Conservative History Journal

Tory Historian found another interesting mini-exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, this time a collection of drawings and prints by Richard George Mathews. In the introduction to the exhibition there is an unnecessarily snide comment about the pictures being of idle Edwardians who seemed to find a great deal of pleasure in just travelling.

As the drawings are of writers like Kipling, Hardy and Jerome K. Jerome, of the Manager of the Times newspaper, Charles Moberley Bell and of various actor-managers, idleness is not quite the word that immediately springs to mind.

The most interesting of the portraits is of Henry Algernon George Percy, Earl Percy (1871 – 1909), a man so well-known in his time, that in 1908 when the drawing was published in The Bystander, the title of it was “A Future Tory Leader”. A year later he was dead and how many people have even heard of him today?

Ever curious about past grandees, Tory Historian looked around, found a very inadequate piece on Wikipedia, which did, however, refer to the intriguing story of death being the result of a duel, and turned to the Oxford Dictionary of Biography and the Dictionary of National Biography.

True or otherwise, the official story of Earl Percy catching a chill in Paris and dying of it does irresistibly remind one of the unfortunate end of Ernest Worthing, Jack Worthing's mythical and wicked younger brother, in Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”. In actual fact, Earl Percy was, if anything, more like the main character of “An Ideal Husband” without the unfortunate secret in the past.

Henry Percy was the eldest son of the 7th Duke of Northumberland but died too young to inherit the title. He seems to have done extraordinarily well at school and university, winning the 1892 Newdigate Prize for English Verse at Oxford. The slightly unusual subject he chose was St Francis of Assisi.

In 1895 he won a by-election at South Kensington and continued to represent that constituency until his death. Another important event of that year was his first visit to Turkey and the Near East. He went back in 1897 and published “Notes of a Diary in Asiatic Turkey” the following year.

His 1899 visit produced “The Highlands of Asiatic Turkey” in 1901. Earl Percy became known as an expert on the Near East and was made Parliamentary Under-Secretary for India in 1902 but really came into his own and Under-Secretary to Lord Lansdowne, the Foreign Secretary, in 1903. He specialized in matters to do with Turkey and often took an independent line from his superior and the government in general.

For instance, Earl Percy promoted the idea of an Anglo-German alliance that would stabilize Turkey and stem growing Russian influence. One can’t help wondering how the twentieth century would have developed if that idea had been followed instead of the later, liberal Entente Cordiale of 1904 and Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.

Earl Percy was accused of having “perhaps excessive sympathy for Turkey”, an unpopular point of view by the time of the early twentieth century, though it might have been better received by Disraeli. He also showed himself to be rather concerned with the political position of Muslims in India as the discussions on possible reforms progressed in 1906 – 1907.

Another of his important political achievements was the renewal and strengthening of the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1905.

One can quite see why in an age when foreign policy mattered a great deal to a government, a man like Earl Percy would have been seen as a potential leader. An untimely death meant not just the end of his career (which would be obvious) but his disappearance from the history of the Conservative Party. One cannot help wanting to know about more “lost leaders” like Earl Percy.

More from Diane Urquhart's book on the formidable Londonderry ladies. This quote is singularly relevant to certain developments in the American presidential election, where the "second-wave feminists" have found themselves on the back foot:

There is no question that the marchionesses formed part of a small coterie of political confidantes and hosteses who worked by distinctly personal means in high society to promote their family, direct careers and impact change while their marriage and widowhood would respectively facilitate and impede their political influence.

Indeed, the idea of the personal being political, brought to the public's attention by the second-wave feminism of 1960s America, can be applied to a different place and a different time: in this instance to nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain and Ireland.

The glamour of the Duchess of Devonshire has eclipsed a very important historical fact. She was not the only lady to have become involved in politics long before female suffrage had become a political fact. Nor were the Whigs the only ones to have powerful and influential political hostesses.

Tory Historian is reading Diane Urquhart's "The Ladies of Londonderry", a history of that powerful family through the distaff side. The book follows the story for 150 years, from 1800 to 1959, by which time the role of the political hostess had diminished though had not disappeared completely.

With women entering politics directly and, as it turned out, ready to rise to the very top, back-stage management seemed to be a little less important. Further reports of the book will follow.

The Rosenbergs were really spies? Well, colour me surprised, as they say on the other side of the Pond. It seems that Morton Sobell, who was convicted of espionage with the notorious pair, has now admitted that yes, indeed, he and Julius Rosenberg with the help of his wife Ethel, spied for the Soviet Union.

As it happens, the Venona documents and more recent finds in the KGB archives before they were closed to the public again have shown some time ago that there was not the slightest doubt on the subject. But, as the Rosenbergs have been a cause célébre for the left during the last fifty odd years, it is all a surprise. Whatever next? Alger Hiss was really a GRU agent? Surely not!

A phone call from the Birmingham Council Leader’s office alerted me to the fact that this is not the first time the Conservative Party has decided to hold its annual conference in Birmingham. The Tory Council Leader wanted to know exactly when and in what circumstances did the previous events take place.

Well, naturally, my first port of call was John Barnes, who is a mine of information about the Conservative Party and its history. He knew, of course, and directed me to the books that could give me more information. Quite a story it is, too, as I put it together, using Andrew Roberts’s biography of Lord Salisbury, Robert Rhodes James’s biography of Lord Randolph Churchill and Richard Shannon’s “The Age of Salisbury”. Oh and a quick look at R. J. Q. Adams’s “Balfour”.

The story is quite fascinating and puts to pay the notion that somehow politics was a much more gentlemanly affair when it was run by “gentlemen”. The Salisbury/Northcote fight with Churchill was anything but gentlemanly. In the end, Churchill lost not because he was a nicer person but because, seduced by apparent party adulation, he could not envisage anybody outmanoeuvring him as Salisbury did. Lord Randolph Churchill, it seems, believed that he was indispensable – the most dangerous delusion any politician can have.

The National Union of Conservative Associations was founded in 1867 and held its first meeting in the Freemasons’ Tavern in London on November 12 of that year. In 1868 they went to Birmingham and there were 7 people in attendance. By 1869, in Liverpool there were 36 delegates. And so it would have continued but for the disastrous Conservative defeat in 1880. As Robert Rhodes James puts it in his biography of Lord Randolph:

It is a monotonous feature of English politics that the defeated party in an election blames its organization for the débâcle. The Conservatives in 1880 were no exception to this rule.

Tory Historian was somewhat underwhelmed by the news that Keira Knightley, one of our least talented young film actresses was going to play the notorious Duchess of Devonshire in a new film, directed by Saul Dibb, whose claim to cinematic fame (if that is what one means) is the 2004 “Bullet Boy”, which somehow escaped Tory Historian’s attention. Apparently it was another gritty, hard-hitting picture of ghetto youth in the East End. It may have been good but it may also have been extremely bad. Either way, it says little about Mr Dibb’s ability to understand history.

Naturally, Tory Historian is not a great fan of the duchess in question, a great Whig hostess and politician manqué. It would seem from the reviews and previews that Mr Dibb has little understanding of the duchess’s importance in history and, indeed, of the entire historical period. Instead, he has produced a film that purports to be the story of Diana, Princess of Wales in beautiful eighteenth century costume.

This is rather a shame because Amanda Foreman’s biography, “Georgiana”, on which the film is supposed to be based, was an extremely readable and well-researched book, even if the author seemed to accept that the Whigs were somehow speaking for the people and in favour of democracy, both notions somewhat anachronistic. She does not make much of it but it keeps bubbling up. Interestingly, Dr Foreman has complained about the Diana link but that has not stopped her from trying to cash in on what she must, presumably see, as a potentially very successful film.

The film, based on reviews and previews, seems to concentrate on the duke’s long-standing affair with the duchess’s friend, Lady Elizabeth Foster and then throws in the duchess’s late and somewhat catastrophic affair with Lord Grey. (Yes, he of the Reform Act in his younger incarnation. Tory Historian was stunned.)

Charles James Fox does get a look-in but nothing seems to be made of Georgiana’s involvement in politics, or of either the American or, more importantly, the French Revolution. One wonders how they deal with the insistent theory that she and Fox had an affair.

What is particularly ridiculous is the repeated reference to the “disturbed” and “unhappy” duchess, just like Diana. Even allowing for the fact that the ultra-skinny and expressionless Keira Knightley can play only disturbed and unhappy (did she bother to look at those wonderful portraits of the duchess, one wonders) this seems a daft way to talk.

There is no evidence for disturbance or unhappiness, except on occasion. Yes, her marriage was arranged and she was very young. That was the normal state of affairs in her circle and she married up, becoming the holder of a very grand title and enormous wealth. Was the marriage happy? Probably not but there was no expectation of that.

There is no evidence that Georgiana did not fit in very well with the rather dissolute Devonshire House way of life, doing what other ladies of her station in life did: spend a great deal of money on clothes and entertainment, drink and gamble, play politics and travel. How is any of that rebellious or going against what society expected from her?

Her involvement in Whig politics brought all sorts of rather brutal attacks in the Tory press, just as the Whig press attacked brutally ladies who were involved on the other side. Those were not sensitive days.

Her affair with Grey ended badly because she had a child (very bad luck) and her husband refused to have anything to do with her bastard while his own were brought up in the household. This was not necessarily the pattern with all such families so one can feel some compassion. Even more compassion goes out to the duchess because of the painful and disfiguring disease that she suffered from for some years afterwards but it is not clear whether the film deals with that.

Of course, historical films are rarely accurate and often use their theme to comment on other matters. Carol Reed’s “The Young Mr Pitt” simplified a complex biography and emphasised the theme of beleaguered Britain fighting an aggressive Continental empire. It was made during the Second World War, after all.

What is the aim of “Duchess”? Diana is hardly a figure of importance more than ten years after her death, though the sentimentalization of all things public, which many call dianafication is still with us. That has more to do with other people’s attitudes than with her own rather nebulous personality.

Why not try to make a good film out of the Duchess of Devonshire’s spectacularly interesting life story that would not make her into a victim of society and would include all the really scandalous aspects of her life (and her sister’s, the Countess of Bessborough)? Of course, one would have to have someone else play her. Someone who could act and make an attempt to resemble the original.

While looking up something in Andrew Roberts's outstanding biography of the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, Tory Historian came across the following paragraph, which raises a number of interesting points about the role and duty of MPs:

When Lord Randolph Churchill emerged as the leader of the movement for Party democracy in 1883 and 1884, Salisbury set his face against anything that he considered liable to fetter the complete independence of parliamentarians, as famously enunciated in Edmund Burke's 1774 address to the electors of Bristol. He was not about to allow parliamentary sovereignty to be circumscribed by caucuses of Party bureaucrats, let alone rank-and-file Party members.

Control of Parties from outside Parliament both seemed to Salisbury impractical as it could not take into account the fast-moving mood swings of the Commons chamber, and repugnant in a Constitution in which an MP was expected to represent his whole constitutency, not just that part of it which voted for him.

There were, therefore, philosophical as well as practical considerations why Salisbury and Churchill were set upon a collision course.

Well, experimental it may be but the theme is not far off what this blog is about, which gives Tory Historian a good deal of leeway.

Wandering round the British Museum, Tory Historian decided to take photographs of two of the choicest exhibits in one of the Greek galleries. One is of the face of the Kouros, the young boy, that is probably from the 6th century BC, when, as the notice said, "when the conventional smile was replaced by a solemn pout, the facial expression of classical sculpture". Does one get the feeling that the curator is fonder of Archaic Greek sculptures than of classical ones?

On this figure, though, the enigmatic smile is still present.

The other picture is of one of the earliest Greek bronzes, from the 5th century BC and probably from Cyprus, the head of Apollo. Tory Historian decided to take the picture in profile for no particular reason (not being a particularly artsy photographer). For all of that, the amateur photo seems to have more life than the official one on the BM page. Can't understand it. Normally they are much better.

Yesterday, when it was not raining, Tory Historian attended a garden party in Oxford. Well, what else does one do in Oxford? This was an unusually mixed party with guests from many different parts of the world and even different parts of Oxford easily chatting with each other. Those who know the city well will not be surprised to hear that the party was not in that stronghold of academic residence, North Oxford.

Tory Historian spent a long time talking to a Serbian lady, who teaches English in Belgrade and comes to England once a year or so. She spent the war of the nineties in that city and was, together with her family, part of the ten per cent, as he estimates it, who were against Milosevic and his wars with the other states of former Yugoslavia. They did not even object to the final act, the bombing of Belgrade because, as her father had put it, Serbia had to learn a lesson.

Anybody who thinks this smacks of treason might like to contemplate what Germans, who had opposed the Nazi regime, its wars and the support it had from ordinary people, may have thought during allied bombing.

However, what Tory Historian found particularly interesting was the story of the Serbian lady becoming vegetarian – not a common phenomenon in the Balkans or Eastern Europe. It was precisely because of that she had decided to stop eating meat and fish, however hard that made her life. This made her different, roused suspicion in her interlocutors (you are not Orthodox, they would say) and allowed her to start discussions on politics and express her opinions. Rather a courageous move that puts the activity of our own vegetarians into perspective.

Interestingly enough, as Tory Historian mentioned in the ensuing conversation, vegetarianism in history has always been viewed as rather a subversive form of living, ever since the days of Pythagoras, who is alleged to have been murdered with his disciples by rebels in Croton. Of course, that may have been simply because they were seriously fed up with having to study that theorem.

Colin Spencer, in many ways a very eccentric writer and journalist, did produce a fascinating history of vegetarianism, in which he explored the relationship between it and social subversiveness at length.

It is always nice to find something unexpected like the Canadian Conservative Forum. Apart from anything else, it has lots of excellent conservative quotations, some from Canadians, some from others.

Here is a very good comment by the writer, critic and journalist Robert Fulford:

Civilization begins with the consciousness of memory; it begins when we decide we must maintain a spoken, drawn or written account of who we are, what we have done, and why we did it. Conversely, when we abandon this enterprise, or neglect it, or wilfully distort it for the political needs of the moment, we grow less civilized. A society loses its way when it loses secure connections with the past. That possibility is one of the dangers facing us during this historic period.

We are not likely to forget this year of all years the "assistance" Soviet troops insisted on rendering to Czechoslovakia forty years ago today. Here is the BBC story. At least, there is no longer any pretence that anyone in Georgia asked for assistance though, of course, there was that story of "genocide" in South Ossetia, since disproved by all, even Russian sources.

This is a blog on history, so let's stick to history but forty years is not such a long span of time.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the birth of one of the most prolific writers of excellent popular fiction, of which Tory Historian approves, as readers would have realized. Georgette Heyer, whose fan club maintains a very elegant website, was born on August 16, 1902 in Wimbledon, which is somehow appropriate.

She died, an immensely successful author, on July 4, 1974 in London. Known largely for her Regency novels, she also wrote highly amusing, if somewhat ridiculous detective stories, mostly about Superintendent Hannasyde and Sergeant, later Inspector, Hemingway. There were also other historical novels but these are not so well known. (Wikipedia lists them all.)

The Regency novels are highly entertaining and rely on very accurate information that Georgette Heyer collected assiduously. She was clearly influenced by Jane Austen and, while not being as great a writer as the latter, she is considerably better than most authors of historical romances.

The Regency world of Ms Heyer, a slightly higher one socially than that of Miss Austen, is vivid and is never merely a modern world with a few tushes and gadzookses added to them. In fact, there are very few tushes and no gadzookses at all but the details of dress, habit, behaviour, food and so on are accurate as anyone who reads contemporary accounts and diaries can see. Even professional historians have been known to recommend Ms Heyer's romances.

Her detective stories, while mostly very silly and never as popular as the romances, also give a clear picture of the upper middle class and middle class world of England some years before and some years after the Second World War. In her descriptions of post-war England she shows herself to be considerably more accurate than the more highly regarded but hopelessly outdated and nostalgic Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh.

Tory Historian finds it particularly admirable that Ms Heyer's dating and time scale in the detective stories is always accurate. To prove this, two novels, which have many of the same characters some years apart, are particularly recommended: "They Found Him Dead", published in 1937 and "Duplicate Death", published in 1951.

And we used to be proud of them. Indeed, many an academic on both sides of the Atlantic has referred with a knowing smile to his or her career in the hush-hush part of the Second World War and the only annoying part of it all is that it is not always possible to find how true the individual claims are.

All of a sudden these people have become known as spies, a term that has a distasteful aspect and programmes about people who fought the enemy through gathering and analyzing vital intelligence are full of disdainful verbal grimaces.

Tory Historian once sat through a completely pointless talk, which asked whether Raoul Wallenberg, the one undoubted hero of the Second World War and victim of the other totalitarian state, could have used his position as a Swedish diplomat to supply information to the Allies as well as rescuing Jews in Hungary.

In the end, the speaker had to admit that he had no evidence for any of his speculation. But the question that was left in the mind of the audience, made up as it was from analysts, writers and former practitioners of the intelligence service is why that should be a problem. The war was fought to be won and intelligence was an important weapon.

Now the subject of wartime agents has cropped again in what sounds like a shock-horror story produced by CNN. Apparently, the famed chef Julia Child and Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg

served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt.

The full secret comes out Thursday, all of the names and previously classified files identifying nearly 24,000 spies who formed the first centralized intelligence effort by the United States. The National Archives, which this week released a list of the names found in the records, will make available for the first time all 750,000 pages identifying the vast spy network of military and civilian operatives.

Two books arrived in the post today for review in the Conservative History Journal. Both are published by Politico's, no longer the domain of one Iain Dale, and both are about very recent British political history.

There is Norman Fowler's "A Political Suicide", subtitled "The Conservatives' voyage into the wilderness", a cautionary tale to both the Tories and Gordon Brown's Labour. I have only glanced through it and, thus, cannot tell whether Lord Fowler shoulders any of the blame. Some lucky reviewer can find out and tell the rest of us. Incidentally, I never cease to be amazed by the propensity modern politicians have for keeping diaries that seem to record very little of any interest. (Miaow!)

Secondly, we have "Challenge to Democracy" by Ronald McIntosh, who was the director general of the National Economic Development Council (Neddy) from mid-1973 till 1977. The sub-title of this tome is "Politics, Trade Union Power and Economic Failure in the 1970s" and who would know that better than Mr McIntosh, though I do not suppose he could have done anything.

Well, readers, who would like to review these books for the Conservative History Journal, either the print version or the blog? If you do please e-mail me on szamuely_AT_aol.com.

Being an historian by training and interest (though not, sadly, by employment) I have always found it odd that people should not be interested in history. But it’s about people and what they do and why they do it. How can it not be interesting? The usual reply consists of a list of unrelated and rather dull topics that passes for history these days in schools.

It has been obvious for some time that what excites people is narrative history, which is, presumably, the reason for the popularity enjoyed by popular history books and TV series in the last few years. Of course, as Andrew Roberts pointed out to me in an interview for the Conservative History Journal, this popularity may not last and can be replaced at any time by any other subject.

For all of that, it is clear that there are many people out there who want to know about history and feel cheated by its non-teaching at schools. This influenced Civitas a couple of years ago when it decided to reprint the old children’s classic, “Our Island Story” by H. E. Marshall.

I re-read it in its hardback version and thought it was a pity that the new edition was quite so heavy to pick up, what with thick glossy paper and rather thick cover. It was meant to be for children who would find it difficult to manoeuvre a hefty volume of that kind. This might well have been sorted out in the paperback edition.

There was something of a surprise as I did not remember how much of the history Henrietta Marshall wrote was actually based on literature, most notably, of course, Shakespeare’s plays. There are many quotations from the plays as well as other poetry.

Poetry, of course, is a great incentive for learning history, especially if it is of the more heroic kind and those plays have been inspiring debates for centuries. However, none of that is history in the acceptable sense of the word. It is more a reflection of the way teachers wanted children and young people to see their own national development.

Browsing through some second hand books at a summer fair recently I came across a slim tome I had not heard of before. It is by Peter Mandler, the Cambridge historian and is entitled “History and National Life”, complete with that famous picture of the young Walter Raleigh listening to the stories of an old salt on the cover.

This is an interesting topic and I shall enjoy reading the book and reporting on it, despite the rather poor review by Roger Spalding published in the Institute of Historical Research.

Yet more apologies for a prolonged silence. Other matters have intruded.

Today we should turn our attention to those astonishing people, the scientists and engineers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century; the people who made this country truly great.

The reason for that is because August 9 is the anniversary of the birth of Scottish engineer, architect and stonemason, Thomas Telford. The son of a shepherd, who died soon after his birth, he was apprenticed to a stonemason at the age of 14 and was largely self-taught.

The list of his achievements make one feel rather dizzy. He built important roads, canals and bridges in England, Wales and Scotland. He was called the “Colossus of Roads” by his great friend, the poet Southey, one the Lake Poets in his early life and a Poet Laureate later on. Presumably, the idea of two cultures simply did not occur to these people.

When you have read Thomas Telford’s biography have a look at the list of the Men of Science Alive in 1807 - 08, pictured in the group portrait above.

This is a posting that celebrates great people so there will be no moaning and tearing out of hair because these days our universities and firms find it hard to recruit British students who could get anywhere near studying or practising science and engineering.

Tory Historian spent an hour or so last Thursday in the National Portrait Gallery, which is open late on Thursdays and Fridays. On the top floor the small room that is given over to temporary exhibitions on one theme is filled with images of Charles I before his execution, during it and as the glorious martyr afterwards. The exhibition is on till mid-December and is well worth seeing.

The Parliamentarians probably over-reached themselves when they tried, condemned and executed the King, thus turning a problematic and not very popular former ruler into a martyr for all times. (Tory Historian seems to recall talk of the same thing happening with Saddam Hussein after his execution but it has not. That man was beyond simply unpopular – he was hated in a way Charles I was not except by very few.)

There is deliberately very little about Charles and his Scottish wars or disagreements with Parliament or, for that matter, the religious, constitutional and political problems he allowed to grow in the years before the Civil War. Many of the portraits that relate to the period can be seen in the large room devoted to the subject.

The theme in the special exhibition is the fascinating one of propaganda and the way opinion can be swayed. Charles was not a popular king but the notion of raising Parliamentary rebellion may not have appealed to many people either. Still, there had been rebellions before – some successful, some not so much.

The issue here was the trial and execution. Charles was actually put on trial and accused of being “a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and a public and implacable enemy of the commonwealth of England”. This was the shattering new idea that the squires of England, who sat in that Parliament thought of: that the king could be tried because there was a law and a constitutional order that was superior to him.

New ideas are not necessarily popular and this one was not, followed as it was by King Charles’s apparently noble martyrdom during trial and at the execution. The subsequent oppressive rule by Parliament did not endear the cause to people and the Royalists profited by it.

Etchings and woodcuts of Charles’s execution, real and imaginary, were widely available, though their production and distribution was actually banned in the country. They were brought in from the Continent, many, interestingly enough, from Holland, a country that had only recently emerged from its own war against the King of Spain.

As the notes to the exhibition say:

Royalist propaganda avoided difficult political and constitutional issues and focused attention on a sympathetic image of a devoted king suffering for his people.

Once again apologies for light posting. Other preoccupations, including dental appointments have been eating into time. Matters will improve. Well they can scarcely get worse.

In the meantime there is only about 30 minutes left to remember the birthday in 1866 of one of the most delightful children's writers, Beatrix Potter. There can be no question but that what she wrote was masterful conservative tracts encased in easily understood stories with enchanting illustrations. Anyone who thinks otherwise should compare the lives of Benjamin Bunny and Peter Rabbit or find out what nearly happened to silly Jemima Puddleduck who was saved in time by the wise and traditionally minded dog, Shep.

Tory Historian was once wandering round the National Portrait Gallery - the theme of tomorrow's blog - on a quiet day when the keeper of the Early Twentieth Century Gallery was predisposed to chat. He was eloquent in his admiration for Beatrix Potter and compared her very favourably with all the swaggering First World War generals and officers.

Tory Historian is back in harness after a gap when time had to be devoted to a serious piece of work. An interesting anniversary needs to be noted. As Historic-UK.com points out for July 22, on this day in 1946 bread rationing was introduced in Britain, more than a year after the war ended. Unlike other European countries, this one managed to get through the six years of war without bread rationing and a year after the end it was introduced. How is one to explain this/

The website says rather blandly: "The shortage is blamed upon a poor harvest and drought." Hmm. Not on the socialist government that was in charge of the country?

This is not an anniversary any conservative can relish but neither can any historian ignore the beignning of the French Revolution, an event that changed the history of Western Europe and, in its wake, probably most of the world, whether for better of worse, we can argue about.

As the complete quotation from "A Tale of Two Cities" sums up:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it ws the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we
were all going the other way.