Paul Lay's Reading List

"I suppose, when it comes down to it, there isn’t really anyone better than Diarmaid MacCulloch . He is someone who is capable of reaching that Holy Grail of serious scholarly material, but who can also communicate it to a wider audience. He’s done it several times before. He did his history of Christianity and a history of the Reformation . Both are major scholarly books—syntheses I suppose—but what I think he’s absolutely brilliant at is the historical biography. He did two that really won him followers. One was a biography of Thomas Cranmer , who was so important to both the religious and literary life of this country with his Book of Common Prayer . He was a complex, sometimes quite unlikable figure, but hugely important to this country’s history. Then he wrote what I regard as one of the best history books of the last few decades, which was his Tudor Church Militant . It’s about Edward VI who (at least in the popular view) had been seen as the bit that happens between Henry and Mary and Elizabeth. What Diarmaid MacCulloch did was refocus on this brilliant intellectual child and his milieu, the people around him, whereby radical Protestantism came to Britain. We can’t really talk about Henry VIII as being a Protestant in any real sense. He remained pretty much a Catholic in terms of his beliefs, despite his battles with the Pope. That’s not true of Edward, who was a militant Protestant and transformed the country in his very, very brief reign. It could never quite return to being the Catholic country it was during Henry VIII’s reign. Although you had the Marian reaction to that and then Elizabeth’s more pragmatic view of religion, those seeds had been sown and they would remain there for centuries. So that was a really important book. Then the next thing he wrote was this greatly anticipated biography of Thomas Cromwell. Diarmaid MacCulloch was influenced by Geoffrey Elton, who wrote The Tudor Revolution in Government , which depicted Thomas Cromwell as this reformer and bureaucratic genius. I’m not sure if, when MacCulloch started writing the book, he was aware that Hilary Mantel was writing her novels. Suddenly, Thomas Cromwell became a figure that was widely known, perhaps more widely known than he has been for centuries, because of Mantel’s fictionalization of him. So MacCulloch’s book couldn’t have been better timed, because we are now familiar, at least in part, with the story of Cromwell. Now we have this scholarly but very accessible biography which will be the definitive life of Cromwell for many years to come. It has all the qualities that we’ve come to expect from MacCulloch: it’s rigorous in terms of its scholarship, but it’s also beautifully written and it does, I think, make a change. It transforms the character of Cromwell from this brilliant bureaucrat we saw with Elton into a slightly shadowy figure. Cromwell is a person who is very real in his Protestant faith and conviction, but he’s also given opportunities because of Henry’s crises over succession and a male heir, his serial marriages and adulteries. He seems to navigate between the gaps. Also, as Peter Cook said about David Frost, “he rose without trace.” He was quite lowborn—the son of a yeoman who was a brewer and a tavern keeper in Putney—although, because of the Wars of the Roses, a lot of the people who were part of the aristocracy were themselves new in that position. So this was a period when a bright young man could make an impact and take advantage of the flux and fracture and fragmentation that was still part of this world. And he was an absolutely brilliant linguist. He seems to have mastered several languages. He was an autodidact, but very well-travelled. Yes, because Henry is dealing with the church in Rome. He’s also dealing with Francis I in France. England is very much part of Europe, of Catholic Christendom at this time. So it’s extremely useful. Cromwell rides on the back of Cardinal Wolsey, whom he is loyal to even when Wolsey meets the crisis that ends in his execution. What you see in this ‘rising without trace’ is that people underestimate him. He’s rather cunning. I always think of the famous Holbein painting of Cromwell which is in the Frick Collection in New York. He’s facing a portrait of Thomas More across a fireplace . He’s More’s nemesis, in a way. More looks very confident. He’s totally at home in the robes of state, whereas Cromwell looks slightly furtive, slightly anxious or even paranoid. It’s a brilliant study of the two men. By the time Cromwell has risen, it’s almost too late to do anything about him. It’s only when his son marries the queen, Jane Seymour’s sister, and he’s given a title, that suddenly the resentment really comes out. Then he’s on quite slippery ground and it all goes horribly wrong between the death of Jane Seymour and the arrival of Anne of Cleves. That’s a disaster for him and he ends up having the same fate as Wolsey, his mentor. It’s a real problem. I think about half of the letters and correspondence are available in the National Archives, so considering what a letter-writer he was, there’s an enormous amount that’s missing. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, and Diarmaid MacCulloch acknowledges that fact and is very open about it. “Even in death, he is loyal to the king.” It’s brilliant that it doesn’t appear to affect the book. Even though he’s hamstrung in terms of the correspondence, probably the best thing about the entire book is the way he constructs the network Cromwell builds up. Cromwell has no official title for much of this period; he has no specific position someone can point to like chancellor or chief minister—and yet he is able to build this network. This is where you see the genius of bureaucracy, the mastery of information. And, of course, he’s also helped by the fact that we’re living through this period of flux. When the dissolution of the monasteries comes, he suddenly has this vast resource with which he can bribe, or pay people off, or convince doubters to be on his side, to support him and the king. Because he’s also very loyal to Henry VIII. That’s the other thing that you find: even in death, he is loyal to the king. I think people in this period tend to choose between Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, and I’ve always been sympathetic to Cromwell. There is something admirable about this working-class boy made good and one has to admire his skill. Countering that, he doesn’t seem to be particularly well-liked. Take his relationship with Anne Boleyn, for example: he supports Anne because she is on the right religious side. She is an evangelical Protestant, like he is. She’s part of that circle of young, modern people who seek to transform the country with these new ideas. But she doesn’t warm to him at all, and there’s something approximate to cruelty in the way he makes sure Anne is destroyed. I think it’s always been there in the background, but that’s something that emerges from the book. He’s quite vengeful. “There’s something approximate to cruelty in the way Cromwell makes sure Anne Boleyn is destroyed” But that, again, might mirror the paranoia, the furtiveness, the fragility of his situation because he’s a new man. I’d urge anyone who’s interested in Tudor history to read this book because it is magnificent. Like everything Diarmaid MacCulloch writes, it’s beautifully written. It’s the third in a trilogy, in a sense, with Cranmer, Edward VI and now Thomas Cromwell."

"Lucy Inglis is a brilliant writer. We’ve had quite a few books on a single subject, going back to Cod by Mark Kurlanksy. There have been many inferior versions of this method, where a person just takes a thing and then writes what is often quite a predictable history around it. That’s absolutely not the case with this book. This history of opium has two things which are really important in history at the moment: geographical and chronological depth. It goes right back to the Neolithic period where, in a place near Barcelona, there is some evidence of opium use. It’s unclear whether it’s for medical or religious purposes or maybe a combination. She looks at opium in its various forms: poppy seeds, morphine and heroin and, in doing so, it becomes a genuinely global history. What I found particularly interesting were the medical advances in the Arab world, with people like al-Razi and al-Kindi. She looks at its use as an anaesthetic and as an analgesic. It was actually used in Baghdad in the form of pills to treat, amongst other things, leprosy. Al-Kindi, who was an important physician in Basra, had a table whereby he could calculate the dosage, what quantities worked with different ailments and how much was dangerous and an overdose. That was extraordinary and I hadn’t read that before. It was also used as medicine during the plagues that affected Europe and Asia. “She looks at opium in its various forms: poppy seeds, morphine and heroin and, in doing so, it becomes a genuinely global history.” But then there was a shift. It was the Mughals who were among the first people—or at least the first people recorded—to use opium for pleasure. There’s a Mughal emperor, Jahangir, who is basically incapable of doing anything after he’s had his combination of opium and wine. So we start seeing opium addiction. There’s a phrase she quotes: ‘There is no Turk who would not buy opium with his last penny.’ As far as Europe is concerned, the turning point seems to be in the mid-seventeenth century. That’s when Thomas Sydenham creates laudanum, which becomes the means of taking opium for pleasure rather than medicinal purposes. There’s still a medicinal element there, but now people are taking it for intoxication. You have things called ‘Paregoric’ and ‘Dover’s Powder,’ which are ways of selling opium in a commercial form and people like Coleridge taking it. In terms of modern heroin addiction, I was quite surprised to find it wasn’t until the 1940s, when there was concern about a heroin epidemic in Chicago. There’s Charlie Parker and people who become addicted to it and it spreads through urban conurbations in the United States . It’s still feeding into this rich cultural source with the Beat Generation. The most famous poet—if you want to call him that—is William Burroughs in the Naked Lunch . He’s an addict right up to his death really, in his 80s, and he becomes this bard of heroin. There’s a romanticization of heroin—albeit a gritty romanticization—that continues with the Keith Richards figure and heroin chic. That’s perhaps abated in recent years, but was certainly there in the seventies and eighties. Absolutely. It’s that thing of ‘only connect’, and she’s just so good at making connections. It’s a very, very wide-ranging book and it’s beautifully written. Despite the subject matter, you never feel overburdened by it. It’s always fascinating and she’s got a very good turn of phrase. She’s one of the best. If only all historians could write like Lucy Inglis."

"It’s an enormous book, in excess of 1,000 pages; I think we can call it a tome. He’s been working on it for 20 years at least and it reflects a lifetime’s learning: he is one of the leading scholars of Iran. It begins in the sixteenth century when, after nearly a millennia of foreign rule, Iran re-emerges as a state with Shah Ismail I and the establishment of the Safavid dynasty. From the book, you get just how turbulent Iran’s history has been. During this period, there were something like five dynasties, three revolutions, just as many civil wars and serial—if short-term—foreign occupations. “Iran’s faith has this extraordinary culture underlying it that long predates Islam” What I found very interesting is the central role of the Shiite faith and why Iran stands out so much in the Islamic world. It’s not just that it’s a different culture and language, the Persian aspect of it. The Shiite faith is a more Cavalier faith, compared to the Roundhead, Sunni version that you find in, say, Saudi Arabia. The Sunni version is embedded in the austere world of the desert. Iran’s faith, although we understand it as fundamentalist, has this extraordinary culture underlying it that long predates Islam. There’s still a great pride in that Persian history. It acts as ballast for the stability of the country and unifies it, in a way, despite all the suffering. The art, the architecture, the music are all very distinctive. You have the poetry of Saadi and Hafiz, which is very sensual. It’s this Persian love poetry and this intoxication. There’s even the eulogizing of wine and Shiraz itself, the name of the grape, is in Iran. It’s contradictory. You get this sense of Iran’s distinctiveness compared with other leading lights of the Islamic world. Iran and Saudi Arabia couldn’t be more different, even though they both proclaim Islam. That, I think, is very pertinent to the current crises in the Middle East . Often, Iran is presented to the West as a twentieth-century phenomenon. We see it through the prism of the Shah and the Revolution or the Mosaddeq coup or the Constitutional Revolution that happened in 1905. Those are important to know about, but we don’t usually see how the foundations are much, much richer, much, much deeper and much more contradictory and complex. If you understand the previous four centuries, Iran’s twentieth century makes so much more sense. That’s the real revelation of this book. I should say that the twentieth century is also told really well—probably around a third of the book is devoted to the twentieth century. The book is a challenge. It requires a great deal of effort—it’s not beach reading. And there are a few errors in the text, which I think are being cleared up for the next edition. They can be quite annoying. But it’s a really invaluable survey. With the 40th anniversary of Revolution coming up, you’d never get a better master class in understanding Iran. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I’m just about old enough to remember seeing the Revolution happen. At the time, people knew it was important, but I don’t think any of us could see just how groundbreaking it would be. It was a return of radical Islam and this major player to the world stage. Iran has come to the forefront again. It has huge foreign power now, especially in the Middle East. It has played an integral role in what’s happened in Syria . The telling of that deeper history makes you realize the strength of the culture. Because of that grounding, it’s stress-tested, to a certain extent. It reminds me of Russia: if a country has a real sense of its past, a real sense of its identity, it’s much more capable of suffering. To have survived an awful lot makes a country quite a formidable presence. Iran is probably in a better state now than it has been for quite a long while. It’s certainly very influential, and if you look at the diaspora as well, it’s a remarkable culture. This book is definitely the best instruction you will get into it—in the English language, at least. I think quite a few world leaders should read it. It is immensely valuable. At History Today , we’ve had articles in the past that we’ve run and we’ve concentrated on the twentieth century. But this really gives you a much deeper view of Iran and explains a great deal about the country and its culture. Yes, what it conveys is just how robust that culture is, which is what makes it so formidable."

"I read this as much out of duty as pleasure because this is my period, the mid-seventeenth century, the Civil Wars, the Protectorate. I probably would say this, but this is one of the most important periods in English and indeed British history and it’s not very well known by the wider public. I’ve wondered why that’s the case because it has such extraordinary characters. A theory I’ve always had is that one of the reasons why the mid-seventeenth century is not popular among readers is the absence of women in major roles. In Tudor times , with Henry VIII, you have Anne Boleyn, Catherine of Aragon, Mary and Elizabeth . There are prominent female figures, whereas during the seventeenth century, with Charles and Cromwell, men dominate. There’s an absence of strong women, at least to the layperson. What Nadine Akkerman does is concentrate on these invisible women. That’s why it’s such a good title—because women are so invisible in this period in the public sphere. Men literally couldn’t imagine that women were capable of being spies or intelligencers. There are some great stories in the book. There’s one about Alexandrine, Countess of Taxis. She has a house in Brussels, and a Stuart agent who’s there is having his letters intercepted. He talks to her and says something like, ‘Who is doing this? It couldn’t be you, because of your honesty, your dignity and your sex. You just wouldn’t be capable of doing it.’ But Alexandrine has this commercial network and she’ll sell this stuff to the highest bidder. She’ll sell to Catholics; she’ll sell to Protestants. She has no real loyalty to anyone. It’s very amusing. It’s a classic lesson in what so many historians have overlooked—which is not just what historians have overlooked, it’s what people at the time overlooked as well. This world is a little bit like the world of Thomas Cromwell. It’s quite fragmented. It’s a place where you can step through the cracks. There are some great details in the book about spying in general. We’ve tended to concentrate in the popular imagination on spies in the Elizabethan world, but in the period of the Civil Wars, there’s some great stuff. The book talks about Oxford, which is Charles’s capital at the time. The parliamentarians would put little pieces of paper in holes and they’d be picked up by ‘gardeners’, brought back and left in a ditch just outside the city where they’d be picked up. The book is very good on tiny, fascinating details, and also at conveying the high stakes. Being a spy was incredibly dangerous. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There’s one particularly gruelling episode recounted by Akkerman which begins with a man called Anthony Hinton. Hinton is a member of the Sealed Knot, a clandestine organization—largely incompetent, it should be said—that tries to build a network of resistance to Cromwellian rule and the Protectorate. It’s not very good at this: many of its people are louche, drunken or just not very able figures. Anthony Hinton is arrested for carrying correspondence from Susan Hyde, who is quite highly placed within the circle. Eventually, at the Restoration, her brother, Sir Edward Hyde, becomes the chief minister of Charles II. She’s investigated and although it’s claimed that there’s no torture during the Cromwellian period—which I think is right—it’s nevertheless a very brutal episode. She is stripped; she’s interrogated; she has an almost complete mental breakdown. She’s left catatonic. It’s an appalling experience, and she dies a week later. Yes, it’s safer than it is for the men. The example with Susan Hyde is atypical in terms of brutality towards a female spy. Coming back to the title, ‘invisible agents,’ it simply wasn’t thought that women were capable of doing this, though they were at it all the time. It’s quite a scholarly work. Perhaps more could have been done to give it a narrative thrust, but it’s so revelatory in terms of scholarship that it’s worth persisting. Maybe now this groundbreaking work has been done, others will carry on. There’s a small book by Blair Worden called The English Civil Wars which is quite good. But if you just concentrate on the Civil Wars, you don’t see how we got there and you don’t see what the consequences are. So the best book if you really want to understand this period, I would say, is probably by Austin Woolrych. It’s called Britain in Revolution . It’s a well-written, really brilliant overview of the whole period. It explains how it began. It’s a very good chronological narrative of the war. You also get the idea of the Cromwellian Settlement and the problems there were and why the Restoration happened. It’s also quite good on the idea of ‘revolution’ because it has two meanings, really. We tend to think of it in the modern sense: a revolution being a break with the past. Whereas to the seventeenth-century mind, a revolution was a restoration. It is literally the revolution of a wheel. “We tend to think of ‘revolution’ in the modern sense: a revolution being a break with the past. Whereas to the seventeenth-century mind, a revolution was a restoration.” So is it a revolution that happens when Cromwell comes to power? It’s very difficult to argue that it’s a revolution in the modern sense—like the French Revolution—because it’s so imbued with religion. Or is it a revolution when Charles II comes back? I suppose you do have a turning of the wheel, but it’s never quite the same again. The king never has the power that Charles I was trying to find in his personal rule. The other thing that is misunderstood about the Civil Wars is that we tend to view Charles as the reactionary and Parliament as the radical, progressive force. Actually, I think it’s the other way round. It’s Charles who’s trying to build something new, because he’s seen European absolutism and wants to build that kind of absolute monarchy in England. That was a modern thing. It’s the Parliamentarians who want to return to what they constantly call ‘the ancient constitution’; the Levellers want to get rid of ‘the Norman yoke.’ It’s much more ambiguous than we tend to think, from our twenty-first-century perspective."

"This is by far the most challenging book on my list. David Wootton is one of the best intellectual historians we’ve got. He began as a historian of atheism, writing a brilliant short book about Paolo Sarpi , who was a Venetian humanist. Rather like England, Venice had an ambivalent relationship with the Pope. It was excommunicated in a papal interdict at the beginning of the seventeenth century and Sarpi became an apologist for the Venetian state. David’s real breakthrough book, in terms of reaching a wider audience, was called The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution , which is full of bravura writing and interesting detours that he’s particularly good at. There is an entire chapter on ‘the fact.’ This book, Power, Pleasure and Profit , is incredibly ambitious because it tries to address a change in humanity during the Enlightenment, when the secular is emboldened. People in the West turned their backs on Aristotle and Christ—who had underpinned rationality and morality up until then—and started to think in a Benthamite, utilitarian way about cost and benefit. So you have people like Hobbes, Locke, and Voltaire who are interested in the selfish motives of human beings and the way in which you can build an infrastructure around those selfish motives that makes them beneficial. It’s an interesting book because the Enlightenment has become fashionable again—I’m thinking of Steven Pinker, and even Jordan Peterson. But, in a sense, it’s life reduced. Pleasure is good and pain is bad. The old morality, where something was worthwhile in itself, is replaced by, ‘Does this hurt? Then it’s bad. Does this feel good? Then it’s good.’ It’s a very reductionist mentality. There’s one passage where he writes, “The real transformation was not in the world of ideas; it was in the lives and behaviour of people who had come to accept that virtue, honour, shame and guilt counted for almost nothing; all that mattered was success.” That has a very modern aspect, but in this profit and loss calculation it also seems like we’ve lost something. I think about this in terms of Brexit where, for many people, if you tell them they’ll lose something economically, they still think it’s worth it. It goes back to what we were saying about Iran, that a culture that’s very, very strong and deep is incredibly resistant, it can endure, it can overcome. Whereas I think Wootton is arguing that this culture of profits and losses is very, very fragile because it’s not really built on anything. It’s not built on the idea that some things are worth doing just because they’re worth doing or someone is good because they’re good. There’s always got to be a reason. The book is very much concerned with Britain and the Scottish Enlightenment. People like Adam Smith in particular are important to it. I don’t think David has looked at the Continental tradition , which tends to be more metaphysical. If you think of people like Kant or Marx , their writing tends to have, for want of a better word, a more religious, deeper meaning. Even Voltaire, who Wootton does refer to, is an Anglophile really. He’s one of the citizens of nowhere. David talks about that quite a lot—the citizens of somewhere. Why would people vote for Brexit ? Why would people vote for Trump? They must be irrational, they must be bad—whereas there may be deeper reasons that are almost, I wouldn’t say spiritual, but just not simply a profit-and-loss calculation. That’s what—I think— David is exploring in this book. Of course, he goes on endless digressions, as David always does. In themselves, they’re fantastically entertaining. There’s an interesting character called Kenelm Digby who links a lot of things together because he’s there in the mid-seventeenth-century. He’s a Catholic acquaintance of Oliver Cromwell, a key member of the Royal Society, and the inventor of the modern wine bottle. So he’s quite an eclectic figure. But the main people are Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, Adam Smith, those Enlightenment philosophers . David always takes you on a ride. You read it once and you’ve probably understood 5-10 per cent of it, but you reread it and go back to certain passages. The book is based on a series of lectures he gave at Oxford. There’s things where you think, ‘Oh yes, that’s absolutely right’—real epiphanies—and then you’ll see something and go, ‘Hang on, that can’t be true. That’s mad.’ It’s just so full of ideas. It’s always stimulating and it’s always well worth persisting with David. I think his diagnosis is convincing, with the caveat that he’s largely writing about an Anglophile tradition. The cure, I don’t know. There does seem to be a reaction against that simple economic rationalism we’ve had for about 30 years or so, whereby money is everything and as long as GDP keeps going up and people’s wages keep going up, that will be enough. It doesn’t feel that way at the moment, as though that is enough. He’s examining a profound shift then in the light of a profound shift now , and so the book feels very, very timely. The problem is we know where they went, but we don’t know where we’re going. So it’s difficult, but it might be useful for navigating the present. Not that history ever repeats itself."

"When the anniversary of a great man like Napoleon comes around, I tend to think, what more can you tell me? Napoleon’s life has been extraordinarily well documented. It’s not a story we’re unfamiliar with. But if there’s one person who can bring new angles to this subject, then it would be Ruth Scurr. She is one of the most original, brilliant historians there is. She’s also a fantastic writer whose historical works are real works of literature. So, when I saw that Ruth Scurr was writing a biography of Napoleon by focusing on his interest in gardening, I knew it was going to be fascinating. Ruth takes enormous risks. You always think it could be a catastrophe, that she won’t pull it off. Her last book was a life of John Aubrey , which was half related to historical sources, half imagined, with a real understanding of Aubrey and his times. It could have gone horribly wrong, but she pulled it off. It was a fantastic read. She’s done exactly the same with this book which is, again, based on a very high-risk premise. It’s fascinating. At the core of it is the relationship between Napoleon and Josephine. Both have a tremendous interest in horticulture and gardens. They, of course, eventually have the means to create gardens on a formidable scale, but their philosophies are poles apart. Josephine liked the jardin à l’anglaise , as they call it, which is a structured garden that looks wild, as though it’s unkempt. It’s a kind of shabby-chic garden philosophy, with broken paths, and no apparent structure to it—although of course there is. Napoleon, who remember is a great mathematician, a great strategist, a man who likes order, a man who’s used to commanding and getting his way, prefers the French style of gardening, which is imposed from above. It’s all about order, structure, and the projection of power. He marshals his gardens much as he marshals his troops, he’s in complete command, whereas Josephine prefers this improvised style, that’s much more chaotic. It says a great deal about their relationship, which ultimately fails. “His vast empire has been reduced to these little plots on St Helena, miles from anywhere” Scurr is very interesting about why Napoleon is so concerned with order. One of the key moments of his life was when he was a young soldier in the Revolutionary Army and he witnessed the massacre of the Swiss guard in the Tuileries gardens in Paris. He sees a revolution, of which he’s been a supporter, running out of control. This acted as a warning to Napoleon about what happens when control is lost, when authority loses control, and you see that philosophy in his gardens. The book is also very moving. Napoleon took a great interest in horticulture as a child and, at the end, he almost becomes a child: you know, in his beginning was his end and in his end was his beginning. He’s there isolated on St Helena, thousands of miles from civilization. He constructs his plots of land, and it’s the one area in which he has control again. It gives meaning to those lonely, isolated days and Ruth Scurr, as she always does, tells this story brilliantly and movingly. Yes, I think it was. He was this lonely figure far away from anything that he’s known. It’s cold. He becomes ill eventually, with stomach cancer or some kind of digestive ailment that eventually kills him. That’s the sadness of it. His vast empire has been reduced to these little plots on St Helena, miles from anywhere. But he still manages to have some control over this one cultural pursuit that is still allowed to him, and which mirrors his childhood on Corsica. He had this Italian heritage. He was always an outsider, in a way. There was something about him that wasn’t quite French. He was always a one-off, and he sensed that and found comfort in plants as a child. And he finds that comfort again as this fallen hero, this huge figure who is suddenly in this diminished space. It’s very moving, very, very well told."

"One of the things that Napoleon aimed to do when he was in his pomp—and this was very much in line with his being a figure of the Enlightenment —was to make Paris the cultural centre of the world. As his empire expanded, he would take things from these newly acquired lands and bring them back to Paris as a treasure trove. It was plunder and one of the things he wanted above all was Veronese’s absolutely enormous, sumptuous masterpiece. Yes, it does. It completely overshadows the Mona Lisa in terms of its artistic genius. It’s a riotously colourful biblical scene with an enormous cast of characters. It depicts The Wedding Feast at Cana , when Christ turns water into wine. It’s also about Venice. Venice, a once great maritime empire, by this time is in precipitous fall. In Venice it had hung in San Giorgio Maggiore, which was a kind of diplomatic centre where the Republic of Venice greeted distinguished visitors. To be taken to France it had to be taken off the wall and cut in half. It was brutal in the way it was done, but Napoleon makes a kind of science of plunder. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The old Louvre had been renamed the Musée Francaise in 1793. Then, in 1803, in an act of megalomania, it was renamed the Musée Napoléon. The plan was to bring the greatest things from Rome, Florence and Venice. In April 1797 a French ship—which ironically is called the ‘Libérateur d’Italie’ — enters the Venetian lagoon and the captain is shot. In the following months, Napoleon declares war on Venice and this works out very nicely because his commission has identified 20 works of art in Venice to take back to Paris, 16 paintings and the four bronze horses which reign over the facade of St. Mark’s Basilica, which are supposed to be the work of the ancient Greek sculptor Lysippos. They themselves were looted from Constantinople by the Venetians during the Fourth Crusade in 1204. We talked about how moving Ruth Scurr’s book is. This one is also very moving about the way this vast masterpiece is ripped from the wall of the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore. It’s rolled up and packaged for this perilous, damp voyage to Paris. And yet, it survives. It’s still there now in the Louvre. It’s never been returned. What Saltzman does is she tells the story incredibly well, so you get a really thrilling blend of historical narrative and art criticism. You get to understand a lot about Veronese’s technique and the use of these incredibly sumptuous, expensive colours that he was allowed to work with. What’s interesting about The Wedding Feast at Cana is it’s not the creation of a workshop. Veronese painted it all. The book raises questions that are very pertinent and very modish at the moment about where works of art belong. Should it be returned to San Giorgio Maggiore? I don’t think France is going to give it back anytime soon. Saltzman argues that it’s a superior work to the Mona Lisa, with which it shares a room at the Louvre. The Mona Lisa is a remarkably simple painting, whereas Veronese’s is full of narratives and of scenes within scenes. It takes an awful lot to read and Saltzman shows us how to read it. It’s a thrilling story in all kinds of dimensions. And it’s beautifully done."

"Over the years, as editor of History Today , I’ve commissioned two or three pieces on Chinggis Khan and the Mongols. One always feels we’ve never quite got to the core because they’re so alien in a sense, so distant in time and in geography. You’ve got to take in everything from China, through Central Asia, to Russia, even to Eastern Europe. We’re talking about a grand geographical range, and a grand chronological range as well. Favereau covers about 400 years of history and I felt that this is the book that’s come closest to allowing me—and therefore I think lots of others—to understand this unfamiliar world. It’s painted on a huge canvas. She uses the phrase ‘empire on horseback’. We tend to think of the Mongols—with some justification—as bloodthirsty, genocidal maniacs, going across the plains of Asia. This book suggests something a little more nuanced. “It’s an incredibly compelling read and it changes the way you see the world” Favereau is asking, ‘What is the state?’ We’re used to settled states with geographical limits, where monarchs or assemblies are sovereign. This is a different kind of state. But it is a state and it’s one that offers trading links on an enormous scale. At its best it also offers security for very, very different communities to interchange with one another—principally for the purposes of trade. Along the Silk Road , the geographical range is so vast and that’s reflected in incredible ethnic and cultural diversity. There’s a fantastic use of sources here that shows you that difference. She uses Mongolian sources, which of course are absolutely crucial because you hear the voices of people within the Mongol world: administrators, people who fought and people who led. You also have a lot of Russian sources—the exchange between Russia and this empire is often under-appreciated. You also have a lot of Persian and Turkic sources. Islam is very important in this world as well. So there’s a lot going on, and there is undoubtedly a great deal of conflict. But there’s also a great deal of exchange, of toleration and, certainly, a tremendously dynamic economy. It’s an incredibly ambitious book with a huge range. It presents this world in its full complexity. It’s an incredibly compelling read and it changes the way you see the world. Because you have a new definition of—or a new variety of—‘empire’ and ‘state’ that’s not really like anything you’ve seen before. Until I’d read this book, I didn’t really perceive the Mongols as anything but bringers of chaotic, marauding hordes, a bit like the Vikings . But they offer security and create a kind of state and a kind of empire, albeit one very different to those we are used to talking about in the West. It’s really illuminating in that and you begin to think again about what we might mean by ‘empire’, and what we might mean by ‘the state’."

"This is a book I only came across about a month ago. It’s a beautifully produced book by Yale University Press. They always produce rather sumptuous books. It’s also a piece of detective work, about the great buildings that were created on the Strand between roughly the 1550s through to the 1650s. The early part sees Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the English Reformation , when a new class of rising Protestant bureaucrats—the Cecils, the Howards, Thomas Cromwell —follow Henry VIII’s lead when he takes over Thomas Wolsey’s Whitehall Palace and makes it the centre of government. The people around him, newly enriched by the dissolution of the monasteries and other transfers of the land, decide to make their physical presence felt in these houses—they call them ‘houses’, but they’re really palaces. There are eleven of them, and they link the government part of London, which is Whitehall, and Westminster, by means of this 100-meter ribbon to the legal and business world of the City. These extraordinary houses owe something to European patterns, but are also English in their way. The great tragedy is that almost nothing of them remains. There’s an arch on the Victorian Embankment from one of the houses but they disappeared mainly during the civil wars. The first of these houses was in the middle of the Strand and was Somerset House, built in 1547—not the Somerset House that stands there now. This was built on the orders of Edward Seymour who became Lord Protector, the brother of Jane Seymour, who’d married Henry VIII. This grand building became the blueprint for the other 10 houses. It’s ironic that Seymour was this great Protestant figure: the house ended up being the residence of four queens, three of whom were Catholic. Elizabeth I lived there before she became queen, but so did Anne of Denmark, Henrietta Maria and Catherine of Braganza. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This very grand building set the mark for all the others. Guerci tries to recreate them, using floorplans, descriptions, and particularly Wenceslaus Hollar’s fantastic drawings and illustrations of this period. Wenceslaus Hollar was a Czech/Bohemian illustrator who came over to London and was one of the great visual chroniclers of early modern London. We have his drawings and one particularly illuminating example is a bird’s eye view of Covent Garden and the Strand, which tells us a lot. The book is brilliantly structured. Once we get through the introduction, we see each house going from east to west. Somerset House is the third of these. He includes the oldest of the Strand houses, the Savoy Palace. All of these palaces were originally bishops’ inns. Two of them stood on the north side of the Strand, the nine others were on the south side, often with very elaborate riverside terraces, with enormous gardens where one could enter from the Thames. Bedford House, which was built by Edward Russell, the third Earl of Bedford, had this enormous garden at the back, which extended into Covent Garden, and the fourth Earl left a remarkable legacy of Palladian buildings. Palladio was, of course, the great inspiration for Inigo Jones, who was the first man to bring Palladian classicism to England, with the Covent Garden Piazza, and his St. Paul’s Church. Guerci stresses the difficulty of reconstructing these lost palaces. It’s incredibly difficult to do. It was the Civil War and its aftermath which eventually led to the demolition of the Golden Mile. Now there is the Embankment, King’s College London, the Savoy Hotel and an endless number of chain shops that ends right about Charing Cross Station. All that is left are the names on the streets—Russell, Bedford, Henrietta. It’s not built on the plan. It’s just built on the site. The most astonishing thing of all is how little is left. There are almost no traces. In fact, I was walking up there, having read the book, and was trying to recreate something and it’s quite difficult to see any kind of legacy that’s been left there by these houses. They’re like butterflies that emerged and then disappeared. It’s quite extraordinary. And this book is something of a revelation because most of us don’t realise just what architectural wonders were there. The break with Rome seems to me to be the real revolutionary moment in English history. That was when England becomes different. And these buildings were symbolic of a changing of the guard. The Catholic Church was out. Its bishops were out. This was a kind of secularisation in governance. They were very capable men, crucial to the way in which the English state was reimagined. These houses are symbolic of that."

"Martyn Rady is a specialist in Eastern Europe: he is at the School of Slavonic Studies at the University of London. He’s written principally on 20th-century history, particularly with an interest in dictatorship, fascism and totalitarianism. In this book, he tells us the story of the Spanish Habsburgs—Charles V and Phillip II in particular. What he does is restore the primacy of Central Europe to the Habsburg dynasty’s story. He takes us right back to the beginning, to a place called Habsburg and their very modest roots in Switzerland. The Habsburgs always refer to themselves as ‘the house of Austria’. Rady argues that this concept of Austria was as much an idea as a geographical location or base. They had this acrostic, A.E.I.O.U., in both Latin and German: ‘ Alles Erdreich ist Österreich untertan’ or ‘ Austriae est imperare orbi universo.’ It could be translated as ‘Austria is to rule the world’. It was an ambition that, for a while, the family pretty much fulfilled. Charles V became not only Holy Roman Emperor, but also King of Spain. His son, Philip II, has this great moment at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, where the Christian alliance he formed defeated the Ottomans near the Gulf of Corinth. That is the high point. After that, you have some very strange characters. Perhaps the strangest is Rudolph II, a fascinating character who moves the Habsburg capital from Vienna to Prague for a brief time. Prague during this period becomes the European centre of alchemy and other magical arts. Rudolph has this ‘wonder chamber,’ as he calls it, and is seen as a Prospero-like figure. But all around him Protestantism is flourishing. There’s a revolt in Bohemia that would spark the 30 Years War . That ended with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which is an important moment for the Habsburgs because that sees the emergence of, or the definition of, the nation-state, which by its very nature is a threat to Habsburg imperialism. In one sense, that is the beginning of the end, although there’s a long tail. With the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna in 1683, Emperor Leopold I manages to get forces to defend the city, and the Turks are repulsed. He’s acclaimed as the champion of Christendom, but in Spain it was all unravelling due to the succession crisis. Eventually, the Habsburgs lost Spain and all of its possessions in the New World and the Pacific following the War of the Spanish Succession. They then faced two new threats as they retreated into central Europe, their original home. The first of these was intermarriage, which led to infertility and terrible ill health. By the 18th century, they were an incredibly unhealthy family. Secondly, you have the emergence of Frederick the Great’s Prussia. Then you have the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 by Napoleon. And yet, even then, the Habsburgs still play a role in the defeat of Napoleon because it is their agent Metternich, a man described as an elegant dandy, who organises the Congress of Vienna to help repair Europe following the Napoleonic Wars. He’s quite a formidable character and one of the heroes of this book. The peace that he constructs in 1814 holds for the best part of a century. It’s not until 1914 that a major war happens again, and Rady gives a lot of credit to Metternich for that. By contrast, he sees Emperor Franz Joseph as inept. Franz Joseph’s last words on his deathbed were ‘why does it have to be now?’ The book’s full of these tremendous little things. He doesn’t just tell the main story. Rady is quite a mischievous writer. He’s full of little gems of knowledge and asides. For instance, that the Brazilian football team play to this day in Habsburg colours. And that Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, which he conducted at the Congress of Vienna, was his atonement for dedicating the Eroica to Napoleon. In less capable hands, this could be a mess, because there are all kinds of threads coming together, but he manages to put those strands together in a lucid and elegant way. Too many books these days are too big. He tells this story with a great deal of economy and concision. It’s really difficult to imagine anyone writing a better history of the Habsburgs. It’s great fun. It’s the way history should be done. Part of our best books of 2021 series."

"I’m a person who is pretty averse to military history, on the whole. I find it rather dull and technical and detailed and quite masculine, in a way. At the same time, I’ve become more interested in a certain type of military history that seems to be having a golden moment. It’s about strategy, it’s about tactics, it’s about contingent elements and deals a lot with humanity. I think it was Michael Howard—the great military historian who died just last month—who made the point that many of the most important works of literature in western culture, going all the way back to the Iliad , have been confrontations with war. We think of great novels, like War and Peace , or the plays of Shakespeare . War has been absolutely at the foundation of these because it’s where humanity reveals itself most. And although Alexander Watson’s The Fortress: The Great Siege of Przemysl is plainly written by a historian who understands the technical details of war and the nature of strategic warfare, what’s so fascinating about it is the human story. I’ve always taken quite a romantic view of the Austro-Hungarian (or Habsburg) Empire and its various permutations. That’s probably coloured by the novels of people like Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig. This book reveals just how tawdry its end was, full of bitterness, ethnic violence, rivalry, incompetence and decadence. Przemysl is on the southeast edge of what is now Poland, where it meets the Ukraine. The Habsburg forces were in retreat from a dominant Russian Tsarist army in 1914-1915 and certain elements of the army ended up at a crucial strategic place, this fortress. There is a Hungarian Landsturm regiment there which is competent and professional but also ruthless. But many of the soldiers are middle-aged and not well trained. A lot of people are from the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, particularly the Rusyns, an ethnic group that comes from what is now the Ukraine. You see the clashes between the Hungarians and the Austrians, who are the leaders of this empire, and the Rusyns and other ethnic groups who are on the fringes of it. “What I’ve looked for is books based on real, serious scholarship that would genuinely appeal to that elusive creature, the intelligent general reader” And what Watson teases out—and I think he does this very, very effectively—is that the terrible horrors that take place in this part of the world during the 1930s and 1940s and the Second World War have their blueprint in this moment of the breakup of this single empire into ethnic groups. It becomes a real horror show, made all the worse by the sheer incompetence of the Austrian chief of the general staff, General Franz Conrad Von Hötzendorf. He is a catastrophe, inhumane and decadent. Decadent is a word I’d use again and again. Watson absolutely brings this all to life—and death, I suppose. There’s an awful lot of death. The conditions are horrible and insanitary, there’s disease, there’s violence, there’s interethnic fighting. He paints it with the most vivid colours, but it’s an awful scenario and it becomes a portent of what is to come in what Timothy Snyder called the Bloodlands of Eastern Europe. It’s absolutely staggering and again it’s pointing towards what’s to come. It’s a complete catastrophe and you see, in this one place, an empire just break down. It’s no longer fit for purpose and it disappears. And they’re fighting the Tsarist army, which is itself going to disappear in a couple of years’ time. It’s a clash of empires that will both soon be gone and replaced by something that’s perhaps even more terrible. It’s an incredibly well-written and vivid book about a terrible episode in modern European history. That’s absolutely true. Eastern Europe is still a complete mystery to most Britons. With the Brexit debate and everything else that’s been going on for the last three-and-a-half years, what’s apparent is how few Britons have any knowledge of Eastern Europe, Central Europe and indeed Europe as a whole. The historian Roger Moorhouse has talked about how for Britain and France World War II began on September 3rd 1939—but for people in Poland it actually began on September 1st. We’ve neglected this whole aspect of Eastern Europe, much to our peril, really. Phenomena like the emergence of Viktor Orbán, or the Law and Justice party in Poland, appear a mystery. But many of the people of Central and Eastern Europe went through a whole series of existential crises during the 20th century. There’s the First World War, as detailed in Alexander Watson’s book. The Second World War was even more catastrophic, as revealed in books like Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands . And then there was the occupation by the Soviet Union and the rebellions in 1956 in Hungary and in 1968 in Czechoslovakia. Then there was the breakdown in 1989. This is a very, very, very different history from the relatively stable 20th century of somewhere like Britain or the United States. That the phenomenon of Eastern and Central European politics comes as a surprise reveals just how ignorant we are of this area’s history."

"I’ve always been a bit obsessed by Essex. I don’t come from there, I’m from the West Midlands, but I used to cycle through Essex quite a lot. I’ve always been struck by the way it’s divided into two parts. There’s what’s called ‘estuary Essex’, which is places like Romford, Ilford, Tilbury, and Grays. It has this image as a post-industrial, rather bigoted place that’s rather ugly. Then, moving towards East Anglia, there’s the beautiful part of Essex with the Stour Valley and places like that, Constable country. I used to cycle through Romford and Ilford before getting to Epping Forest. This really beautiful, bucolic county would open up and eventually I’d get to the gorgeous coastline. So it’s quite schizophrenic, but actually that makes it really, really fascinating. The post-industrial, estuary part of Essex is every bit as interesting as the beautiful part. Essex has this proximity to London—what people call the push and pull of London—but nevertheless has a very distinct identity. It’s always been quite close to the centre of English affairs. Even now, during this Brexit period that we’ve just been through, places such as Thurrock, which is part of estuary Essex, have been really decisive. These maligned, working-class, Brexit-voting regions have really had their moment in the sun over the last few years. But there’s also a side to Essex that is quite artistic, quite eccentric, a place where you can just escape London, but still be within touch of the capital. For example, the painter Augustus John was involved in a ménage à trois there with his wife Ida Nettleship and another woman called Dorelia McNeill. They fall in love with each other and also with rural Essex, the gypsy encampments. But they could still get back to Liverpool Street, when they felt like it. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s a radical county in many ways. It’s a county that’s an early adopter. For example, it’s the region at the heart of Cromwell’s Eastern Association. It was a great supporter, at the first, of Margaret Thatcher. It’s got this very belligerent, up yours attitude, which is typical of a very individualistic county. If you think of the Sun of Kelvin Mackenzie’s heyday, he’s very much an Essex man. It has a lot of entrepreneurs who come from relatively humble backgrounds, like Alan Sugar, Vijay and Bhikhu Patel or Jon Hunt, the man who set up Foxtons. There’s also this slightly vulgar aspect to it. Rod Stewart was born in Islington, but he moved to Essex where he has his own stately home. These shifts and ironies are typical of Essex, which also produced both Lord Tebbit and Grayson Perry. You’ve got these wonderful thatch cottages and water mills of Constable country, you’ve got the beautiful salt marshes and mud flats at the estuary. It’s insular, it’s eccentric, but it’s also got the most beautiful collection of churches you can imagine, including one, which is the chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, right out on the Essex coast, which is reconstructed from a Roman temple. It’s just the most amazing place. So it’s a very ancient part of England as well. So Gillian Darley, who is very much a disciple of the great architectural writer Ian Nairn, has done this absolutely beautiful book. Especially around this time of year, it’s a wonderful book to just sit back with and relax and think about how Essex is a place worth exploring and a truly great and important English county. Absolutely, all places are interesting if you just open your eyes and look. There is nowhere that doesn’t have a fascinating history. This book restores Essex, this much maligned county, and says, ‘Take another look. This is a rich, rich place in terms of history. It’s been at the heart of English culture and remains so today.’ No, it’s not a book I’d put in the car if I were driving around various country churches, you’d want something by Simon Jenkins for that. I imagine that someone who knows Essex well would read this book in a different way to someone who doesn’t, but each would find it rewarding in their own way. To the person who did know Essex, it might be a reminder of just how remarkable this county is, but it might also open up certain aspects. For those who don’t know Essex at all, I wholly recommend this book, because they’ll realize just how fascinating a county it is."

"David Abulafia is a remarkable historian and this is, I think, his masterpiece. As you say, he’s already written a history of the Mediterranean, but what seemed a remarkable book at the time was just a little hors d’oeuvre compared to this, the real à la carte stuff. The book has so much breathtaking knowledge and learning contained within it, but is also wonderfully accessible. The key to it is in the subtitle, it’s “a human history of the oceans.” It’s not a book devoted to maritime technology, although David plainly knows his stuff when it comes to that. It’s about the way in which men and women have engaged with the formidable force that is the ocean. There’s an element of the book that’s about exploration, but it actually takes him a very long time to get to 1492—not least because he devotes a great deal of space to the extraordinary adventures of the Polynesians. He also looks at the Norse navigators, who used a light-sensitive crystal called a ‘sólarsteinn’ (or sunstone). That allowed them to locate where the sun was, even on a dark day. The Polynesians were just incredible people who made vast journeys without any proper navigational tools at all. There’s a really great story in the book about a western captain who loses his compass, but his Polynesian crew locate their destination anyway. He asks them how on earth did they knew where the place was and they say, ‘It’s always been there.’ You just want to know how these remarkable people managed to navigate without any of the tools that we take for granted on this vast scale of the Pacific. It’s an extraordinary story, one of the greatest stories in all of human history. David spends a lot of time on that before getting to what we call ‘the age of discovery.’ But even then, he doesn’t get too obsessed with the expeditions of Prince Henry the Navigator and Columbus and so on. It’s more about trading. The impulse is not to be the first person there, or the first person to discover an island. It’s about the way in which trade opens up the world on this vast scale, and brings humans into contact, often in a benevolent way. In many ways this book an antidote to The Fortress , where we see humans come together in the most appalling, wholly malign way. Trade brings people together and gives them shared aspirations. The sea is this great thing, making up by far the majority of the world’s surface, that brings people together. It’s actually quite an optimistic book and David tells it brilliantly. I wholly recommend this book. No, not at all and that’s really quite striking. Trade inspires innovation, it inspires contact, it is a very, very benevolent thing. In a way, this book makes the case that trade is what makes us human in a benign way. Yes, it’s not a book to sit down with in one go, but it’s nicely broken up in terms of periods. It’s almost got books within books, and it’s beautifully written. He’s a very good writer and because it’s full of human stories, it has a novelistic aspect to it as well. So it’s very easy to read. It never feels like a difficult book, it’s very, very accessible. One is just taken along on this tide of knowledge and human stories. He starts in Polynesia, and he makes the point that we don’t know when these things happened. In these very early voyages, it’s very elusive but by looking, for example, at linguistic roots, we can see that the connections go very, very deep. For instance, the languages of Hawaii, Tahiti and New Zealand are related and the word for sweet potato resembles linguistically the one people use in South America. It’s difficult to track exactly when this began. We’re going into the deepest parts of human history—which are undateable, essentially—and he brings us right up to the modern age. But the emphasis is always on trade."

"When we ask historians which area of history they find most difficult, they almost always say economic history. Roderick Floud is an absolutely brilliant historian who makes really quite complex economic history very accessible through something that many people find attractive, the English garden. It’s a phenomenon that begins with the Restoration of Charles II. There were gardens before then—indeed people like Cromwell and his number two, John Lambert, were keen gardeners—but the idea of the great estates opening up is essentially a phenomenon of the late 17th and 18th centuries. Think of St. James’s Park in London, for example. Floud argues that gardens become a catalyst for, and beneficiary of, economic development. This is the time when England is really emerging as a major global power and it’s got real money. The Whig aristocracy is coming through and gardening is an enormous industry. Floud is very good at working out equivalent prices, and gardening is worth around 11 billion pounds at that time. So it’s massive and one point he makes is that it’s one of the earliest and largest manifestations of something that Britain has become very good at, which is the creative industries. These are works of art, essentially, a cultural phenomenon, and Britain is still very good at that—whether it’s film or theatre or art or music. And it’s built on a huge scale. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In the book there is a lot about Capability Brown, because Roderick uncovered his account book, which was held at Drummond’s Bank. We all know Capability Brown was a hugely influential garden designer, but he was just as brilliant a businessman. He had lots of people working for him and many great clients and Roderick Floud works out that in his prime, over the space of about 30 years, he earned not far off a billion pounds in modern terms. Even in his day, he was earning 20 million pounds a year. It’s just absolutely astonishing amounts of money, which gives you some idea of just how important gardening was to England’s economy. The Germans famously called England ‘das Land ohne Musik’ (the land without music) but they regarded gardening as the English art. There are all kinds of English gardens around the world, think of the English Garden in Munich, because the English mastered gardening on this massive scale in the 18th century. It’s an extraordinary story and Floud is brilliant at making economic history accessible. He’s helped by the fact that he has this tremendous cast. Capability Brown is at the top, but there’s also this rather louche set of people around the Whig aristocracy and Charles II. It’s a terrific book and it really shocks one, just how important gardening was to England and remains so, actually."

"This is a book by Julia Lovell, who is a brilliant historian of China and has written a number of excellent books. This is not a history of China as such, it’s a look at Maoism as a phenomenon. Maoism has been picked up all kinds of people around the world—by terror groups in South America, by European students and American students in the 1960s. It’s even there in the films of Jean-Luc Godard. It’s had its moment. But now Maoism is resurgent because it remains the ideological core of the Chinese Communist Party. Although China has abandoned the extreme stuff, like the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and embraced capitalism, it’s very much an authoritarian, command kind of capitalism and Mao remains in the background. Or even in the foreground: there’s a huge portrait of Mao that remains, to this day, in Tiananmen Square, at the very heart of China’s enormous power, and his body still lies in state there. It’s not neglected, it’s not seen as some kind of historical by-product in the way Lenin is in Moscow. Mao remains this great figure and there’s talk of his ‘invisible hand.’ The means to power in China remains Mao’s Communist party, however much it has changed. The judiciary is highly politicized and it’s still a one-party state. China is still viciously authoritarian and we’ve seen—with what’s happening in Hong Kong and with the suppression of the Uyghur people—the full nature of the horrors of modern China. In this, Xi Jinping has been really important. He invokes Mao a lot and uses catchphrases like the ‘the mass line’ or ‘rectification’—which encourage criticisms of officials from the bottom. These awful words are very Maoist ideas and are about keeping key party members in line. Meanwhile Xi and his Central Committee have increased their power. They got rid of the constitutional restrictions of 1982 that limited the president to two terms as in the United States. And Xi Jinping now, just like Mao, can rule for as long as he wants to. “It’s an extraordinary story, one of the greatest stories in all of human history.” I think a lot of people in the West really misread what was happening in China. Julia Lovell plainly was not one of them, because she had intimate knowledge of China. But a lot of commentators got it wrong. They presumed that China was going to become a commercial, capitalist enterprise that would slowly break with its past and westernize (whatever that means). Nothing like that has happened. Maoism remains absolutely central to this incredible organization, the Chinese Communist Party, which soon will overtake the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in terms of years of holding onto power. And there’s no sign it’s losing its grip. One gets the sense that the West needs the cheap goods that China produces and one does wonder if the Soviet Union missed a trick, that had it produced a lot of cheap tat, it might have survived rather longer. This book is a wake-up call as to the true nature of China. Weirdly enough, one of the people who does seem to understand China is Donald Trump. He’s wrong on just about everything else, but he may be right—rather like Churchill in the Second World War was wrong about almost everything but got one political question right—about China and how to oppose it. This is a hugely significant book and a real eye-opener to anyone—and that’s most of us, let’s face it—who has not really grasped the true nature of China in the 21st century. Yes, and that’s without thinking of China’s more recent moves into Africa. It’s a very, very good book and it’s got real authority to it. Julia Lovell really knows her subject, she knows the language, and she’s not afraid to reveal the Chinese state in its true nature. To a certain extent, it is. The mid-17th century has been invoked quite a bit of late, the constitutional aspects of it, because of issues like prorogation in the Brexit debate and the role of the judiciary, the nature of the constituent countries in the UK and the relationship with Europe, as well as our global presence. All these are resonant of the 17th century. But the reason I wrote the book—which is called Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate —is because the period has relatively little purchase with the wider public unlike, say, the Tudors or the Victorians or the Normans. That situation is particularly puzzling because there has been so much great scholarship on this period over the last two decades. There are lots of brilliant scholars, but they’re relatively unknown to the wider population. So I wanted to write a book as a window onto this world and the most neglected of all the periods of the 17th century, which is the Protectorate. The book is about the period from the execution of Charles I to the Restoration of his son, Charles II. I wrote it so that people would be tempted to read the really great historians of the period, because it’s a world that has been neglected for too long. There are a lot of things people don’t know about this period. You see the nascent British Empire, you see the world’s first written constitution, you see a commoner being offered the Crown. You see Britain and Ireland united for the first time. There are all kinds of things that go on in this period that people don’t know, so I’m hoping the book will at least be a corrective in that way. It does have a slightly strange reputation. The people involved in it, the Cromwells, smoked and drank and danced and liked music. They also liked art. As I said earlier, in relation to Roderick Floud’s history of the English garden, they were even keen gardeners. They were aesthetes, but they were a small group of people who were slightly isolated from the wider English public and I think that’s ultimately where they went wrong. The innovations and their attempts to heal and settle the nation ultimately failed because Cromwell’s power rested on the army. It was never transferred to the people and, in the end, the people opted for the ancient constitution and the old ways. But the monarchy could never be the same again and it never was. There was no absolute monarchy again in Britain after Charles I."

"The mid-17th century is my period. I’m writing a book at the moment, which is looking at the fortunes of those who survived the Civil War and the Protectorate and their relationship with the Restoration. Milton is absolutely central to that. Milton’s life is well known. There have been quite a few biographies of Milton over the years, many of them very good, but I think this new book by Nicholas McDowell is superior to anything that I’ve yet read—and it’s only the first volume of two. It’s about the young Milton and this hothouse atmosphere in which he pursued his intellectual interests. “This new book by Nicholas McDowell is superior to anything that I’ve yet read” Milton was a quite formidable scholar from a very young age. At St Paul’s School, he mastered Greek and Latin very early. He spoke French, Italian and Spanish . He was a really brilliant linguist, but he was also absolutely on top of scholarship about writers such as Dante and Petrarch. From these very early years, he saw himself as an English Dante. He recognised that he was put on this earth—there’s a providential aspect to this—to write the great epic of the English nation, which of course he did, as an older, blind figure who had been ostracised by the political class after the Restoration. He had supported the regicide and came very close to being executed during the early days of Charles II. Thank God he wasn’t. He was left relatively alone and wrote his masterpiece, Paradise Lost . This book doesn’t go that far. It really ends with the Civil Wars and Milton taking sides in that. He became a great polemicist for Parliament and for republicanism, actually. Although he worked for Oliver Cromwell , he was very much at odds with Cromwell, who was not really a republican in the sense that Milton was. There’s also this fascinating account of the way he embraces chastity as a young man, as though nothing can intrude on his intellectual pursuits. He’s quite an extraordinary figure. There’s also really illuminating stuff about the political and religious background against which he operates, which is that the root causes of the divisions that emerged in English society, British society and Irish society were the actions of Archbishop Laud, who becomes this incredibly divisive figure—he eventually became Charles I’s Archbishop of Canterbury and was ultimately executed by Parliament. As a result of his actions, the division that already existed in English Protestantism between the high episcopalian wing of the church and the puritan wing, which had always been there since the beginning, suddenly became a fissure because of the utter lack of any kind of compromise that Laud allowed. It’s almost as though the via media of Elizabeth and, to a certain extent, James I just disappears overnight. Milton inhabits that world and he’s forged by that world. He was always interested in the Renaissance humanist tradition and some of that takes place in a republican milieu. He’s very interested in Venice, for example, which a lot of classical republicans around him are. He’s very interested in the work of Paolo Sarpi, who is a Venetian priest, who had been the propagandist for the Venetian Republic, similar to the way Milton becomes the propagandist for the English Republic. Sarpi served the Venetian Republic in its battles with the papacy around the time when Venice was excommunicated in the early 17th century. Sarpi wrote a history of the Council of Trent, with which Milton was very familiar. That’s already forming his ideas but, like many English people at that time, I think he only makes the choice that he has to make relatively late in the day, because that’s when he has to. Yes, he was. He was in Rome, in the Vatican. His life was often threatened because he was so outspoken in his anti-Catholicism and yet at the same time he’s there with learned Catholic priests, to whom he’s very close, in the Vatican, in Rome. He’s obviously such an impressive intellectual figure that they give him a lot of time in the pursuit of their interests, particularly Neoplatonism and the intellectual end of the Counter-Reformation. They very much saw Milton as an equal, even though he was a relatively young man—he wasn’t even 30 at that point. He was obviously someone of tremendous intellectual stature and people commented on how his Italian was absolutely fluent, like a native speaker, even though that was the first time he’d been there. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But he wouldn’t compromise at all in his views. This book shows that a lot of his early writings were published anonymously and only towards the end of the book does he start to become this public figure who’s willing to put his views out there on the record. Yes. It’s very very good. I highly recommend it."

"That’s right. It just won the Cundill History Prize and deservedly so, I think. It’s a groundbreaking book in many ways. Camilla Townsend has been doing work on this for a while at what you might call a high scholarly level, and this is an attempt to take that learning to a slightly wider audience. With the publicity from the Cundill Prize, there will be many more people reading it. Rather like Milton, in a way, she has this grasp of the languages that are needed to access the documents from which she takes the Mexica—the Aztec—accounts of their past. So she speaks Nahuatl. And she’s not just looking at Mexico. This goes all the way up to Utah where some of these people come from. There is a huge network of people for whom, Townsend suggests, the great basin of Mexico, where the city of Tenochtitlan is crucial, is seen as a kind of paradise. It’s almost like a promised land. Maize grows there, corn grows there. It seems abundant in things and it has this almost mythical quality for anyone who’s returned from there. She has access to these documents called xiuhpohualli , which she translates as ‘yearly accounts’, but they are the Nahuatl people’s annals and, using these, she concentrates on a period of roughly about a hundred years either side of Hernan Cortes’s arrival. She is very concerned not to portray the Mexica, the Aztecs, as these people who indulge in human sacrifice and all the other things we know from Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto . But it does go on and the human sacrifice actually increases with time. “This account gives us a much more complex and nuanced account of that world pre-conquest and post-conquest, as well as of the conquest itself” The story she tells is that, basically, from about 1420, there is an alliance of people who turn the tables on the people who held power before. The Mexica gain this position of power and they build this fantastic city, Tenochtitlan , one of the great cities of the world. She’s very good on the way they organise their religious world. She’s very good on things like the way they organise sanitation and markets. They have this incredibly well-ordered system of markets that are overseen by groups of older women as law enforcers. It’s a remarkably peaceful, progressive kind of place—most of the time. And she’s very good on their extremely complex belief systems. She’s very interested in the women who survived the conquest. One of the points she makes is that this culture carries on. It’s not destroyed by the arrival of the Spanish. There are still many people who speak these languages, as does Townsend. There’s a kind of intellectual love affair you sense she has with some of the people who survived. One of those is a woman called Malintzin, who is Cortes’s interpreter. She has access to Cortes, who treats her almost as an equal. What we also get is an understanding of the divisions between the indigenous peoples of Mexico and that landscape. The Spanish were only able to do what they did because they formed alliances with people there. The book gives us a much more complex and nuanced account of that world pre-conquest and post-conquest, as well as of the conquest itself. She gives quite a substantial appendix over to the sources that she’s talking about and uses. That is groundbreaking and absolutely fascinating. But it’s a relatively short book, just over 300 pages. It’s an important work, but it’s also a wonderful introduction to this culture and the people. It reads something like a labour of love, without at all whitewashing the worst aspects of this society. There’s much to admire, but there is also human sacrifice and slavery. There’s a kind of decadence that creeps over it. It doesn’t really end, as such. She goes into quite a lot of stuff about the Nahua people now. So, it goes right up to the present day, but obviously that’s not the bulk of the book. But she goes deep into this history, thousands of years before the conquest and right up to the present day, looking at cultural and linguistic resonances. And more than resonance. It’s a living culture."

"This was to be the year of wall-to-wall Beethoven. One of the last things I went to a couple of days before lockdown arrived was a performance of Fidelio at the Royal Opera House. I suppose it was ironic that this great opera about freedom and liberty should be the last thing a couple of days before we were all effectively imprisoned. One of the things that I find quite strange about classical music is that people are very scared of it. It seems to frighten people in a way that almost no other art form does. I find this baffling, as someone who’s never had any formal education in classical music. I’ve never understood why it intimidates people in the way it does, but it does. It’s a great shame that a lot of the opportunities to think about Beethoven have been lost over the last nine months of this year as a result of the virus. There’s been Donald Macleod’s excellent series on Radio Three about his life. But I think people want a place to begin to understand his vast output. Laura Tunbridge has written this relatively short book. There’s a lot of learning in it, but it’s light. It sets nine works by Beethoven within their historical and cultural context. Some of them are very well known, including Fidelio on the theme of liberty, and some of them are not. “You don’t need any musical knowledge to enjoy this book. It’s a very interesting account of a great artist” She begins with a look at a work that’s not played very often, his Septet, which is an early work from about 1800, rarely performed. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen it performed, but it was one of the most popular works of his lifetime. That’s because the way in which classical music was performed and the kind of events at which it was performed were very different to what we expect now. She’s very good at looking at how audiences have changed and how patronage has changed. Beethoven was really the first of the great composers who made a living through his work. He does get aristocratic patrons, but he’s not, in the end, dependent upon them. There’s a fee-paying public out there, an emerging bourgeoisie that wants to pay for his music. She looks at his relationship with chamber music, which tends to be on a smaller scale and at his relationship with people who would have played his violin sonatas and string quartets. She looks at his relationship with Napoleon, who completely bestrides this period. He is like the Colossus, above everything. One minute he’s Beethoven’s great revolutionary hero and then, when he causes appalling suffering in Austria—Beethoven was living in Vienna—and in his native Rhineland, Beethoven turns against him. Eroica , the great groundbreaking symphony, having originally been dedicated to Napoleon, is rededicated to ‘a great man’. It may have been Beethoven talking about himself. She talks about his love life—he’s one of the first architects of German Lieder, the song tradition. She talks about concepts of liberty, she talks about his religious views through his later choral masterpiece, the Missa Solemnis . And, of course, she talks about his deafness. I didn’t realise this, but the Heiligenstadt Testament only became public after his death. It is a great confessional letter prompted by his deafness, in which he laments losing the only sense that actually matters to him. He comes close to suicide but then, through some sheer force of will, he overcomes this. He becomes insular, so his very greatest masterpieces, like the late string quartets and the late piano sonatas, become these incredible internal works, that he never hears. They’re only in his head. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s the most monumental tragedy and then the idea of him as this irascible, difficult, semi-alcoholic figure suddenly becomes something else after his death. He becomes heroic, anticipating Freudian ideas of the individual and self. He becomes a more modern figure. It was only the testament, made public after his death, that made people realise that these great works were born of this great suffering. And he becomes this Romantic archetype of the artist as hero. Tunbridge covers all this extraordinarily well. Absolutely. And people who aren’t musicologists shouldn’t worry. It’s not a book mired in technicalities. She talks about it for the layperson. You don’t need any musical knowledge to enjoy this book. It’s a very interesting account of a great artist."

"Well, it’s become quite an important thing to me. It’s a subject that I’ve had to take a lot of interest in over the past few years in writing my book about Cromwell’s Protectorate. Cromwell was the main agent of the resettlement of Jews into England. They had been expelled from England in 1290, unbelievably, and were absent in any official, legitimate way from English culture for the best part of 350 years. I’d become interested in Jewish life and the interaction between Jewish and Christian life politically, theologically and commercially during the 17th century, which is essentially what we’re talking about here. Of course, it’s about much more than that because the Reformation’s concentration on the Word—not just Luther, but Calvin—brought a renewed scholarly attraction to and attention on the Bible. The true meaning of this ‘Word’ became so important. You had a lot of Protestants, in all their different guises, looking at the Old Testament in particular, for which Hebrew was absolutely crucial, but also at St Paul in Greek, and at Jewish writers who were writing in Greek and other languages as well. As well as that, Jews as ‘the other’ became people closer to you, if you were one of these scholars. And yet, at the same time, because of the divisions in Christianity and Christendom, they became not the only other. If you were a Protestant, the Catholics were the ‘other’; if you were a member of the Church of England, then Presbyterians or Baptists became the ‘other’. There was this whole pool of new people you could oppose. And, of course, if you were Catholic all the Protestant world was the ‘other’. So, the Jews were no longer the only ‘other’. There was a kind of legitimacy to their position in England. It depended where you were. In Italy there tended to be quite a strong tradition of relative tolerance and for quite a long while, certainly in England, it improved. How typical that was is difficult to say. But Protestantism was obsessed with anything to do with millenarianism, this idea that Christ would return to Earth and would herald the new Jerusalem. In Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, there’s quite an important phrase which says, “All Israel will be saved,” which was interpreted as meaning that before this can happen, the Jews will be saved. And they will be saved if they convert to Christianity. This comes back to why Cromwell wanted Jews resettled in England: it wasn’t out of humanitarian idealism, of tolerance towards a beleaguered ethnic group or anything. It was related to the idea that England was on its way to creating the perfect Christian country on Earth and therefore, if Jews resettled, that was the place they were most likely to be converted to Christianity. Therefore Christ would return to England. That would be the chosen place. We’ve got to understand that politics and religion at this time were absolutely one, and this is a point that Kenneth Austin makes from the very beginning of this book. It is impossible to divide politics and religion in any way at this point. Jews can be the beneficiaries of this and they can be the victims of it. It’s a rather capricious world in which they are involved. Not really. It’s puzzling. There were a lot of people around Cromwell, for example, who really didn’t want Jews resettled. Cromwell himself can’t pass a law which will allow them to. He does it with a nod and a wink through a person called John Sadler, who was Cromwell’s secretary for a while and was Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was a noted Hebraist and Neoplatonist. He was very much involved in this hermetic world of millenarianism. Magdalene College happened to hold some land in the City of London, which is where Cree Lane is now, just near St Mary Axe and the Gherkin. You can see a plaque there for the site of the first synagogue in Britain since the resettlement, which I think was 1656 or 1657. That synagogue lasted until about 1701. The Jewish Community was largely Sephardic—from Portugal and a Portuguese community in Amsterdam. The main agent of this was a person called Manasseh Ben Israel who was a very learned intellectual, who brought over a community. He was friends with Cromwell and Sadler. “We’ve got to understand that politics and religion at this time were absolutely one, and this is a point that Kenneth Austin makes from the very beginning” But I don’t think anyone had worked anything out other than to give them a synagogue and allowing them to trade openly. It was not like the large-scale immigration of the 19th century, with Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern and Central Europe escaping Russian pogroms. This 17th-century community, particularly the ones from Amsterdam, were familiar with a similar political and mercantile milieu to the one operating in the City of London. By and large they were left alone. They were useful. They had good networks in Europe, intelligence networks as well as trading networks. They proved useful to the regime and, when the Cromwellian regime disappeared, there was no attempt to change anything. They just carried on slowly expanding. Bevis Marks Synagogue, which still stands, was built in 1701 and is relatively near to where the original synagogue was. They’ve been there ever since. No, not at all. It’s very much about Europe as a whole and covers all of this in a series of chapters that deal with the reaction of Protestantism in all its different guises, and Catholicism in the Counter-Reformation, as well. So you get a real panorama. It’s a fascinating book."

"I’m not a classicist, but in the three months of this year that I was allowed out, I just kept coming across Ovid quite a lot—for instance, the Titian exhibition at the National Gallery, which was absolutely astounding. Only six paintings, but the first time that the collection of paintings based upon Metamorphoses , which Titian painted for Philip II, have been assembled in a single room for 300 years. Quite extraordinary. Delving into this, you realise that everyone steals from Ovid—Dante, Chaucer , Shakespeare , James Joyce mentions him, Ted Hughes , Margaret Atwood has a short story about him. Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel, Middlesex , was based upon Metamorphoses . Even Enid Blyton adapted him for a children’s book about tales of Ancient Greece. In the world of music, Handel , Gluck, Lully, Benjamin Britten—they’ve all adapted tales from Ovid. So, just at a time when I thought I really should know a little bit more about Ovid, Llewellyn Morgan comes up with this book. The Very Short Introductions , at their best, are really excellent. I’m thinking of John Arnold’s introduction to history, for example. It’s a really superb, very personal account, of the attractions and meaning of history as a discipline . That’s a fascinating one. Sadly, because they’re part of a collection, they’re not often reviewed. But there are some real gems within them, lots of good ones. This one is a really loving account of Ovid, with a very simple structure. It takes you through his major works, with the Metamorphoses obviously at the centre. It’s also, to a certain extent, a meditation on exile. Ovid is one of the great figures of exile. It’s very good on that perspective. It’s a wonderful little book. I can’t think of a better introduction to the work of this figure who is, arguably, the single most influential poet of antiquity. Yes. And going back to what we were talking about before, this is extremely useful when looking at Milton. It confirms one of my worries about history at the moment. I’ve talked about language and religion here and the two are often bound up. Unless you really have some grasp of foreign languages, or the vocabulary of religions—both of which are rather neglected in Britain today—you can’t really have any geographical or chronological depth in history. You’re stuck with the 20th century, the 19th century and probably just the West. If you really want to practise history, then you need languages and you need an understanding of religion and I think all the books we have talked about, these five books, which range from Ovid, to Jews in the Reformation, to the Aztec world, to Milton, this great poet, and to Beethoven—music being a language in itself—all of them represent the idea that, unless one has some kind of facility in these languages in all their variety, then you’re lost as a historian. Whenever anyone asks me who the greatest living historian is, I always think of Peter Brown, the great Princeton Professor , who speaks something like 27 languages and has this incredible familiarity with religion— Islam , Christianity , Judaism and Zoroastrianism. He mastered all this in order to understand the world that he named ‘Late Antiquity.’ That’s the model we should follow. We can’t all be Milton in our mastery of languages, but we can try. That’s a good analogy. Part of our best books of 2020 series."