Conservative History Journal

Harvey Klehr is one of  the undoubted experts on matters to do with Communist infiltration, espionage and agents of influence in the United States and has fought the good fight with many in the media and academia who still insist that a.) Alger Hiss was not a Soviet spy because b.) he has always said he was not and c.) if by some chance it may be remotely true that he passed on some insignificant amount of information to a deeply unpleasant hostile regime then he was fully justified to do so because d.) there was McCarthyism and whatever else before that.

A few days ago, Professor Klehr reviewed, mostly positively, another book on the case in the Wall Street Journal.

There really is nothing new to say about Alger Hiss's guilt, which has been proven beyond any doubt over and over again. There might be when the archives of the former Soviet military intelligence, the GRU are opened, which will happen very soon after the devils build their own ice skating rink.

What is of interest is the refusal by so many of the media and academia to accept this evidence, a refusal that amounts to a collective pathological state.

To Ms. Shelton, the Hiss case excites intense emotion because it was a battle between "collectivism and individualism, between central planning and local/state authority, and between rule by administrative fiat and free markets." Perhaps it was, but she is wrong to take a perjurer at his word when she accepts Hiss's claim that he was a loyal New Dealer. (He said that he was the victim of a conservative cabal intent on dismantling the welfare state). In fact, most of the young lawyers and economists who joined communist cells in Washington, D.C., in the mid-1930s were disappointed with the New Deal and with President Roosevelt, believing that his reforms did not go far enough.

What better way of celebrating St George's Day as well as Shakespeare Day than by posting Laurence Olivier's rendering of Henry V's speech outside Harfleur.

Some time ago there was a review on this site of Alistair Cooke's (now Lord Lexden) excellent book on the Primrose League, the country's first and largest popular political movement. (Those who point to the Chartists ignore the fact that these had no time for women members.)

Today is the anniversary of the death of Benjamin Disraeli, the Earl of Beaconsfield, whose favourite flower the primrose was alleged to be and in whose honour both Primrose Day and the Primrose League were established.

PRIMROSE DAY IN LONDON

My only difficulty is that I want to repudiate all the accusations at the same time. That doesn't matter; I am in the middle of my speech without any realization of how I began. 

'You say that the story should be told directly, but that, I assure you, would not add any sense of actuality. I have never seen a murdered corpse, and I could not describe one in a manner which would make a reader believe that I had. On the other hand, I have often enough sat late in Common Room discussion crimes, and have advanced theories about disputed cases in courts of law. To me, then, the conversations in Common Room are much more real than any direct story would be. 

And I would go further. A detailed realism is no necessary part of a detective story, for the detective story, for the detective story follows highly artificial but well-established conventions. How often is a cursory and unnecessary concession made to the belief that the story should be made realistic without any influence on the reader's mind at all! Usually at the sight of the corpse one of the characters vomits, or alternatively another remarks, "I did not know there could be so much blood in a human body." But that is all, and the reader hurries on to the rest of the story without pausing to let the horrid spectacle of the corpse sink into his mind. 

Reality has little to do with detective fiction. At most there is only a sort of pseudo-realism. 

What could be more conservative in the true sense of the word that does not imply any idea of class, let alone class warfare, than gardening? Whether we mean a large garden in the country, a suburban square behind the house, a small town garden, just a balcony in a block of flats, mucking about with soil, plants, bulbs, seeds, cuttings or bushes is being part of a long tradition. Even new or newish, radical or supposedly radical ideas of change in gardens remains within that tradition of creating and growing.

Tory Historian has just read a delightful little history of gardening and gardens in England (not really any other part of the country) by Anne Scott-James, illustrated by her husband, Osbert Lancaster (he of the pocket cartoons and the Littlehampton family), entitled The Pleasure Garden.

From the British Roman estate that so resembled those of villas in Italy itself through gardens that were and are monastic or Tudor, in the grand French or the enclosed Dutch manner, romantic or formal, suburban or railway all the way to the patio of the seventies the chapters are witty and knowledgeable and the drawings are a joy to study.

Staying off the internet has its good and bad signs. Not sure where forgetting this anniversary fits. Thirty years ago yesterday Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, announces the invasion in the House of Commons.

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, a slightly loopy society of eminent lovers of the canon who "play the game" of elucidating gaps and contradictions. Having issued this warning Mr Dirda can sit back and smile as his disappointed readers find that he has, indeed, been completely fair.

This book is not about Sherlock Holmes, or not exactly about him; nor is it exactly about his fascinating creator; it is more about the effect Conan Doyle has had on his readers, on the literary world and on his faithful followers.

Those who call Conan Doyle the greatest story teller are right. His prose, spare in the more modern stories but with mediaeval and eighteenth century overtones in the historical novels thrown enchantment over the reader from the first line. He had a fine sense of pace, an excellent ear for dialogue and a sense of humour that ranged from sly to slapstick, the latter to be found in some of the stories of medical life and in the Professor Challenger ones.

Michael Dirda is no mean stylist himself. He tells of his youthful discovery of the Holmes stories, of his subsequent investigation of other thrillers and detective tales, of his career as a literary journalist and critic, of his further adventures with Holmes and, finally, his involvement with the Baker Street Irregulars. En route he manages to point out that T. S. Eliot's love and use of matters Holmesian go beyond the obviously villaionous Macavity.

His brief analysis of the Holmes canon and its astonishing hold on people's imagination is excellent though he limits himself to the Anglo-Saxon world, specifically Britain and North America. (I do wish, however, that he had not repeated the nonsense about Holmes wearing Inverness capes and deerstalkers in London.)

Dirda is less fond of the rest of Doyle's output though Professor Challenger is obviously a favourite and he is good on the supernatural tales and has some interesting ideas about White Company, which Conan Doyle valued very highly.

The highlight of the book is his account of the Baker Street Irregulars, their book collecting habits and fantastic discussions of likely and unlikely events in the lives of Holmes and Watson as well as their real and fictional contemporaries. Dirda'a own articel about Langdale Pike, a briefly mentioned character in one of the weakest stories of the Casebook, The Three Gables, which includes an hitherto unknown "Case for Langdale Pike" is joyously funny though one needs to read it in full in Canadian Holmes: The Journal of the Bootmakers of Toronto. Yes, I think that is real and there are good reasons why the Holmesians of Toronto should be called The Bootmakers.

On Conan Doyle is not an introduction to the life and works of Sir Arthur or the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels but a delightful long essay for those who already know and love the master and his output but would like to read a highly knowledgeable person's opinions.

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 leave a profession for which he was eminently suited", diplomacy, and found himself entering another, politicws, "for which he was patently ill-suited". Nevertheless, he did have a part to play in the tragicomedy of Parliamentary activity before and during the Second World War.

Having been one of the prominent anti-appeasers in the late thirties, he seems to have finished the war by becoming one of the most prominent pro-appeasers of Stalin. He was overwhelmed by the Yalta Agreement, thinking that the Western allies had brought off a tremendous coup and he spoke in the debate on February 28, 1945:

Ever since the war, Harold assured the House, Stalin had demonstrated 'that he is about the most reliable man in Europe'. These sentiments, to a later generation alarming in their naivety, were soon to change as the harsher realities of the Cold War se tin. But for the time being Harold was in good company. On returning from Yalta, Churchill reported to his Cabinet. He felt convinced that Stalin 'meant well to the world and to Poland', and 'he had confidence' in him: Stalin 'had kepthis word with the utmost loyalty'. (Hugh Dalton who was present at the cabinet meeting, put it more dramatically. He reported Chuchcill as saying, 'Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don't think I'm wrong about Stalin.')

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. That came to a bad end, too. Here are a few illustrations:

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 quite recently, at least, the 1970s have still felt contemporary, but no longer. This offers both an opportunity and a necessity to rethink the politics of that era. In the historiography of British politics, the period c.1880-1920 is traditionally the era that has generated extensive paradigm-changing work. But the period that encompasses the Second World War to the rise of Thatcher could become conceptually the most exciting era of modern history.

Throughout the 1930s the whole of Whitehall, and most of Westminster, were in awe of a very great man, Neville Chamberlain. He was unrivalled in the despatch of public business. He was unrivalled too in his command of policy in many diverse areas. .... What mattered above all to Chamberlain was the domestic battle that he pursued remorselessly to establish a welfare state based on Tory principles.

Even during the tempestuous events abroad in the late 1930s he continued to work tenaciously on the decisive next stage of his grand vision for a better Britain. A draft manifesto for an election planned for 1940 set out radical proposals: they included action to bring the whole population within the national health services he had already established, a wider and more generous pensions system developing a Chamberlainite achievement of 1925, the introduction of family allowances, and the intensification of this massive slum clearance programme. 

Under Chamberlain more new houses were built every year than under post-war Conservative governments with their 300,000 annual target. It all added up to a welfare programme that provided for a properly funded, two-way partnership between the individual and the state, unencumbered by the plethora of benefits that were to drag Britain down in the post-war world. Whether he was in Birmingham or Downing Street, Neville Chamberlain always balanced the books. 

Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed, a collaboration between the Royal Academy and the Yale Center for British Art, makes a virtue of Zoffany's marginality and mobility, showcasing his panoramic gaze. He was as interested in beggars and streetsellers as nabobs and queens.

Zoffany was a man on the move: painting in Germany, Italy, back to Germany, England, back to Italy, India and back again. One of his rare disappointments was the failure to secure passage as ship's artist on James Cook's second voyage to the South Seas. Zoffany's career exemplifies the fertile possibilities of a booming European and global art market.

Rome was the great artistic cosmopolis, teeming with architects studying classical ruins, artists in training from all over Europe, as well as young British milordi picking up a smattering of taste and connoisseurship before they went home to inherit. It was the capstone of a gentleman's cultural education. A man who had never visited Italy was always conscious of some inferiority, said Dr Johnson. In Rome, the young German learnt the visual lingua franca of the British.

Suitably polished, Zoffani returned to Germany in 1757 and achieved his first appointment as "court and cabinet painter" to the elector of Trier. But a hidebound and peripheral court was an anti-climax after cosmopolitan Rome. Though he married an innkeeper's daughter from Wurzburg, the ambitious artist did not cool his fiery heels for long in Germany. Three years later he moved on to London – the metropolis of commercial modernity, the biggest city of western Europe. To modern eyes, Georgian London may look small and compact, only a few square miles, which could easily be crossed on foot, but to contemporaries the English capital was a breathtaking phenomenon, a very monster of greatness. To Daniel Defoe, London was the new Rome: "Such a prodigy of buildings, that nothing in the world does, or ever did equal it, except old Rome in Trajan's time."

London represented an intense concentration of commercialised culture, retail and art, as well as rank and buying power. It was the great city of opportunity for a young man of parts.

History Today has started a new blog in conjunction with Endeavour Press. Called The Siren, it appears to be very well worth reading.

As the year drew to a close, he settled down to write a short essay that is almost startling in its prophecy. Entitled An Anglo-American Reunion, it consisted of a trenchant plea for a much closer understanding between the two nations, and he coupled that plea with the warning that, unless this essential relationship was brought about by good will, then it might be forced into existence in some future time as a measure of self preservation against an eventual threat from Russia. 

You Americans have lived up to now within your own palings, and know nothing of the real world outside. But now your land is filled up, and you will be compelled to mix more with the other nations. When you do so you will find that there is only one which can at all understand your ways and your aspirations, or will have the least sympathy. That is the mother country which you are now so fond of insulting. She is an Empire, and you will soon be an Empire also, and only then will you understand each other, and you will realize that you have only one real friend in the world.

cuckoo eggs, imported from Germany by Handel and Mendelssohn and hatched in British nests to the detriment of our native singing birds, who might otherwise have developed a distinct note of their own.

Tory Historian managed to see something like half of the exhibition Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination at the British Library. There will have to be at least one more visit though one has to pay to get in. Not only the exhibits are overwhelming in their beauty and fascinating content and details but the curatorship is on the sort of high level one has  learnt to expect from this institution.

The British Library, incidentally, has a collection of fascinating blogs, one of which is on the subject of the various manuscripts in its collection. Another one, about maps, has been mentioned by Tory Historian before.

The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of dead policies. When a mast falls overboard, you do not try to save a rope here and a spar there, in memory of their former utility; you cut away the hamper altogether. We cling to the shred of an old policy after it has been torn to pieces; and to the shadow of the shred after the rag itself has been torn away. 

Tory Historian has always found visits to Tate Britain, home of the superb collection of British art, intellectually stimulating and emotionally soothing. Not so, this afternoon. Most of it has been turned into an outpost of Tate Modern.

While the Clore Wing remains largely devoted to Turner, it now has an exhibition of Romantics, which intersperses paintings by artists who were more or less his contemporaries as well as modern artists who paint supposedly in the same vein. Whether Turner can be called a Romantic is a moot point but the idea of following British romanticism through is an intriguing one. TH, feeling a little tired for various reasons, decided to return to this huge exhibition some other time and returned to the main rooms to be stunned by the latest arrangement.

Tate Britain changes periodically the way it hangs the paintings, an idea that may have sounded better in theory than it has proved to be in practice. The latest decision was to devote almost all the main galleries to twentieth century British art, the later part of which, large and full of installations, ought to be in Tate Modern, where there is room for it.

The rest of the collection seems to have been secreted. There was on gallery, in which about thirty paintings from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century were hung in a rather shambolic order. This was described as the highlights of the historic collection. The Tate is supposed to show that historic collection not pick out a few examples from it.

There were three small "focused" exhibitions: a very good one of the Camden Town Group drawings, an interesting one of Rubens and Britain though that could have been bigger, and a completely nothingy display of odds and ends under the title of The Protestant Church after 1660. Small, "focused" exhibitions, successful or not, are of interest in conjunction with the large display of what is the glory of Tate Britain: British art from the 1500s to the present day, which cannot be seen at present.

To add insult to injury TH found an extraordinarily silly and unpleasant painting entitled Portrait of V.I. Lenin with Cap, in the Style of Jackson Pollock III, as well as a concrete bust of Stalin by Peter Peri, a Hungarian refugee, originally a constructivist and later a socialist realist. The bust was made in 1942 and is displayed without the slightest explanation. When TH was angrily relating this to someone, the question came whether Mao, the greatest of all mass murderers was there as well. As, having reached this display, TH stormed out of the gallery, the answer remains unknown.

The Princess Elizabeth learned of her accession to the throne while on a tour in Kenya. She returned to London immediately. The Queen is greeted on her arrival by the Prime Minister and others:

The man whom I found myself facing was a well-built, fresh-complexioned young fellow with a frank, honest face and a slight, crisp, yellow moustache. He wore a very shiny top-hat and a neat suit of sober black, which made him look what he was - a smart young City man, of the class who have been labelled Cockneys, but who give us our crack Volunteer regiments, and who turn out more fine athletes and sportsmen than any body of men in these islands. 

For those readers who will be in or around London on February 1: Robin Harris, author of the monumental new history of the Conservative Party, will be addressing the Bruges Group that evening on the subject of

The Political Class and their Support for the EU.

He ought to know. The other speaker will be Simon Heffer, journalist, polemicist and historian. Tickets: £10 to be paid at the door but that will include drinks afterwards.

Tory Historian's attention was called to a fascinating source for the study of conservative history. The Duke University Press has set up a site on which you can read Thomas Carlyle's letters on line. The collection is excellently catalogued and the site is easy to navigate. One almost wishes that one was a student of Carlyle. However, this has also reminded TH of the need to visit Carlyle's house in Chelsea. A report from there will follow.

It is some time since this site has noted significant dates and it is time to do so again. Yesterday was the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which ended the War of Spanish Succession and gave Gibraltar and Minorca to Britain. As we know, Gibraltar is still British and its population has no desire to be anything else. Next year we shall all be celebrating the 300th anniversary.

Today, on the other hand is an anniversary of greater sadness: the death of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965. The idea that any readier of this posting might not know a great deal about him is preposterous (though there is no need for all those bogus quotes). The picture is not of him but of his funeral, the cranes of London docks bowing as the Havengore takes his body to Waterloo station, a moving and unforgettable sight.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

To be conservative ... is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one's own fortune to live at the level of one's own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one's circumstances. With some people this is itself a choice; in others it is a disposition with appears, frequently or less frequently, in their preferences and aversions, and is not itself chosen or specifically cultivated. 

With the Diamond Jubilee rapidly approaching, Peter Whittle, Director of the New Culture Forum put up an excerpt from his recent book, Monarchy Matters. Here are a few paragraphs:

The monarchy is the embodiment of our history. That history is now woefully under-taught in our state school system (one recent poll showed that a large number of children were under the impression that Churchill was a nodding toy dog in a TV advertisement). Too much of our educational establishment has instead concentrated on forms of social engineering. Pupils are leaving school without the most basic knowledge of key dates and events in our history. Newcomers are given little idea of what they should be integrating into. Could not the jubilee be the perfect inspiration, the ideal moment, for a popular celebration of our national story?

This could be done in simple yet effective ways. For example, could we not see the formation of acting troupes, who would visit schools across the country to present accessible, entertaining and informative shows that depict the great historical personalities and moments in British history? This can work wonders for children’s imaginations: I vividly recall, as a primary-school kid, learning about our maritime history in just such a way. And why not revive the old tradition of presenting each schoolchild with a free jubilee mug? For a modern twist, there could be a competition for the children themselves to design it.

The past decade has seen a boom in public sculpture: more has been erected in our towns and cities in ten years than in the whole of the past century. So much of it is banal – meaningless to the people who live with it and too often the result of entrenched social and political agendas, which are, in any case, fast falling out of fashion. Could not the jubilee see a flowering of new commemorative public art, of the type that has been a feature throughout our history – fountains, obelisks or just simple statues? It could be financed by public and private subscription, which has been the basis for some of our most famous monuments and statues.

Talk of sculpture brings me to a final thought. Would it not be good, one day, to see a likeness of the Queen occupying the now famous fourth plinth on Trafalgar Square? That this might indeed happen has been rumoured in recent times, but so far nothing has been confirmed. Of late that empty platform has been a temporary home to various waifs and strays – nebulous concepts that are literally immaterial, ‘challenging’ ideas that fail to challenge, gimmickry and trivial personal preoccupations. It would be both popular and appropriate to install a permanent, regal statue of our Queen. But perhaps her reign needs to be at an end before that could happen. In which case, the longer we have to wait, the better. Trafalgar Square is the most famous public space in the country, and it is what we show the world when it visits. It is a meeting place, the town square of the capital, which also celebrates our past. But our history carries on. And there could be no better affirmation.'

Tory Historian came across a potentially very interesting new blog, called 80 Libraries: The Quest. The idea, it would appear is to blog about eight libraries around the world. (One wonders whether Jules Verne ever realized the sheer brilliance of his title.)

It is, in itself, a fascinating idea. Tory Historian wishes the blogger well and will be watching future postings. In addition, the first library is one TH is very fond of, the London Library. The descriptions and pictures are delightful and well worth reading and looking at. There is a slight problem: the links at the bottom do not actually link to anything. Clearly, the author had forgotten to put up the URLs. How different from Tory Historian's efficiency.

For anyone interested here is the link to the London Library blog.

The two great Russian questions are: Who is at fault and What is to be done.

 Кто виноват? is a novel by Alexander Herzen. Based on various personal experiences, it is his only foray into the writing of fiction (one has to assume that his various autobiographical volumes are more or less accurate) and not his best work. However, it is considerably better than Что делать? by Nikolay Chernyshevsky, a most appallingly boring novel with no fewer than four dreams by the heroine Vera Pavlovna and one that Dostyevsky mocked and attacked mercilessly. Astonishingly enough, given that it was written and read at a period when Russian literature produced one genius after another, this long and hectoring work was taken up and eagerly adopted as a secular bible by the Russian radical intelligentsia, particularly its younger members. This perverseness may well account for why things went so badly wrong in Russia. 


The title was subsequently adopted by V. I. Lenin (the anniversary of whose death is coming soon) and the best one can say for his tract of the need for a revolutionary party to lead the populace to where they do not want to go is that it is shorter than Chernyshevsky's novel.


Both these questions were asked yesterday after a talk given by Luke Harding, the Guardian journalist who has  had the distinction of being the first hack to be expelled from post-Soviet Russia for writing things that the authorities were not happy about, in London's Pushkin House. As it happens, he had no answer. Why Russia has gone the way it has in the last twenty years is a question that needs many hours of cogitation and discussion. Many people are at fault and by now it has become quite difficult to work out what can be done to start remedying the situation. 


Mr Harding's talk was interesting and centred on his personal experience from which he drew a number of obvious conclusions about Russia and its governing elite. He also mentioned his predecessors as Guardian correspondents in the Soviet Union, Arthur Ransome and Malcolm Muggeridge. He did not go into details but, had he done so, he might have noted that while the first one of those swallowed the Bolshevik line completely, to the point of becoming an agent of the Cheka while the second one (and he did refer to this) famously went as a convinced supporter, became disillusioned and was one of the first writers to tell the truth about Stalin's monstrous regime. 


Mr Harding, however, did not mention any journalists who had, like him, been expelled from Russia or the Soviet Union. It is, therefore, worth pointing out that the first of those was D. D. Braham of the Times, who was expelled in 1903 for writing unfavourably about the pogroms and the subversion of the Finnish constitution. 

Tory Historian wrote some while ago about visiting Dickens Museum on a Boxing Day and about George Orwell's essay about the great writer. That led to a very interesting discussion. However, yesterday's London Evening Standard had an item about the museum, wondering why it will be shut for refurbishment for most of the year, which just happens to be one dedicated to Charles Dickens.

The counter-argument was worthy of consideration:

Dr Florian Schweitzer, director of the Charles Dickens Museum, apologised to those upset about the timing of the £3.2 million renovation. "In our opinion this is the best year to do it, because there will be many other Dickens exhibits available," he said. "When everything winds down we'll be back with more facilities and an even stronger offering." The refurbishment includes an expansion into the building next door to make the museum look more like it did when Dickens was alive.

Dr Schweitzer added that the museum would arrange pop-up collections around the country during the six months it is closed.

A spokeswoman for the Dickens Fellowship said: "It seems ridiculous that so many people will be coming to London for the Olympics but that they won't be able to enjoy one of the world's most important centres for Dickens lovers."

Tory Historian happens to be what is vulgarly described as a sucker for newsreels of the past. What a joy it is, therefore, to find two videos on the History Today blog, one of people celebrating in the streets in 1918 on hearing that the war is finally over and the other is a longish piece of various dignitaries arriving for the Versailles Conference. There is even a sequence of the documents being signed. One wonders where the Pathé News cameraman is standing as the pictures always seem to be above and behind everybody else.

Or PMQs as they are known not so affectionately. Tory Historian's Blog mentioned the fiftieth anniversary of this tradition before. Nevertheless, a section on the Parliamentary website seemed like a good opportunity to revive the subject. There are many interesting links in the piece, but it is somewhat unfortunate that it is so badly written and edited.

There is, for example a reference to a Parliamentary Breifing Note. Really, that rule ought to be known by people who work in the House of Commons. And what does the first sentence mean?

"The 24 October 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of Prime Minister's Question Time as a permanent parliamentary event." The 24 October 2011?  Dear me.

Still, there are many gems of interest to people who find parliamentary history and traditions interesting. Go to it with a will, say I.

In Federalist 51, James Madison (or it might have been Alexander Hamilton) wrote:‎

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

Jeremy Black, a conservative historian who is probably a member of the Conservative Party as well, writes in History Today about the grievance industry.

Grievances are a characteristic of post-Cold War history, as various ‘liberated’ peoples have adopted historical claims in the service of their political goals. The end of the Cold War discredited Marxism as an official creed and lessened its influence as a basis for analysis, resulting in a major shift away from the understanding of society linked at an international level to the expression, revival or rise of national grievances, notably within Eastern Europe.

Grievances provide an easy way to mobilise identity and expound policy; and the use of grievance in this fashion by one party encourages its use by another. The copy-cat nature of public history has become very apparent, as in rival Chinese and Japanese accounts such as those inspired by recent territorial disputes in the East China Sea. Grievance becomes a means both to interrogate the past and to deploy the past to justify current actions.

Tory Historian finds a great deal of C. S. Lewis's writing entertaining and instructive. A copy of Mere Christianity, the published version of Lewis's extremely successful wartime broadcasts on religion and morality has produced many gems.

Lewis says that some people have suggested to him that moral judgement that we all, according to him, have is, perhaps, just an instinct like other instincts. Not so, replies he. Instincts are like the notes in music but it is moral judgement that tells us how to play them. Left to themselves, instincts will not guide us and they never do. Even the best instincts can steer us in the wrong direction.

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of these that will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials 'for the sake of humanity', and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.

News comes of two incredibly principled poets, who, one assumes, fight like anything for their various fees and royalties, withdrawing from the T. S. Eliot poetry prize, because ... oh fie ... it is now sponsored by nvestment management firm Aurum Funds. Oh, oh, oh. Smelling salts someone, please.

The Poetry Book Society negotiated the three-year sponsorship deal with Aurum earlier this year. The deal followed the withdrawal of its Arts Council funding – a move protested by over 100 poets including Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage.

Kinsella told the Bookseller that he "fully" understood why the poetry organisation had looked elsewhere for funding, "given the horrendous way they were treated, but as an anticapitalist in full-on form, that is my position".

"Hedge funds are at the very pointy end of capitalism, if I can put it that way," he added.

Oswald, who pulled her collection Memorial from the prize on Tuesday, believes that "poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions".

Tory Historian has mentioned before (here and here, for instance) that detective stories are the most conservative of literary genres. And here is an article I wrote on it last week for Taki's Magazine.

Consider what happens in a detective story, even a modern one that purports to have a leftward (or “enlightened”) leaning: A crime, probably murder, is committed, possibly followed by similar crimes. The world is turned upside-down as a result. Together with the detective, we cannot rest until the perpetrators are discovered and brought to justice. The perpetrator is at the very least prevented from repeating the crime. Human life is sacrosanct. Murder is wrong, no matter how you look at it. It is the ultimate crime. It destroys nature’s balance, which can be restored only by the culprit’s discovery and his or her punishment. In a century that saw the casual elimination of millions of people, this highly moral attitude became and remained attractive to many people. This has continued into the new century, which has not started off too well.