poisonous rightwing Press.  MacWhirter became drawn into this alternative movement and found himself moving from an instinctive unionist to a sceptical nationalist.  His personal story mirrors the national narrative.

This is how a political campaign should be run.  There are lessons for us all here.  I cannot recommend this beautifully written and deeply insightful book strongly enough.  It should be on the school curriculum both sides of the Border.

Lady Jane Grey - A Tudor Mystery - Eric Ives

Eric Ives, being a highly respectable historian, offers something different amid the forest of books on England's first queen.  Instead of the usual recycled guff, he goes back to basics - to contemporary sources and indisputable facts - and reassesses everything.  Some of his conclusions may be arguable but you can't question the rigour with which he got there.

Why it's called a mystery I cannot fathom.  If anything was done in the full light of day, so far as the record is concerned, it was the Nine Day Rule.  Other than that, a superb addition to the canon which deserves to be top of the list for anyone fascinated by the Mid Tudor Crisis.

I was sorry to learn that Professor Ives died last September.  He wrote the classic study of Anne Boleyn (which I already have on my to-read pile) and brought a welcome scepticism to popular Tudor history.

The Wrestling - Simon Garfield

I bought this book when it first came out in 1996 and was prompted to re-read it by a mention on TV the other day.

The book is partly based on Garfield's earlier journalism but mainly on the memories of ageing grapple-and-groaners, gathered for a reunion at Wayne Bridge's pub in Greenwich in August 1995.  Distilled to its essence it might sound something of a cut-and-paste job but actually it is much better than that.  Garfield, like me, was a fan in his youth.  Given he is more youthful than I am, I fear he missed some of the greatest days - for example I went regularly to the wrestling when I lived in Middlesborough 1976-77, and saw Giant Haystacks fight Kendo Nagasaki (pictured, sort of, above).  Nagasaki is one of the stand-out characters in the book.  He doesn't speak - he never speaks, even on radio - but others speak about him with a certain awe.  He was spectacularly dedicated to his business and has never dissed it.  He is identified here but it matters not - without his mask and ring character he really is nobody.

The other stand-out who doesn't speak directly is Les Kellett, a middle-aged clown in the ring but very odd and extremely hard out of it.

Because mine is the original edition (there has been an update), Garfield only covers the first ripples of US superstar wrestling on the British scene.  He interviews a young Triple H, and Shawn Michaels when he still had a full supply of hair.  Unfortunately he doesn't get to Vince McMahon or any member of the Hart family, which became linked with two of the greatest British exports.

I remember seeing the Dynamite Kid, at Middlesbrough, when he was only 17 or 18.  He paved the way for British wrestlers in America, essentially the WWF.  Now the Kid is back in England and disabled, and his cousin Davey Boy Smith, the other half of the British Bulldogs, died in 2002 before he was 40.  Smith is interviewed here, at the height of his fame, and you can't help sensing the tragedy to come.  Already, in 1995-6, the Dynamite Kid was a reclusive, excluded figure.

Garfield's narrative is the death of British professional wrestling after it was dumped by ITV in the late 1980s.  You get the impression it was never much of a game, despite packed houses all round the country.  The wrestlers were never paid worthwhile money and the promoters ran a typically exploitative closed shop.  I get the impression that some pro wrestling still goes on in the UK - that must be a pretty tawdry affair.

Fanny & Stella, The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England - Neil McKenna

April 1870, Ernest and Fred, or maybe Stella and Fanny, are attracting the boys' attention at the rather dodgy Strand Theatre.  Stella nips to the ladies.  They leave - and are promptly lifted by the police for the horrid crime of dressing as women.

Only ... crossdressing isn't a crime.  So the police have to build a case for buggery, which is, in Victorian times, very much a crime with penalties ranging up to long prison sentences with hard labour, which are to all intents and purposes death sentences because very few survive.  The next problem is, how do you prove giving or receiving anal intercourse?  The greatest medical brains of London are brought to bear.  Ernest and Fred are examined in minute, excruciating detail.  And, inevitably - to coin a phrase - they can't prove bugger all.

So, given the press hysteria (and the fact that Stella is apparently married to an MP who also happens to be the son and brother of dukes), the authorities end up with some ridiculous charge along the lines of outraging public decency.  In a West End theatre?  Then as now, come off it!

The fiasco drags on for a full year.  The showcase trial is held in Westminster Hall, the Lord Chief Justice presiding, the Attorney General leading for the prosecution.

Neil McKenna writes beautifully, sensitively.  The amount of research for this ostensible thin tale was clearly enormous.  Fascinating insight.  Great empathy.  A story brilliantly told.

The Third Plantagenet - John Ashdown-Hill

John Ashdown-Hill was the genealogist-historian who tracked down people descended from Richard III's female relatives though not, of course, from Richard himself.  This meant the DNA in the skeleton dug up in the car park of Leicester Social Services could be matched, confirming the remains of the crooked-back man killed in battle, always said in the historical records to have been buried where he was found, was indeed the missing king.

The dig was funded by the Ricardians, of whom Ashdown-Hill is one, who were appalled when the 'Tudor propaganda' deformity was there before their very eyes.  The implication, of course, is that everything else Thomas More said about Richard might also be true, in particular that he murdered his nephews, the Princes in the Tower - just like every contemporary chronicler, including those who wrote before 1485, said he did.

The Ricardians, quite openly, have an agenda - to restore the king's reputation.  This can lead them into odd yet fascinating digressions, which is what interested me about Ashdown-Hill's latest book.  His thesis is that the Duke of Clarence, the surviving brother between Edward IV and Richard, was not the scheming, self-promoting, untrustworthy blot on the landscape who screams out at us from the pages of history (and I'm talking here to real history; that recorded at the time).  Thus, for Ashdown-Hill every Plantagenet male other than Clarence and Richard was illegitimate and excluded from the crown.  I'm no fan of the British royal family and their endless progeny but I know for a fact some of them were married - I've seen them marry on the telly.

His other problem is that Clarence has left very few traces behind him (though, to be fair, he has an awful lot of actual direct descendants thanks to his daughter Margaret Countess of Salisbury).  Even his bones seem to have vanished from his tomb.  Thus everything has to be reconstructed or hypothesized.  The result is great fun in every sense.  Ashdown-Hill provokes argument, which is what books should do from time to time.  I don't agree with some of his theories (frankly, I don't agree with any of them) but I am confident that what he identifies as facts are indeed reliable.  I enjoyed it, and there are plenty of other modern histories of the period I can't say the same about.

The Invention of Murder - Judith Flanders

Judith Flanders has produced a huge book, incredibly well-researched, but the subtitle for me indicates its main flaw.  "How the Victorians revelled in Death and Destruction and created modern crime."  Yes, true enough but not peculiar to the Victorians.  The Elizabethans and the Georgians also revelled in true crime fact and fiction - consider Greene, Nashe, Fielding, and Defoe - and what really invented modern crime - that is to say, crime that is not entirely metropolitan - is mass transport, which admittedly came about during Victoria's reign although the steam train itself predates it.

Flanders, however, is a Victorian specialist and she knows her period in absolute detail.  Not all the murders considered here are either gruesome or even interesting - Flanders' point is that they all, for one reason or another, caught the public imagination and were reinvented, sanitised or elaborated on stage or in fiction.  She has made an exhaustive study of the yellow/gutter press, the 19th century equivalent of today's chip-paper/red-tops with their blithe disregard for truth.

For a thorough, single volume overview of British murder from the Red Barn to Jack the Ripper, The Invention of Murder would be hard to beat.  Individual murders or murderers have been explored better elsewhere.  What is absolutely invaluable for the murder buff, however, is the 40 page notes section.  I found many leads for stories that especially interest me - and, to be absolutely fair to Flanders - not all of them were Victorian.

Fatal Colours - George Goodwin

The subtitle says it all - Towton 1461: England's Most Brutal Battle.  Towton was the deciding factor of the first half of the Wars of the Roses, Edward of York's revenge for the deaths of his father and brother at Wakefield.  It was fought at Easter but, this being Yorkshire, it was fought in a snowstorm.  The Lancastrians were massacred and Edward became king.  In the long run it resolved nothing.  Ten years later Edward was hoofed off the throne by Warwick the Kingmaker and had to do it all again at Barnet and Tewkesbury.

Goodwin is an enthusiast rather than a professional historian - he's a member of the Towton Battlefield Society.  He is scrupulous, however, in his references, if a little free-form in the way he pads out his narrative.  For example, a long time is spent debating the various theories of what was wrong with Henry VI.  That's OK, and handled well enough, but at the end of the day he didn't fight at Towton and was, by that stage of his reign certainly, a spectator at his own fate.

I enjoyed the book.  To be fair, I'm much more interested in the personalities of the participants rather than the battle itself.  Goodwin certainly showed me things I didn't already know (and which bore up to further research on my part).  It's a decent book.

Blood Sisters - Sarah Gristwood

This is something of an odds-and-sods adjunct to the Tudor women genre revived recently by Philippa Gregory and Gristwood herself.  It purports to show that women were powerful players in the Wars of the Roses (or Cousins War, as Gristwood prefers) but ends up, by and large, proving that they weren't. 

Elizabeth Woodville was certainly the epicentre of a powerful clique, mostly her relations, but was either a nonentity or a completely heartless bitch.  Because Gristwood wants to play the feminist card, she opts for the nonentity option.  Margaret Beaufort, on the other hand, was certainly a woman of brains and ambition - but had to exercise her talents through the single son she gave birth to at the age of thirteen or younger, the future Henry VII.  Elizabeth of York looked like a plumper version of her mother and was certainly a nonentity.  Margaret of Burgundy was the dowager duchess of a small but wealthy and influential duchy.  She brought up people of significance, like Philip the Fair, but threw her backing behind anyone who could pass as one of the murdered Princes in the Tower.  She was, therefore, a rotten judge of character.  Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, suffered more bereavement than anyone should and outlived more or less everybody involved in the Cousins War, but she let her reputation be trampled in the mud at the whim of her ruthless sons.  Margaret of Anjou, queen of the hopeless Henry VI, was another who had a rotten time and lost everything when she lost her son, the Prince of Wales.  The poor old Neville sisters, wives of dukes, princes and kings, seem to have existed only to give birth and die.  They were absolutely pawns in the games of sleazy men and completely undermine Gristwood's argument.  One woman who does seem to have had skills as a courtier and who is only mentioned in passing here - Katherine Gordon, wife of the pretender Warbeck, who seems to have flourished after his execution - is the one I would like to learn more about.

Sarah Gristwood is a cracking writer and this book is a pleasure to read.  Whilst I criticise her thesis, I have only two criticisms of her technique.  Firstly, she really overdoes the Fortune's Wheel device.  Secondly, after properly branding as unreliable the writings of Tudor propagandists like More, who weren't there and didn't know the people concerned, why then rely so heavily on Shakespeare, who didn't even know Thomas More?  There is no conspiracy behind the fact that Shakespeare overlooks Margaret Beaufort - he just didn't have an actor who fancied playing a midget in drag.  I really appreciated the extensive notes where she makes many of her more scholarly arguments.