Category History books

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The Fallen by Louise Brangan review – an enraging account of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries

The horrifying story of the Catholic-run institutions that incarcerated thousands of women and girls

Many readers, and surely most Irish readers, will finish this book in a state of white-knuckled rage, mingled with sorrow and at least a pang of guilt. It is a detailed, thoroughgoing and appalling account of the Magdalene laundries, the most famous, and most infamous, among Ireland’s extended and varied landscape of penal or correctional institutions, which operated for most of the 20th century – the last of the laundries was closed in 1996.

As the academic Louise Brangan points out in The Fallen, it is easy to become confused by the number and variety of prisons, mental asylums, orphanages, workhouses and homes for unmarried mothers that proliferated in Ireland between the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the late 1990s. However, the Magdalene laundries were unique. Dr Brangan writes: “In a regime distinguished by its excessive inhumanity, the Magdalene laundries were its deep end. In 1951, when the laundries were at their height, for every 100,000 males, 27 were in prison … [while] for every 100,000 females, 70 were in a laundry. These were not peripheral: they were Ireland’s main carceral institution.”

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The Black Death by Thomas Asbridge review – a medieval horror story

A magisterial history of one of the worst ever pandemics focuses on the individuals caught up in the chaos

In Venice, authorities tried to enforce social distancing by closing all the bars, and banning the sale of wine by merchant boats plying the canals. In Gloucester, the powers that be attempted to lock down the city by banning anyone travelling to and from Bristol, 40 miles south. But fights broke out among thirsty Italians, and Gloucester’s quarantine was broken – whether it was by people simply going on a trip to check their eyesight has, alas, gone unrecorded. In London, there was a dramatic rise in the sale of personal protective equipment, in the form of gloves.

The story of the Black Death, as historian Thomas Asbridge shows in this magisterial survey, contains many such echoes of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it also shows just how relatively lucky we were a few years ago. The plague was far more lethal, and in the areas it spread between 1346 and 1353 it killed half the population. About 100m died: it was, Asbridge remarks, “the most lethal natural disaster in human history”. If a pathogen with a similar case fatality rate were to erupt worldwide today, billions might die.

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The Writer and the Traitor by Robert Verkaik review – divided loyalties

Sex, booze and subterfuge – the extraordinary friendship of Graham Greene and spy Kim Philby

At the Café Royal in Regent Street in 1944 three intelligence officers bent over their plates while Europe held its breath. Outside, London braced for D-day. Inside, Graham Greene announced that he was resigning from MI6.

Kim Philby, his chief in Section V, MI6’s counterespionage arm, blinked. Educated at Westminster, converted to communism at Cambridge and by then securely installed as Moscow’s man at the heart of the British establishment, he had helped orchestrate the deception on which Operation Overlord depended, persuading Hitler that the allies would land at Calais rather than Normandy. Greene had played his part in tending the illusion. Yet here he was, strolling off-stage before the curtain rose.

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Tales of the Suburbs by John Grindrod review – an entertaining alternative history of queer Britain

From London’s commuter belt to the country village gay club, these portraits of LGBTQ+ life are filled with humour, compassion and observational flair

Generations of readers have loved Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City novels. His chronicle of queer life began in 1976 in the eclectic glamour of San Francisco’s Barbary Lane, where queer people learned who they were and how to live their lives. But even Maupin relocated in the end. The most recent instalment, Mona of the Manor, saw one of its key characters move to the Cotswolds to navigate a very different kind of village.

The social historian John Grindrod nods to Maupin in this fantastically entertaining alternative history of queer life in Britain, which departs from the usual tales of city-based freedom and discovery to tell the stories of people who grew up in the suburbs. “The suburbs” resist easy definition, and Grindrod handles this lightly. Sometimes they’re marked out by social class, sometimes by geography, each facet blurring into the other. His locations range from London’s commuter belt to hamlets, farms and towns, from the edges of Portsmouth and Hull to pockets of Glasgow and Wilmslow and a tiny village in Lincolnshire, where a gay builder is protected from homophobic abuse in the pub by the local darts team.

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Scholar, seductress, alchemist: who was the real Cleopatra?

The Egyptian queen has fascinated me from childhood, but following the archives led only to ancient gossip and Roman propaganda. Fiction was the way to liberate her from misogynist myth

Witch, whore, villain – there are few women who have been as vilified through history as Cleopatra VII. The disdain of ancient sources that sought to dismiss her as exotic and seductive has corrupted her legacy. But I take pleasure in knowing that her name has permeated through time with far more recognition than the men who wrote about her. Ask a 10-year-old child who Plutarch is and they’ll scrunch up their brows – but Cleopatra? Their eyes light up with glee.

Mine did when I was tasked by my schoolteacher to draw Cleopatra. My small hands searched through the box of crayons. I picked up the brown, its tip pristine from lack of use. It was the loneliest colour in the box, used only to draw mud or bark. The face I drew reflected my own in features and colour.

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Ancient by Luke Barley review – the secret history of Britain’s woodlands

A former ranger tells the story of how the UK’s forests intimately shaped – and were shaped by – its people

It may not sit well with the politicians who now seek to govern it, but Britain has always been a land of immigrants – our “native” fauna and flora among them. More than 10,000 years ago, in the wake of retreating ice sheets, trees from the warmer south began to re-colonise this chilly north-western fringe of Europe: first birch, then hazel, elm, oak and alder. By the time rising sea levels submerged the marshy lowlands connecting it to the rest of the continent, the new British mainland was covered in a luxuriant tangle of forest. In this primeval wildwood, a squirrel could leap tree-to-tree from north coast to south, east coast to west.

Or so one story goes. In Ancient, woodland expert Luke Barley sets out to tell a more complex and fascinating tale of our forests and the people that have lived with and made use of them. His title points back to the post-ice age woodland and its forerunners in sweltering or wintry deep prehistory, but it also holds a more specific meaning. Under classifications drawn up in the 1970s, a UK wood is considered “ancient” if it was already in existence by 1600 (in Scotland, by 1750), as shown on the earliest accurate maps. These are our last links to the wildwood, places where the undisturbed soil still supports a rich and intricate ecosystem that no human ingenuity can recreate.

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Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-45 by Ian Buruma – how Berliners defied their Nazi masters

An immersive account of how the inhabitants of a liberal city – including the author’s father – survived fascism

In December 1941, the Nazi authorities received a letter from a soldier complaining that, on his recent leave in Berlin, he had been thoroughly disgusted by what he saw. While his comrades were dying at the front, plenty of young men appeared to have dodged military duty and were now to be found carousing in Berlin’s packed bars. The women were no better: husbandless but flush with ration coupons purloined from soldiers on leave, they were busy gorging themselves. “If Berlin were Germany,” huffed the complainant, “we would have lost this war years ago.”

Berlin had always been a case apart. The legacy of the wild Weimar years – all that artistic and political radicalism, not to mention louche living – had continued under the Third Reich. The city remained defiantly itself and, despite the efforts of high command, mulish about being told what to do. That, at least, had been the situation in 1941.

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Gordon Brown by James Macintyre review – a very different kind of politician

A new biography reveals Brown to be a man of exceptional vision and probity – what a contrast with today’s politics

For a while, during the 13 years when Gordon Brown was at the apex of British politics, it became fashionable, and then a cliche, to depict him as a Shakespearean protagonist. He was the Scot who would be king, consumed by vaulting ambition for the throne, or else the powerful man of action, devoured by envy of his onetime friend. But in an illuminating new biography by the political journalist James Macintyre, Brown emerges as something closer to the hero of a Victorian novel: a man who leads an epic life shaped by early misfortune and later tragedy, driven onward by a moral purpose that burns to the very end.

His is a compelling story. Bill Clinton was once described as the most psychologically complex occupant of the Oval Office since Richard Nixon; the same is surely true if you substitute Brown, Downing Street and Winston Churchill. Macintyre hails him as a “titan”, brimming with both intellectual firepower and the urge, rooted in Christian faith, to do good. (When the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was asked to identify who in the current era most closely incarnates the values of the pastor and legendary anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he answered: “Gordon Brown.”) But Macintyre also describes his subject as “famously flawed”, with a volcanic temper, a talent for grudges – he stops speaking to Robin Cook and can barely remember why – a tendency towards “needless suspicion towards his perceived opponents” and a willingness to rely on a phalanx of “sometimes thuggish spin doctors”, expert in the blackest arts.

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On Censorship by Ai Weiwei review – are we losing the battle for free speech?

China isn’t the only country imposing limits on creative expression, argues the provocative artist

‘Chinese culture is the opposite of provocation,” Ai Weiwei once told an interviewer. “It tries to seek harmony in human nature and society.” Harmony has never been his bag. Provocation though? In spades. As a student at the Beijing Film Academy in the late 1970s, he joined an artist group called Stars that had a slogan: “We Demand Political Democracy and Artistic Freedom”. In the 1990s, returning to Beijing after a decade in downtown New York, he and a couple of friends published and distributed samizdat-style books devoted to off-piste, often-political art of the kind that government censors tend to fear.

Ai’s own work was bolshie and anathema to custodians of good taste. His Study of Perspective series showed him raising a middle finger at global sites – among them Tiananmen Square, the Eiffel Tower, the White House – that are expected to produce awe, delight, reverence. In the self-explanatory photographic sequence Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), itself the follow-up to Han Jar Overpainted with Coca-Cola Logo (1994), he asked viewers to decide who was the bigger cultural vandal: himself, a mere artist – or a Chinese state for whom iconoclasm was a defining feature of its modernising project. A 2000 exhibition in Shanghai that he helped to stage bore the name Fuck Off. (Its Chinese subtitle was “Ways to Not Cooperate’”.)

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Made in America by Edward Stourton review – why the ‘Trump doctrine’ is no aberration

From territorial overreach to deportations, the current president is not as much of an anomaly as he might seem

‘Almost everyone is a little bit in love with the USA,” declares Edward Stourton in his introduction to Made in America. And why not? It is the land of razzle-dazzle and high ideals, of jazz music, Bogart and Bacall, Harriet Tubman and Hamilton, a nation that was anti-colonialist and pro-liberty from its conception, whose Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal”. Why, then, does this same country so often produce clown-show politics, racism at home and abroad, and imperial ambitions, latterly in Greenland and Canada? Why does it regularly show contempt for the world order it helped create? Why did it once again elect Donald Trump?

These contradictions have kept an army of journalists, White House-watchers and soothsayers in business for generations. Alistair Cooke, perhaps the greatest British exponent of the genre, interpreted the country via the minutiae of everyday life, observing people at the beach, say, or riding the subway. Stourton, another BBC veteran, who first reported from Washington in the Reagan years, takes almost the opposite approach. He looks at Trump and Trumpism through the run of history, arguing in a series of insightful essays that the 47th Potus is not an American aberration but a continuation, an echo of dark and often neglected aspects of the country’s past. Trump, he concludes, is “as American as apple pie”.

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