Conservative History Journal

History Today blog informs us that the two winners of the 2012 Wolfson History Prize are Christopher Duggan for Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy and Susan Brigden for Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest. Both sound very interesting and are hereby added to the notional pile of books to be read.

As a (one-time) contributor to History Today I was invited to their grand annual party and award giving ceremony, held at the Royal Society in Carlton House Terrace, a place and terrace full of historical connections.

The prize for the best picture research went to Pauline Hubner in The Great Builders, a book that looks well worth reading; the Longman/History Today Book of the Year award went to the first volume of Memories of Empire, titled The White Man's World, which looked interesting enough though, for myself I thought one of the others that received a special mention, a biography of John Dee, was more appealing.

The special Longman Trust Prize to a body or book or person who had contributed most to the study of history in the last year went to the Pevsner Architectural Guides published by Yale (formerly called Pevsner Buildings of England/Scotland/Wales/Ireland and published by Penguin but always and for ever known as Pevsner).

Tory Historian was delighted to read in History Today that the Samuel Johnson Prize (named after a truly great Tory) was awarded this year to Frank Dikötter’s Mao's Great Famine, a book TH has not yet read right through, so devastating it is. There is also the new biography of Bismarck, short-listed for the prize, to read. Jonathan Steinberg's book is described as "a genuine game-changer whose influence will be enormous and sustained".

I was puzzled by the comments of one of the judges, though, the biographer Brenda Maddox, who is reported to have said: ‘Why didn’t I know about this? We feel we know who the villains of the 20th century are – Stalin and Hitler [I could add a few more to that]. But here, fully 50 years after the event, is something we did not know about. It’s testament to the power of non-fiction that it can rock you back on your heels.’ Well, she’s right on the last point, but her comments only serve to reinforce my view that the literati should get out more. Has Maddox not read, or even read a review of Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, for example? Or does her knowledge of Maoism derive from the films of Jean-Luc Godard and the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir? Dikötter gives us much valuable and fascinating new detail, but he does not alter the thrust of what has been known for some time now about the nature of Mao’s appalling regime.