In a way Michael Dirda's elegant and delightful little tome On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling is misleading. He pretends to be entirely fair in that he warns his readers: this is not a book about Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, it is about Conan Doyle as a storyteller; it is about his other books, a little bit about him and a great deal about the post-Doyle Sherlockian developments, notably about the Baker Street Irregulars,...
While the subject of appeasement in the thirties has been analyzed over and over again (though popular mythology seems to be impervious to historical arguments) less has been written about the appeasement of Stalin in the years 1943 - 45. As it happens, I came across a few details concerning the treatment of Poland in Norman Rose's biography of Harold Nicolson.
Nicolson's political career was chequered, to put it mildly, and there is something to Rose's theory that he had been "persuaded - some would say, blackmailed - to...
March, on the whole, is not a good time for tyrants and oppressive regimes. It is the month of uprisings and revolutions, regardless of what happens to them afterwards. March 15, for instance saw the start of the Hungarian revolution of 1848.
Most famously, of course, it is the Ides of March, the day on which Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of conspirators, some of whom, at least, were intent on preserving the Roman republic....
I have started reading Robert Crowcroft's Attlee's War, mentioned on this blog yesterday. It promises to be very interesting though Alistair Cooke's complaint in the review of the book that the author is a little too apt to push himself into the picture is accurate.
Summing up in his Introduction why it is absolutely vital that Attlee's role both in the Labour Party and in government during the war should be understood, Dr Crowcroft says:
The whole of the period c.1940-79 is now genuinely a complete historical era. Until...
The current issue of The Salisbury Review has an interesting review by Alistair Cooke of Robert Crowcroft's Attlee's War: World War II and the Making of a Labour Leader. The book, apparently, destroys certain myths about the war and the coalition government that was in place during it, though it seems to me that those myths are being destroyed slowly by surely anyway. Does anyone who knows anything about the subject really believe...
Next week the Royal Academy (an institution that does not get any state subsidy) will have an exhibition of Johann Zoffany's paintings. As the Guardian points out, two years ago Tate Britain (an institution that gets a good deal of state subsidy and whose remit of displaying British art is sadly neglected) decided that an artist they considered to be marginal did not deserve an exhibition because not enough people will attend it.
As...
History Today has started a new blog in conjunction with Endeavour Press. Called The Siren, it appears to be very well worth readi...
St David, the Patron Saint of Wales is listed among Western Orthodox Saints. Astonishingly enough, he was actually born in Wales and was a Bishop there in the 6th century. According to Wiki there is a relatively large amount of information about him though, one must admit, some of it is undoubtedly mythical. Even in Wales in the early Middle Ages they did not live to a 100. Here is some more information about Dewi Sant.&nbs...
