Campbell's Soup

Alastair Campbell: The Blair Years - The Alastair Campbell Diaries

The New Criterion, October 1, 2007

It was Henry “Chips” Channon, one of the most entertaining, and informative, of Britain’s twentieth-century political diarists, who asked what was more “dull than a discreet diary.” Quite. Yet in some ways it is the discretion of the diaries just published by Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former press secretary (and much, much more), which makes them so interesting. ]What’s in them, I suspect, matters far less than what’s been left out.

The published diaries amount to “only” 350,000 words out of the more than two million Campbell wrote between starting work for the then-opposition leader Blair in 1994 and resigning some nine years later. The full text is promised for another time, but for now Campbell has, he says, produced a volume focused on Blair himself: “I always intended … to be part of the mix that starts to shape the first draft of historical judgement around him.” Even the admission that this master media manipulator is now spinning history is itself spin. It comes across as candor, refreshing after a decade or so of, well, something else, but he’s only confessing to what everyone had already assumed.

Prior to publication, the diaries were also vetted to ensure that they did not breach secrecy laws or otherwise risk damaging the United Kingdom’s national interest. In addition, Campbell tells us “some conversations so private they will never see the light of day” have been excluded, as have a number of others which “the participants would have assumed to be confidential for some time.” All that’s reasonable enough, but it still leaves hundreds of thousands of words to account for.

Campbell cleverly highlights one area they cover with his claim that he has “no desire” to make the “hard” job of Prime Minister “harder for anyone … let alone Gordon [Brown],”phrasing of such marvelous insincerity that one can only applaud. In writing that, Campbell comes across as public-spirited, loyal, and admirably reticent. At the same time he makes it quite clear that he has the goods on Britain’s new leader, the dour, jealous Chancellor whose Gollum’s quest for the keys to Number 10 Downing Street helped create, define, undermine, and, eventually, destroy Blair’s premiership. Those expecting Campbell to have shed much light on the complex rivalry and partnership between the two men will be disappointed. Worse, bundling Brown offstage destroys any pretensions these diaries may have to offer a properly rounded picture of Blair’s leadership. It’s unfair to compare them to Hamlet without a prince, but less so to say they are an Othellowithout an Iago.

Whatever the sympathy Campbell may claim to feel for the latest holder of that “hard job” he writes so sanctimoniously about, he had none for Blair’s predecessor, the hapless John Major. Campbell was a prominent member of the coterie that orchestrated the destruction of a Conservative government that was nothing like as incompetent or as sleazy as it was smeared, caricatured, and, fatally, believed by the electorate to be. The Labour landslide of 1997 was the culmination of the most brilliant, and the most unscrupulous, election campaign the country had ever seen. Unfortunately, these diaries offer little fresh insight as to how this was done.

In one respect this doesn’t matter. The key element, the transformation of “old” Labour into “New,” has already been explained far better elsewhere. Campbell may have been at the center of these changes, but the portrait he paints of them is partial, admittedly incomplete, and clearly selective. Not for the first time, the reader is simply left to guess at what has been omitted, and why.

A significantly greater disappointment is how (relatively) little Campbell, a former journalist, has to say about the way that he enlisted Britain’s powerful media class as critical allies in the fight against the Major government. Yes, we are told a bit about the wooing of Rupert Murdoch, but there’s almost no discussion of the tactics for which Campbell became infamous, the brutally effective bullying, deception, and intimidation of the media rank and file. Neither does there appear to be much recognition that Campbell was pushing at an open door: a large percentage of the media class wanted the Tories out.

For Campbell to concede this would, I reckon, have meant accepting that his (undeniably enormous) contribution to the 1997 victory was slightly less than he believes. It would also make nonsense of his obsessive contempt, even hatred, for the media that gathered pace, rancid, vitriolic, and increasingly unbalanced, as the years went by. Given the position that Campbell held, this fury and this disdain are deeply disconcerting. What makes it even more remarkable is that media coverage of the Blair government was, as it happens, broadly supportive until the Iraq war.

The real problem, of course, was that any carping was unacceptable to those at the helm of the New Labour “project,” a project that was, at its core, both profoundly authoritarian and tinged with a gimcrack messianism. What must have made this criticism (such as it was) all the more galling was that it persisted despite the extraordinary efforts made to smother, bludgeon, blunt, and derail it. These went beyond the abuses of the opposition years (although those continued in office, unabated and, in these diaries, largely, and absurdly, unmentioned) and extended into the machinery of government itself. Within days of Labour’s win, and with the help of nifty legal and procedural footwork, Campbell was given the authority to tell civil servants what to do. The political impartiality of the civil service was one of the many British traditions to take a battering under the new regime. As one of Campbell’s shrewdest critics, the commentator Peter Oborne, has noted, “within two years of taking power … New Labour had sacked seventeen of the nineteen information chiefs in Whitehall, a staggeringly high turnover.” Draw your own conclusions. In fact, you’ll have to: Campbell has tellingly little to say on the subject.

None of this is to argue that there’s nothing in these diaries worth reading. On the contrary. Neither press secretary nor any of his later, grander titles do full justice to Campbell’s role. He was not only Blair’s principal propagandist and most feared enforcer, but also a key policy adviser, Bobby, in some respects, to Tony’s Jack. He was, therefore, a diarist in the right place at the right time. Whether it’s on Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the Iraq crises, the response to 9/11, or the neatly drawn descriptions of British and international statesmen from Blair to Clinton to Yeltsin to George W. Bush, there’s plenty here to digest, even if not much of it is very new.

Finally, and try as hard as he might to avoid it, by the end of these diaries its author has revealed something of himself, above all that he (a former alcoholic with a history of depressive illness) is a man driven, even if it’s never exactly clear by what. There are the shreds of ancient socialist orthodoxy (a fanatical attachment to Britain’s failed state school system), and, almost certainly related to that, there is the class resentment left over from his misfit youth (which in turn dovetails neatly into the more iconoclastic aspects of the New Labour “modernization” of the United Kingdom). Then there is the delight—wild, baroque, and ecstatic—that he takes in hating those on his enemies list. The poisonous media, the wretched Tories, a Labour minister or two, whoever; it’s the hating that’s the thing. Or perhaps the secret lay in the exercise, and the narcotic, of power. In any event, whatever it was that drove Campbell, Blair saw that he could use it, and he did.

And as to what that says about Tony Blair, once again you’ll have to draw your own conclusions.

Hearts of Darkness

Robert Gellately: Lenin, Stalin and Hitler : The Age of Social Catastrophe

The New York Sun, September, 19, 2007

In the course of humanity's long, violent history, there was one brief, happy interlude, a decade or so on either side of 1900, when those fortunate enough to live in the more advanced parts of the planet were able to persuade themselves that barbarism had been banished from their culture, never to return. To those luckiest of men, the last true optimists, the barriers — psychological, political, and technological — that separated them from the savagery of the past were as reassuringly robust as the stout, solid bourgeois architecture then transforming their cities.

This self-satisfaction we now know was pure hubris, a lethal, beautiful, boastful illusion. Confronted in 1914 with the reality of industrialized warfare, that illusion died. As the war progressed, if one can use that word, the social and political restraints keeping man's atavistic ferocity at bay began to fray all across Europe, and nowhere more dangerously than in the Russian Empire. By 1917, this most backward, and therefore most fragile, of the continent's great powers was a society on the precipice. It only took the slightest of shoves, in the form of the Bolsheviks' opportunistic and initially bloodless coup, to topple it over into the abyss. The consequences were worldwide, appalling, and destructive on a scale that had never before been seen.

When in the subtitle of his new book, "Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler" (Knopf, 698 pages, $35), Professor Robert Gellately refers to an age of "social catastrophe," it is no exaggeration. But his use of that phrase also makes a more subtle point. The devastation of the era he describes (roughly 1914–45) went far beyond the physical, far beyond rubble, ruin, and mass graves. The very notion of society itself was torn apart. As for man's idea of himself, it had been changed forever, and not, in any sense, for the better. Man could now be certain that the barbarian within him would always be there, however advanced the civilization — tempting, terrifying and, given an opening, unstoppable.

While Mr. Gellately explicitly narrows the focus of his book to Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, its title still promises more than he manages to deliver. Rather than devoting himself to the wider implications of what he is discussing, Professor Gellately offers a conventional history within a largely conventional framework. For those in need of a serious, scholarly introduction to the subject, it's an excellent overview of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, but despite its great length — with footnotes the book runs to nearly 700 pages — an overview is all that it is. There's not a lot that's new about either the information or the arguments it contains.

Mr. Gellately worries that one aspect of his book may "disturb" some readers — the suggestion that Lenin was a monster to be ranked alongside Stalin and Hitler. As he himself might acknowledge, however, this insight is not particularly original: Historians Dmitri Volkogonov and Richard Pipes (to name but two he cites) have already covered much of this ground, and done so highly effectively. Nevertheless, despite their efforts and those of quite a few others, the real nature of Lenin's ideology remains poorly understood. In repeating the message that the story of Bolshevism is not one of good intentions gone awry, but of an evil that worked all too well, Professor Gellately is performing a very useful public service.

That the Bolsheviks were able to do what they did owed a great deal to the collapse not only of the old order, but of order itself. The rise of the Nazis was made possible by almost exactly the opposite, the desperation of a nation willing to try something, anything, to hang on to what it could of its former way of life. If that meant throwing democracy — and with it, the Jews — to the wolves, too bad.

Hitler's mandate was no blank check, however. As Professor Gellately explains in some of the most intriguing sections of his book, the prewar Third Reich was, in marked contrast with its Soviet rival, a "dictatorship by consent." Compared with what was going on in the USSR at the same time, the use of coercion was limited, largely predictable, and rarely truly murderous. The awful exception, of course, was the ever more hideous persecution of the Jews, but prior to 1939, even that was incremental, a slow-motion pogrom both camouflaged and reinforced by the language of bureaucracy and the law.

That Hitler found it necessary to proceed in this way was a paradox of his earliest years in power. The restoration of social calm was key to his popularity but difficult to reconcile with his long-term agenda of military adventure, unending conquest and relentless genocide. With the invasion of Poland, that paradox became an irrelevance, but neither the frenzy of war nor the intoxication of a victorious blitzkrieg, can fully explain the speed with which so many of the Wehrmacht's "ordinary men" either descended into barbarism or demonstrated their willingness to act as its accomplices. In some cases, it was merely a matter of days. That they did so was a sign that pointed the way to Auschwitz. It also suggested that, even before the tanks had begun to roll, the German people had already moved far, far down that most terrible of roads.

Disappointingly, Professor Gellately never fully succeeds in explaining what it took to make this possible. He takes refuge instead in the observation that, by the time World War II had concluded, it had "raised questions about the very meaning and future of Western civilization." That is right, so far as it goes, but it's too simplistic. The more troubling questions posed by that war are not limited to any one civilization: They concern the essential nature of mankind itself. And there's no comfort to be found in the answer, none at all.

In the Land Of Mammon

Robert Frank: Richistan : A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich

The New York Sun, August 15, 2007

Despite unprecedented social, political, economic, and cultural upheaval, there is, still, just a part of this country's vision of itself that is forever Bedford Falls. That was an idea of nation as extended community, diverse, but not too diverse, a land of opportunity, certainly, but one where no one was left too far behind, or ended up too far ahead. There was Potter, but he was an outsider, the moneyed exception that proved the modest rule, the rule that was also an ideal, of an America where everyone was in the same boat.

Robert Frank, the author of the entertaining, provocative, and dryly amusing "Richistan" (Crown, 278 pages, $24.95), was prompted to write his book by the realization that this was, quite literally, no longer the case. As the writer of the Wall Street Journal's "Wealth Report" (the existence of which tells you something about the times in which we live), his beat took him each year to Fort Lauderdale's International Boat Show, a "weeklong celebration of boats, beaches, and billionaires." There he met a Texas yachter who told him that "the American rich seemed to be floating off to their own country," a country that Mr. Frank has dubbed Richistan.

In Mr. Frank's view, today's new rich are busy creating their own virtual, self-contained nation, complete with their "own healthcare system (concierge doctors), travel network (Net Jets, destination clubs), separate economy (double-digit income gains and double-digit inflation), and language...They didn't just hire gardening crews; they hired personal arborists". Yes, there's a touch of hype in that description (if any journalist is going to make it to Richistan, he's got to sell a lot of books), and a touch of the nothing new, too: The very rich have always been different. It's just how that's changed.

That said, there's no doubt that Mr. Frank is on to something. The key, as he explains, is the remarkable growth in the numbers of America's rich. In 1995 there were nearly 4 million households with a net worth of more than $1 million. By 2004, that total had increased to more than 9 million (both tallies are based on 2004 dollars). Now, as Dr. Evil discovered, and as Mr. Frank concedes, $1 million is not what it was. It's not a bad start though.

It's not just that there are more rich folk around. They are also richer, much richer, than they used to be. By 2004, more than 100,000 households enjoyed a net worth of more than $25 million. If you feel like a loser reading those words, it's no better writing them, believe me. Be that as it may, this wild, if uneven, accumulation of wealth is basically a sign of good times, a largely benign side effect of capitalism on the move. Mr. Frank clearly understands this. His description of the wonders, extravagances, and peculiarities of Richistan is essentially travelogue and guidebook, neither indictment nor paean, and despite the mega-yachts, megamansions, and the $899 pair of children's shoes (crocodile-skin Sperry Top-Siders, since you ask), there is no suggestion of Robin Leach.

Mr. Frank may poke some fun, but for the most part he takes Richistan as he finds it. Yet, for all that, it's possible to discern some faint hints of unease. The source of this, I suspect, is partly aesthetic and partly (for want of a better word) patriotic. So much ostentation may not only be in poor taste, but is it also a betrayal of older, more austere American values, a rejection of Bedford Falls?

Above all, it's likely to be the unevenness that worries Mr. Frank the most, an anxiety betrayed by the statistics of rising inequality that occasionally surface in his pages. Not all of these are breaking news: For example, most of the shift in the concentration of wealth in favor of the top 1% took place two decades or so ago. Nevertheless, the fact that the share of national income now held by the top 1% of earners is at a postwar peak is food for thought, especially at a time when the median income of American households is under severe pressure.

The rich may be pulling away from the rest of the population, but "Richistan" shows how the richest are pulling away from those who are just by-their-fingertips rich or, horrors, merely affluent. Mr. Frank explains how this acts as both carrot and stick to the toilers of Lower Richistan (net worths of $1 million to $10,000,000 million as they try to buy, as well as work, their ways to higher status. In 2004, some 20% of these treadmillers spent more than they earned. That's neither sustainable economically, nor is it a recipe for happiness. Where it may lead is major political change.

Politics is, frustratingly, a topic that is largely beyond the scope of this book. To be sure, Mr. Frank makes the obligatory reference to the swerves to the left that followed both the Gilded Age and the Roaring '20s, but there's little discussion of the extent to which the very existence of Richistan (not to forget the threat it represents to social cohesion) may help history repeat itself. Nor does he examine what may be Richistan's most significant, if somewhat perverse, contribution to this country's political development, one that may follow from the increase in inequality within Richistan itself, and, more dangerously still, its approaches. As that trend continues, there's a clear risk that some of society's best, brightest, and most influential will be left feeling that they have missed not only the yacht, but also the boat.

1688 and All That

Michael Barone: Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers

National Review, July 30, 2007

Clio, that most elusive of Muses, can be glimpsed, but never caught. The interpretation of history is forever in flux, as much reflection of the present as window on the past. There are few better examples of this than England’s turbulent 17th century. Depending on whom you asked, and when, its conflicts were painful, but ultimately progressive; painful, but ultimately reactionary; or painful, but ultimately pointless. The natural response to the publication of yet another interpretation of one of the pivotal events of that century, the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, is to ask, what now?

According to Michael Barone, the answer is star-spangled Macaulay, classic Whig history with a distinctly American accent. The Glorious Revolution was, he writes, America’s “first revolution,” “a reference point” and “a glowing example” for the American Founders. The ghosts of P. T. Barnum and Betsy Ross will be unable to resist a smile at those words. To describe England’s last revolution, a characteristic mix of royal infighting and aristocratic maneuver, as American is, in its endearing exaggeration and patriotic pride, more typically American than anything that actually happened in 1688. That said, Barone’s broader point holds true, but with one important caveat. The Founders were inspired by the Glorious Revolution, but less by its reality than by its myth. The same may well be true of its latest chronicler.

That hasn’t stopped him from writing an excellent, well-researched overview of the prelude, consummation, and consequences of the revolution that is his topic and his totem, the revolution that saw off James II, England’s last Catholic king, and with him the last serious chance that the nation would succumb to absolute monarchy. Our First Revolution is no small achievement. The history of England in the 1680s is one of whirligig allegiance, helter-skelter intrigue, and perilous diplomatic gamesmanship. To retell it, as Barone does, in a manner that’s both informative and easily accessible to the general reader, demonstrates a way with a story that would be beneath the dignity, and beyond the skills, of many academic historians.

That’s not to say that the book is without its flaws. The most significant is, somehow, also very American. Barone is a product of a country that is, in a number of respects, history’s happiest accident, so it’s perhaps not surprising that, despite some hints to this effect, he cannot quite bring himself to admit the extent to which the Glorious Revolution was the product, not of optimism, but of pessimism. Its inspiration lay not in the quest for freedom, but in the fear of a return to the disorder of the six or so preceding decades, decades that had seen an intellectual, moral, and political unraveling so profound that it led to warfare, regicide, and dictatorship. When Hobbes, the finest philosopher of the age, wrote that the absence of a common, recognized authority would mean war (“and such a war as is of every man against every man”), he was writing from experience: Barone notes that the English civil war claimed perhaps 190,000 lives, as a percentage of the population more than that accounted for by the Kaiser or Hitler. In Scotland and Ireland the toll was still worse.

Despite that, Barone feels able to dismiss the upheavals of civil war and republican government as something of an irrelevance. This is to ignore the fact that the anxieties that fueled the Glorious Revolution were a direct response to the savage lessons of those earlier years. And so was the willingness to overthrow a monarch, or even monarchy itself, if that’s what it took to keep the peace.

Those lessons began in the 1620s. On one side the Stuarts, James I and, more fatefully, his son Charles I, were trying to create a modern centralized despotism of the type rapidly gaining ground across the Channel. On the other were England’s merchant class and much of its gentry, jealous of privileges and liberties dating back to the Middle Ages. Charles tried to trump these ancient traditions with superstition: the belief that a king ruled by divine right. But a century into the Reformation, the Almighty was not what He once had been. Kings might rely on God, but did God rely on kings? And if God did not rely on kings, what did He have to say about the rest of the social order?

In their attempt to find out, the English rejected Charles, they rejected the egalitarianism of the mid-century radicals, they rejected Puritan excess, they rejected Cromwell’s Commonwealth, and they rejected military rule. In 1660 they returned, exhausted, to monarchy and Charles II, a cheery cynic who understood that faute de mieux was as good a reason as any to be accepted as king. It’s a measure of his political skills that Charles (who had no legitimate children) was able to ensure that his brother James, a devout Catholic, would succeed him. It’s a measure of his perceptiveness that he thought that his dour and stubborn sibling would hold the job for less than four years. In the event, James II, who came to the throne in 1685 dreaming of Catholic restoration and hog-tied parliaments, hung on for just over 46 months. By early 1689, he had been replaced by William of Orange, a safely Protestant Dutch prince, and William’s wife, Mary, who was not only a safely Protestant English princess, but James’s eldest daughter, a Goneril all his own.

It may fit a little awkwardly with his overall thesis of 1688 as a signpost pointing to the liberties of an independent America, but Barone doesn’t dodge the degree to which religious intolerance was responsible for James’s downfall. The U.S. Constitution may have provided for absolute religious freedom, but its architects lived in a more safely secular environment. Wary survivors in an age of religious fury, the revolutionaries of 1688 enjoyed no such luxury. Religion needed to be tamed, fenced-in, watched. They feared that toleration of some expressions of religious belief might come at too high a price. In that sense, the First Amendment would, to them, have looked like a suicide pact. A militant Catholicism was not only resurgent on the European mainland, but had become the ideological enabler of despotism. Not to resist James’s attempts to foster a Catholic revival would have been madness. When the king demonstrated that he was prepared to use the tools of absolutism to get his way, he merely proved his opposition’s point.

Barone faces a similar problem in discussing the revolution’s immediate aftermath. The passages in which he describes it come across as a little confused, incoherent, and ambiguous. There’s a good reason for that: These events were confused, incoherent, and ambiguous. Barone’s difficulty is that he needs them to form a clear path to Philadelphia. What he gets instead is a muddle. What he misses is that that was the idea.

William’s motive in coming over from the Netherlands to grab the crown was partly dynastic, but primarily strategic. He wanted to lock England into an alliance against Louis XIV. The rest, so far as he was concerned, was conversation. That left those who supported him with the job of securing social peace and, while they were at it, their own privileges. With despotism discredited (its very arbitrariness made it the antithesis of order), and a republic looking too tricky to contemplate, they tried to dream up an answer to the question of where sovereignty really lay. This led to some fine-sounding declarations ambiguous enough to satisfy just about every faction. These efforts were then supplemented by years of piecemeal legislation — ad hoc, gradualist (after an initial flurry), and pragmatic — that helped shape a new constitution without ever defining it. The most satisfactory answer, it was discovered, to the big questions, was silence. It’s difficult to think of anything less like the spirit of Philadelphia in 1787.

To find a connection it’s necessary (and a touch anachronistic) to treat the Glorious Revolution settlement as a whole, but that’s what the American Founders seem to have done. To them these laws (which included the promotion, ironically, of greater religious toleration, the enactment of a bill of rights that was an obvious predecessor of its American namesake, and provisions designed to promote the independence of Parliament) were a precedent. They were both a fumbling codification and, in their apparent success, a definitive proof of the notion that sovereignty was too potent to be entrusted to one person or, indeed, one institution. Look at this another way, however, and liberty becomes a practical means, not an idealistic end — a crucial distinction largely invisible to those who used the romantic myth of a Patrick Henry–style 1688 as a rallying cry for the English in America nearly a century later.

Nevertheless, the fact that this dispersal of sovereignty was accomplished by bestowing rights and freedoms upon a significant portion of the population was not a myth. As Barone convincingly shows, the fragmentation of the old order left a space for the growth of free enterprise and freer enquiry, a space in which the ideas that became America could flourish, a space that was, essentially, an accident, the happiest of accidents.

Stench & the City

Emily Cockayne: Hubbub

The New York Sun, July 11, 2007

If there's one voice that can be heard above the hubbub described in Emily Cockayne's aptly titled new book, it is the voice, splenetic, dyspeptic, and thoroughly fed up, of the grumbler in high dudgeon. For all their traditional stoicism, the English have always known how to complain, and to do so with an acerbity and wit that leaves more famously querulous nations (yes, Jacques, yes, Pierre, I'm talking about you) looking like little more than whiny schoolchildren.

When it comes to the topic of "Hubbub" (Yale University Press, 335 pages, $35), the squalor, grubbiness, and general unpleasantness of everyday life in the cities of 17th- and 18th-century England, there was, as its author shows, plenty to gripe about. And to help her, she's recruited an awkward squad of sourly eloquent grumblers, from Samuel Pepys to the "slightly deranged" vegetarian and would-be "boghouse" reformer Thomas Tryon (who died in 1703, allegedly and appropriately, of "Retention of Urine") to the "notoriously peevish" Oxford antiquarian, Anthony à Wood (1632–95).

Here, for example, is what Matt Bramble, the fictional alter ego of the reliably grumpy Tobias Smollett (1721–71) had to say about a society ball in Georgian Bath:

Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours, armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues, plasters, assafoetida drops, musk, hartshorn, and sal volatile; beside a thousand frowzy streams, which I could not analyse.

Imagine that? You'd probably rather not. But after working your way through the vivid, splendidly horrible pages of "Hubbub," a book that so revels in the nastiness it describes that most of its chapters appear to have been named after Snow White's worst nightmare ("Ugly," "Itchy," and "Mouldy" are just three of their dank and dismal number), you won't be able to avoid doing so. Not only that, you will understand that the stench of assafoetida drops was merely one of the lesser assaults on the senses of poor Mr. Bramble. That party was about as good as it got. Beyond the masterclass theater of ballroom and grand house lay the smoky, reeking cityscapes of early modern England, territories where the medieval was only yesterday, and could, quite easily, have become tomorrow.

It was a muddy, desperate world of licentious fustilugs, determined dog-skinners, essential gunge-farmers, and rootling "piggs," of dissolute rakehells, and the drabs who serviced them, a world of urban dunghills and city "hog-styes," a world inhabited by people marked by tetters, morphew, "psorophtalmy" (eyebrow dandruff, since you ask), and pocky itch, and clothed in grogram tailored by botchers. If you suspect that one of the many pleasures of "Hubbub" is the exuberant vocabulary that so enriches the texts cited by its author, you'd be right. Delightfully, it's an exuberance that has infected Ms. Cockayne herself: She must be one of the few 21st-century writers to use words such as axunge, muculent, and smeech.

This evident, and endearing, empathy for the period of which she writes is more than a matter of language. Yes, it's true that, in a refreshingcontrasttothecarefully picturesque, fiercely scrubbed picture that is the hallmark of BBC manufactured-for-export flummery, the dryly amusing Ms. Cockayne "unashamedly" highlights the worst of urban life of the time. Nevertheless, it's also evident that she is, as she says, determined to guard against what historian E.P. Thompson has called the "enormous condescension of posterity." Some aspects of their ancestors' life might revolt modern Englishmen, but may have been a matter of indifference, or even enjoyment, to their grimy forebears.

At the same time, it would be even more condescending to believe that the citizens of the septic isle were simple fatalists, passively accepting the muck, chaos, and disease that surrounded and, not so occasionally, engulfed them. As Ms. Cockayne's grumblers, not to speak of countless lawsuits against slatternly neighbors and slovenly tradesmen, reveal, they were anything but. Life could be better. Life ought to be better. Life would be better.

This was an age, perhaps the first, of a self-consciously progressive modernity. Raging in the 1740s against the state of the British capital's streets, Lord Tyrconnel sneered that they gave the impression of a place populated by

a herd of barbarians. … The most disgusting part of the character given by travellers, of the most savage nations, is their neglect of cleanliness, of which, perhaps, no part of the World affords more proofs than the streets of London … [the city] abounds with such heaps of filth … as a savage would look on with amazement.

Running through that speech is the implicit understanding that Englishmen had left barbarians and barbarism behind. Englishmen could do better. Englishmen ought to do better. Englishmen would do better.

So, eventually, they did. Twenty years later, parliament passed a series of laws designed to tidy up those streets of shame and much more besides, laws that were just part of an accelerating, if uneven, modernization that quite literally paved the way for industrial revolution and economic triumph.

And some of the credit for this must go to the grumblers. If necessity is the mother of invention, then discontent is the father. So buy this marvelous book, the most engaging work of social history I have read in years, and let Ms. Cockayne introduce you to a cast of characters you will never forget and a past we have failed to remember.

One tip: "Hubbub" is best enjoyed after eating, not before.

Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall

Frederick Taylor: The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–89

The New York Sun, May 30, 2007

Berlin, August 1978, © Andrew Stuttaford

To cross over into East Berlin in the 1970s, as I did on a couple of occasions, was to take a trip that, even then, seemed like a voyage back into a lost, almost unimaginable era. The rampaging ideologies, cruel and convinced, that had done so much to wreck Europe were in retreat across the western part of the continent, their fervor dimmed by exhaustion, bitter experience, sweet, if uneven, prosperity, and, credit where credit's due, careful American supervision. In East Berlin, by contrast, it was still 1945 or, if you prefer that date of a future that already appeared to have passed the West by, 1984.

There were occasional ruins and countless bullet holes, relics of Hitler's Götterdämmerung; there were the apartment blocks that proclaimed a utopia with no room for humanity, and then there was that sense, deadening, clammy, gray, of an oppression that Winston Smith would have understood all too well. Not just a sense, a reality: the Stasi, East Germany's secret police, was more than 100,000 strong, with at least another 200,000 informers, all for a population of just 17 million.

And then there was that wall, a symbol of horror, tyranny, and finally, deliriously, liberation. In his highly readable new book, "The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–89" (HarperCollins, 512 pages, $27.95), Frederick Taylor attempts to combine the tale of the Berlin Wall with a more general history of the German Democratic Republic, an approach that is understandable, yet sometimes a little frustrating: Mr. Taylor's account is very far from being a comprehensive study of what was one of the last century's most peculiar, disturbing, and interesting states.

Nevertheless, there's an undeniable logic to looking at the "other Germany" from the perspective of a wall that was both an admission of its failure and the key to its survival. While Mr. Taylor has no sympathy for the communist regime, the picture he paints is more complex than the usual Cold War cartoon. The wall was, he shows, the desperate response of the dictatorship to the prospect that its state would collapse from within, emptied out by the lure of West Germany's remarkable economic recovery. For many East Germans freedom and an increasingly higher standard of living were there for the taking. All it required was a train ticket to East Berlin, and a little luck.

For all of Berlin, East and West, was supposedly still under the shared control of World War II's "big four." As a result, the border within the city continued to be porous in ways inconceivable elsewhere on the intra-German frontier. In the first 12 years of its existence, the GDR lost around a sixth of its population to the west. As the 1950s progressed, and the barbed wire and death strips went up around the rest of East Germany, Berlin was the escape hatch, the way out. This was unsustainable. If that hatch wasn't locked tight, East Germany would collapse, and if East Germany collapsed, it would almost certainly take the fragile Cold War truce down with it.

As 1960 turned into 1961, the rush for the exit only intensified. Torschlusspanik ("panic that the door will be closed") gripped the GDR. If anything, however, the panic was underdone. The door wasn't just closed that year. It was bricked-up. In chilling, precise detail, Mr. Taylor explains how the regime made its preparations (meticulous, cynical, and, somehow, very German), kept the Soviets onside (one of the many strengths of this book is its focus on the tricky relationship between the Kremlin and East Berlin), and then succeeded in incarcerating an entire nation in the course of one August weekend.

Critical to that success was the passivity of Britain, France, and America, nominal guarantors of a nominally united city. As Mr. Taylor makes clear, they huffed, and they puffed, but they never tried to blow that wall down. To have done so would almost certainly have meant war, and who was prepared to risk Armageddon for the right of East Germans to travel? It was an exercise in Realpolitik that condemned millions to imprisonment in their miserable abomination of a republic for nearly 30 more years, but the obvious implication to be drawn from Mr. Taylor's narrative is that this was the correct thing to do. And so it was.

That is not the same as saying that this was a morally straightforward decision, yet to read this book carefully is also to see the traces of another story, that of the West German politicians (mainly on the left) who appeared to have few qualms about accepting, and perhaps even liking, the idea of that socialist sibling of theirs. When in 1987 Gerhard Schröder pronounced (with, it seems to me, unseemly relish) that reunification was a "big lie," he was not, as Mr. Taylor reminds us, alone.

Fortunately, the future chancellor got it wrong. Two years later, time caught up with East Germany. When it did so, it came rushing in at a pace that suggested it was desperate to make up for those wasted, frozen decades. Mr. Taylor describes those lovely, wild, exhilarating weeks movingly and with undisguised enthusiasm. But, while he does mention some of the difficulties and ambiguities that have followed reunification, it's difficult to avoid the feeling that his head, like his heart, remains caught up in the optimism of 1989–90. History, however, moves on, remorseless, relentless, and forgetful. As Mr. Taylor himself notes, the PDS (essentially the old East German Communist Party in unconvincing democratic drag) is now an important part of the coalition that runs Berlin.

Some people never learn, and others never give up.

England's Arcadia

Juliet Nicolson: The Perfect Summer

The New York Sun, May 2, 2007

Of all the legends with which humanity deludes itself there are few more persistent, enchanting, and tormenting than that of a lost golden age. The Jews of the Old Testament pined for Eden, and the ancient Greeks dreamed of Arcadia. In the fantasies of many modern Britons, that vanished, magical idyll may have taken place on the island they call home, and not that many years ago, but that has only sharpened the sense of loss and tightened its grip on the English imagination.

This particular golden age was said to have been ushered in with a funeral, that of Queen Victoria. It ended, no less ironically, amid celebrations, as cheering crowds feted the declaration of a war that, everyone said, everyone knew, would be over by Christmas. Nearly half a century later, Philip Larkin described the days that followed in his poem "MCMXIV." He did so with a photographer's precision ("moustached archaic faces / Grinning as if it were all / An August Bank Holiday lark"), a poet's lyricism, and a historian's insight. Larkin concludes with lines that blend fact and myth into a lament for the timeless, prelapsarian Albion that had been thrown so carelessly away.

Never such innocence,

Never before or since,

As changed itself to past

Without a word — the men

Leaving the gardens tidy,

The thousands of marriages,

Lasting a little while longer:

Never such innocence again.

Nostalgia for that brief heyday, its glitter, glory, and grandeur only gaining in retrospective magnificence from the years of slaughter and decades of decline that followed, is a reflection of the horror that the British feel about World War I, a conflict that became, and remains, the greatest trauma in their long history. It's a nostalgia, deep, sentimental, self-indulgent and infinitely sad, that can be found in books, in the cinema, on canvas, and just about anywhere else you may care to look. To give just a few instances, it's this nostalgia that inspired the unexpected power of "Another World, 1897–1917," by former Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. It's this nostalgia, misty and melancholic, that saturates "The Shooting Party," James Mason's elegiac farewell to the big screen, and it's this nostalgia, bitter sweet but undeniable, that runs through "The Go-Between," the only one of L.P. Hartley's novels still widely read today.

To understand this nostalgia is to understand the spirit in which Juliet Nicolson has written "The Perfect Summer" (Grove Press, 264 pages, $25) an evocative, gossipy, and, on occasion, profoundly moving description of five sunbaked months in the middle of 1911. To understand this nostalgia is to understand why this book has sold so well in England. Its success may say as much about the United Kingdom today as its contents do about that same country roughly a century ago. The narrative that unfolds in "The Perfect Summer" revolves around country houses, society balls, naughty debutantes, new money, newer mores, ancient aristocracy, artistic experimentation, wild gambling, the coronation of a monarch, and the meals, oh, the meals. A country house breakfast might include "porridge, whiting, devilled kidneys, cold grouse, tongue, ham, omelette, kedgeree, and cold sliced ptarmigan": Never such breakfasts again.

To be sure, the book contains dutiful references to the gross inequality and grotesque poverty that scarred this era, but with the exception of her vivid description of a series of bitter, and portentous, strikes (and what prompted them), it seems as if Ms. Nicolson, a scion herself of the English upper classes, probably only wrote the more hardscrabble passages as a sop to our own more egalitarian age. They represent brief eat your-greens interludes before she returns with evident relish to the richer, wickedly enjoyable fare that makes up the bulk of her book.

After all, she has to: The essence of an idyll is that it must be idyllic. What's more, this particular idyll has long been scripted to derive its emotional force from the way that it was destined to end on the Western front. The suggestion that this splendor might have crumbled regardless has no part to play in this legend. Nor do awkward statistics, such as that Britain lost many more people, albeit far, far less cruelly, through emigration in the decade or so before the war, than it was to lose in the trenches.

Pedantic folk searching for that type of analysis will have to look elsewhere. It has no more place in "The Perfect Summer" than Mrs. Bridges did "upstairs." This book, by contrast, simply asks its readers to lie back and think of an England that never quite was. So pour yourself some champagne and revel in the sybaritic trivia that Ms. Nicolson lays out so invitingly before us. For example, who could not enjoy discovering what really happened during all those country house Saturday-to-Mondays ("weekend" was considered a frightfully common term), especially as they were, it turns out, ideal venues for romantic intrigue?

Ideal, yes, but a hopeful Romeo still had to watch his step. Among the many delightful anecdotes to be found in this book is the tale of Lord Beresford, who was always, apparently, very careful to check that he was sneaking into the right room. There had, you see, been an earlier and most unfortunate occasion when this lord had leapt "with an exultant ‘Cock-a-doodledo,' onto a darkened bed, believing it to contain his lover, only to be vigorously batted away by the much startled Bishop of Chester."

Never such innocence again?

Victory at All Costs

Lynne Olson: Troublesome Young Men

The New York Sun, April 11, 2007

If there is one thing, and one thing only, to be grasped about Britain's failure to head off Hitler in time, it's that it was almost certainly inevitable. Unfortunately, this is something that readers of "Troublesome Young Men" ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pages, $27.50), a new book that explains how Winston Churchill rose to power and appeasement fell, will have to discover from another, more balanced source.

What's more, to describe "Troublesome Young Men" as a "new" book in anything other than the most literal sense is to be too kind. Yes, the additional, if occasionally rather gossipy, focus that Lynne Olson puts on some of the critics of appeasement who rallied around Churchill is welcome (she's particularly good on the studied ambiguity of Anthony Eden, the former foreign minister who had resigned from Neville Chamberlain's government in early 1938), but for the most part, the story she tells is as dated as Chamberlain's frock coat. More morality play than serious study of the past, and riddled with the clichés of class warfare, it's a version of events that had already found its definitive form by 1940 with the publication of "Guilty Men," a fierce, best-selling tract by the pseudonymous "Cato" (in reality, a triumvirate led by Michael Foot, a young journalist who later became leader of the Labour Party).

"Guilty Men" was brilliantly written, brilliantly persuasive, and brilliantly unjust. Designed to saddle Britain's Tories with responsibility for the mess in which the country found itself after the collapse of France, while at the same time carefully exonerating the Left from any meaningful share of the blame, this cunning polemic succeeded to an extent that even its shrewd, deft, and manipulative authors cannot have expected. It helped pave the way for the crushing defeat of the Conservative Party (even with Churchill at its head) in the 1945 election, and it shaped the way that Britons thought of the disastrous run-up to the war. More than six decades later, it still does.

It's no surprise that it played so well. By making scapegoats of toffs and Tories, Cato spared the rest of the British people the embarrassment of asking themselves what exactly they had been doing while the threat from the Third Reich grew. It was, after all, a period in which Britons in their millions had not only participated in 1935's unofficial "Peace Ballot" (collective security, "effective" sanctions, you know how it goes), but had also, after three more years of Hitler, taken to the streets to celebrate the deal Chamberlain cut at Munich. Tellingly, Ms. Olson has nothing to say about the former. The latter she attributes to Chamberlain's manipulation of both the press and his own party.

To an extent she's right. Some of the most interesting passages in "Troublesome Young Men" are those that show how the prime minister was nothing like the ineffective weakling of popular legend, at least when it came to domestic politics. Despite that, Chamberlain could not (even had he wanted to) afford to ignore the concerns of an electorate ready to pay almost any price to avoid a fresh European war. Any price, that is, other than spending money soon enough on the rearmament that might have made a difference.

Might? Part of the appeal of "Guilty Men" was that it had no room for such shilly-shallying. To the armchair strategists that wrote it, all was clear. This should have been done. That should have been tried. It was an approach, helped by hindsight and the luxury of the hypothetical, which came with an additional advantage. Suggesting that the solutions to the conundrum posed by Hitler were obvious implied that the failure to adopt them (until too late) must have been the result of stupidity, stubbornness, naïveté, or something more malign. In essence, it presumes some sort of guilt. Like many before her, Ms. Olson has gratefully applauded that verdict.

In reality, the situation was far more complicated. There was indeed plenty of stubbornness, naïveté, and the rest of it to go round in the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments, but the idea that there were any easy answers to the problems that Britain faced is nonsense. For example, there was no significant political constituency for military action against Germany until at least the Anschluss, and even if there had been, how would it have been paid for? A few years after the worst of the Great Depression, there was little money to spare, especially for a nation already burdened by bills for the defense of an empire. As for the failure to cooperate with potential allies against Hitler (another key element in Chamberlain's rap sheet), one, the USSR, was a hostile, genocidal dictatorship with, as the Finns were shortly to demonstrate, a feeble army; another, France, was thoroughly demoralized; and a third, Poland, was to last less than three weeks when the panzers struck. And America, of course, was nowhere to be seen.

Even if we put moral considerations to one side, none of this necessarily justifies what was done at Munich, but it helps explain it. That Ms. Olson has largely chosen to ignore these issues is a shame. She's a skilled and lively writer, quite capable of handling complex topics in a way that would not deter the popular audience at which this book (with its occasional lapses into Harlequin baroque) is clearly aimed. As it is, "Troublesome Young Men," which finds itself on much firmer ground when its author turns her attention to the Phony War and Chamberlain's fall, is a fair read, but, all too often, an unfair history.