Elegy for the Sons of Asgard

Robert Ferguson: Scandinavians

The Wall Street Journal, August 2, 2017

Baltic Sea, Stockholm-Helsinki, August 1980 © Andrew Stuttaford

Robert Ferguson’s “Scandinavians” is not a book for the beach, but it might well fit the bill on a distant northern shore, with the fog rolling in and memories of long ships stirring. Discursive, meandering, sometimes beautifully written, it presents a historical narrative punctuated by reminiscences, conversations retold, snatches of autobiography, fragments of biography and stories added, one suspects, solely for their strangeness.

Oslo, Norway, May 17, 2009 © Andrew Stuttaford

We learn, for instance, about Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702), scientist, engineer, architect, musician and botanist. “Of all [the] claims for Rudbeck’s polymathic genius,” Mr. Ferguson writes, “none can compare in its scope, its vision, its ingenuity and its sheer weirdness” with his discovery that Atlantis had been located in Sweden and that Swedish was “the proto-language from which Greek, Latin and Hebrew all derived.” Rudbeck devised, Mr. Ferguson suggests, “a golden past worthy of Sweden’s golden present”—in the 17th century, the country was a European superpower. The stormaktstiden (the great power era) didn’t last long, nor did Rudbeck’s reputation. Even so, nowadays he is remembered sympathetically in Sweden for his account of the country’s origins, a saga “in which facts, dreams, myth and waking life, historical personages, biblical and mythological figures merge and flow and part in a mesmerizing drift.”

Stockholm, Sweden, December 2010 © Andrew Stuttaford

Mr. Ferguson, whose earlier books include a history of the Vikings, as well as biographies of Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun, is a rather more reliable source. A Briton, he first traveled to Scandinavia at the tail end of the 1960s with a friend (“He looked like Withnail and I looked like I”). Despite an unglamorous stint in Copenhagen (Withnail was eventually deported for trying to shoplift some cheese), Mr. Ferguson fell for the place. He obtained a degree in Scandinavian studies and, not long after, took up a Norwegian government scholarship to study in that country for a year. It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that he’s still in Norway today.

Arlanda Airport, Stockholm, Sweden, June 2011

The book’s subtitle (“In Search of the Soul of the North”) makes “Scandinavians” sound more daunting than it is. If there is a search going on, the author is in no hurry to find what he is looking for. Instead we are left with an idea—no more than that—of these lands and the three taciturn tribes that make up the bulk of their population. To an outsider, Norwegians, Swedes and Danes seem to be cast from the same mold, but—as I know well from three decades of working alongside them—that is far from the case. Mr. Ferguson touches on this, but too lightly.

Over southern Norway, March 2015 © Andrew Stuttaford

The history that he retells—Vikings, wars, monarchs, writers, philosophers—is an overview, operating both as necessary background and an invitation to dig more deeply. The grand old gods make their inevitable appearance and so does the tale of their demotion, a transition commemorated in 10th-century Denmark by a massive stone that features the earliest known depiction of Jesus in Scandinavian art, a “fierce-eyed warrior ready to jump down from his cross and do battle with the demons of heathendom.” As Mr. Ferguson observes (and as the first missionaries to these unpromising territories understood), “the suffering Christ had no natural appeal among those who formerly worshipped masters of violence like Odin and Thor.”

Oslo, Norway, May 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

Even once they had dispensed with those roughnecks from Asgard, it took a while for the Swedes, Danes and Norwegians to succumb to that whole “love thy neighbor” thing. The Kalmar Union of 1397 among the three countries lasted barely more than a century: Sweden broke away, although the Norwegians sank into what they cheerfully refer to as their “400-year night” under the Danes. Meanwhile, the Swedes sliced away at Denmark’s domain over the years, finally annexing Norway in 1814.

Hotorget, Stockholm, Sweden, September 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

Only nine decades later, Norway split off from Sweden. This history, differing patterns of economic development and subsequent events, not least sharply contrasting experiences of World War II, helps explain some of the distinctions among Denmark, Norway and Sweden today. Nevertheless all three adopted strikingly egalitarian forms of social democracy bolstered by an insistence on self-effacement in the interests, as Mr. Ferguson puts it, “of the greater good of social harmony.” In more recent years, this emphasis on conformity has become, paradoxically, a threat to the harmony it was designed to protect.

Husby, Stockholm, Sweden, September 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

These societies are now undergoing possibly their most consequential transformation in centuries, “immigration on a scale unprecedented in the recorded history of the region.” Yet particularly in Sweden—a country marked, in Mr. Ferguson’s dismayingly accurate opinion, by “an almost pathological fear of socially conservative views and a demonization of those who hold them”—the inflow has been, in the main and for too long, waved through with too little of the debate it deserved. The situation is somewhat different in Norway and Denmark, but Sweden’s democracy has been damaged by the treatment of those disinclined to join the elite’s passionate embrace of “globalized culture.” Add in the effects of the immigration itself, and it’s easy to imagine a future in which the past will be sorely missed.

Stockholm, Sweden, February 2011 © Andrew Stuttaford

Decades ago Mr. Ferguson set out to live “in what was essentially a nineteenth-century dream of Norway,” and when he arrived there this was in a certain sense possible. Norway, Sweden and Denmark were—particularly before cheap travel, the internet and all the rest—both physically and mentally somewhat remote from the European “mainland.” But since then, Mr. Ferguson writes, there has been a “slow-motion tsunami of change,” and the author has “felt an increasing desire to look back” before these societies “change out of all recognition.” This book may be an introduction to the Scandinavians, but it is also an elegy.

Note: Appeared in the August 3, 2017, print edition as 'Northern Lights.'

Stockholm, Sweden, December 2009 © Andrew Stuttaford

Never the Twain

Peter Conradi - Who Lost Russia? How The World Entered a New Cold War.

National Review, July 10, 2017

History has no right or wrong side. There is little about it that is inevitable. But probability cannot be wished away. To read this book by Peter Conradi (the foreign editor of the London Sunday Times) is to be reminded that the odds were always against a durable rapprochement between post-Soviet Russia and the West, but, as Conradi shows, that doesn’t mean that both sides didn’t do their bit to make them even longer.     

The original sin was Russian: The 1991 “revolution” was, as Conradi puts it, “incomplete.” The old regime poured into the supposedly new, unbothered by fresh elections. Conradi maintains that a “short-sighted” West eventually staked too much on an increasingly authoritarian, increasingly erratic Boris Yeltsin. Maybe, but one of the tragedies of the incomplete revolution was that it had thrown up no credible alternative. Russia in 1992 was not Germany in 1945. There was no Stunde Null, no definitive break, no settling of accounts with the past — no Soviet Nuremberg (who, Conradi wonders, in the deeply compromised “ruling class would have wanted such a reckoning”?) — or even any agreement as to what that past had been. Many Russians, writes Conradi, “felt a sense . . . of disorientation after so much of what they had been brought up to believe in had been denounced as a lie”; so much, yes, but not enough.

The survival of countless relics, physical as well as political and psychological, of the Soviet epoch — those Lenins on their plinths, that mummy in that mausoleum — conveyed a message that the old days had not been as bad as all that, a myth made easier to succumb to by the brutally hard times that followed the Soviet collapse. Conradi finds it “difficult to fault the underlying logic” of the economic reforms of the early Yeltsin years, but it was a logic torn apart by an uncooperative reality that, critically, was deformed by a “political class . . . sharply divided between reformers and Communists.” In Poland, by contrast, “a broad . . . consensus” helped smooth the move away from a command economy after 1989.

Conradi asks whether the West, which was less than openhanded to Russia, might have done more to help out, citing sources that suggest, not unreasonably, that at certain moments of crisis it could have. But he appears unconvinced that even significantly more-generous assistance would have made the necessary difference. That seems fair. In all likelihood, a Marshall Plan 2.0 would have struggled to turn around a land ruined by seven decades of Communism. Unlike the battered recipients of American post-war largesse, Russia lacked the habits, the skills, and the institutions needed to make a free market work. An inflow of massive amounts of aid money might well have done nothing more than further entrench the kleptocracy that had viewed privatization as an invitation to pillage. The misery of the many had been accompanied by the enrichment of the few, a looting that discredited liberal reform — economic and political — and did much to pave the way to Putin’s sly despotism.

Adding insult and yet more injury after the loss of Russia’s Eastern European empire came the dismantling of the Rodina itself under conditions — a quick deal struck in a Belorussian hunting lodge — that fed many Russians’ suspicions, as Conradi observes, of a stab in the back, a Dolchstoss, as they used to say in Weimar. And the breakup of the USSR was made more painful by the failure — stressed by Conradi — by large numbers of ordinary Russians, “elder brothers” (so the party had never ceased to insist) in a “socialist family of nations,” to grasp that their homeland too was an empire. Relentlessly repeated propaganda (the lie that the Baltic States had volunteered to join the USSR was just one of many) and also, not least with respect to Ukraine, a genuinely tangled history, had left their mark. And so had geography: Conradi recalls how Russia’s was a “contiguous empire” undivided by the oceans that split up its French or British counterparts. Moving from one Soviet republic to another was no bigger a deal than crossing an American state line. The disintegration of the USSR left millions of ethnic Russians stranded in what overnight became foreign countries, their plight a reproach to their kin back home and an opportunity for future mischief-making in what, years before Putin’s ascendancy, the Yeltsin government rapidly dubbed the “near abroad.” It was a phrase that signaled Russia’s continuing strategic interest in what went on there.

Conradi correctly dismisses the idea that the West should have accepted a Russian veto over NATO membership for countries that had broken free from its vanished imperium. To do so “would have meant a de facto continuation of Europe’s Cold War division” and a denial of a country’s right, enshrined in the 1975 Helsinki Charter, to choose its own alliances. The NATO–Russia Founding Act of 1997 restricted NATO’s ability to base permanent forces closer to Russia’s borders, but only “in the current and foreseeable security environment.” Moscow’s subsequent behavior has since so changed the environment that, as Conradi notes, the door has opened for the argument that that old constraint no longer applies. And, however tentatively, NATO has marched through it.

The West, contends Conradi, misread Russia in the 1990s. “What it chose to interpret as assent . . . to [NATO’s] eastward expansion was, in reality, weakness and an inability to resist,” a humiliation compounded by the manner in which, as he explains, a “triumphalist” America “had become rather too fond of a unipolar world.” It had become too confident as well, beguiled by an interlude that it mistook for an era. It trampled over the sensitivities of a fallen superpower that had not accepted its fall. Russia believed it still merited a seat at the top table, and not only, as Conradi emphasizes, on American terms.

To be sure, it was wildly optimistic of Russia to expect an invitation to join NATO (something for which Putin was angling in his early period in office): There could be no room for the bear in the henhouse. When West Germany was admitted by its former adversaries into NATO in 1955, it was dependent on the U.S. for its defense and had quite clearly learned from the horrors of the past: It was no conceivable danger to those with whom it wanted to team up. The same could not be said of early-21st-century Russia.

Yet Russia’s support for the U.S. after 9/11 was speedy and helpful (and beforehand Moscow had warned Washington that there could be trouble brewing). The threat posed by Islamic extremism might have formed the basis for long-term cooperation between the two, but that promise was sabotaged by America’s unwillingness to reciprocate, not to speak of the attack on (secular) Iraq, a Soviet client for decades.

And Iraq was not the only longstanding Kremlin ally to fall foul of NATO. Orthodox, Slavic Serbia was also battered into submission, and Kosovo, a rebel province of immense historical significance, was later wrested from it. European borders had been shifted by force. After occupying Crimea six years later, Putin referred to the “well-known Kosovo precedent.”

Yeltsin’s relative liberalism, argues Conradi, will prove an aberration. That too is not inevitable, but under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that Russia, nursing the grievances it did, turned into the antagonist it has become. What is surprising is how long it took for it to be taken sufficiently seriously even after the wealth created by a recovering oil price (rather than by the fruits of a well-managed economic restructuring that, had it happened, might have taken the country in a different direction) both entrenched the regime and gave it the resources to punch back. The West was right to pursue the agenda it did in Eastern Europe but was oddly unprepared for countermeasures by the Kremlin, especially after the challenge to the Putin regime posed by the color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia and then, with catastrophic results, the far greater upheaval in Ukraine in 2014, an upheaval that Conradi chronicles with characteristic evenhandedness.

To Conradi, it’s remarkable that the West has yet to put together the “well-considered and historically relevant” policy that Zbigniew Brzezinski called for over 20 years ago. Well, our statesmen are what they are, but it’s hard to deny that Russia has been treated with striking carelessness and startling complacency, treatment that may not have “lost” Russia but undoubtedly helped make matters worse. The supposition by the Western elite that Russia’s time as a great power had passed played its part in all this, handily reinforced by the pleasantly reassuring assumption that the history it no longer understood had come, as the saying then went, to an end.

Then there was the conviction, particularly within the EU and the Obama administration, that an emerging supranational order was eclipsing “19th century” power politics, a delusion that overlapped with a curious faith in allegedly universal values. What those were was a touch murky, but democracy was ostensibly among them, something George W. Bush declared that he wanted to promote worldwide — a stance incompatible, as Conradi recounts, with Russian calls for “non-interference in the affairs of sovereign countries.” However hypocritical those calls (ask the Balts, the Ukrainians, the Georgians . . .), they revealed a growing ideological dimension to the burgeoning rivalry between Russia and the West.

As President Trump is discovering, that rivalry is unlikely to ease anytime soon, but it could be managed — jostling between great powers is nothing new — and perhaps even reduced. After all, Russia and the West do have interests in common, most notably (but not only) with regard to Islamic extremism. But first the West must learn to toughen up, panic less, preach less, and think more.

Latin Lover

Daisy Dunn: Catullus’ Bedspread -The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet

The New Criterion, February 1, 2017

Sandroyd School, August 1990 © Andrew Stuttaford

It was, subversively enough, a Latin teacher who was the first to hint to us that the Romans were not quite the Englishmen-in-training that we had been led to believe. Eleven or twelve years old and enrolled in a Wiltshire boarding school that the 1960s were, most disappointingly, passing by, we’d been brought up on tales of heroic Horatius at the bridge, of steadfast Scaevola at the fire, of legions on the march, of a great empire, if not quite so great as the one on which the sun, until very recently, had never set. In a break from the usual fare—a maneuver by Caesar, more boredom from Livy—Mr. Chips (not his real name, and not his style either: he drove a Rover 2000, a surprisingly chic car for that time and place and, more thrillingly still, was rumored to be a member of London’s Playboy Club) introduced us to something, he said, that was a little different, a poem by one Gaius Valerius Catullus:

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus . . .

Crikey.

Catullus’s Poem 5, perhaps his most famous, is an ode to his love and an ode to the intoxication of love.

Just a little later, “Da mi basia mille”:

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred.

Then another thousand, then a second hundred.

Then—don’t stop—another thousand, then a hundred . . .

The translation is by the British writer and classicist Daisy Dunn, the author of Catullus’ Bedspread. The book’s suggestive (if slightly deceptively so) title is given an extra boost by its sub, the promise that within its sheets readers will discover The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet. Somewhere in the Elysian Fields Ovid raises an eyebrow. Somewhere at HarperCollins a clever mercenary chortles.

Ms. Dunn has set herself a tough task. “Of Catullus,” wrote Charles Stuttaford (my paternal grandfather’s cousin, since you ask) in his 1912 edition of the poet’s works, “we know very little.” Dunn agrees: “Practically everything that can be known about him must be extracted from his . . . poetry,” a technique, warned the American classicist Peter Green, that was “risky,” and “nowadays” (he was writing about a decade ago) has “the full weight of critical opinion against it,” although “there are signs of change in the air.”

I don’t know if critical opinion has lightened up since then, but when Dunn leaves off her occasionally clunky re-imagining of the poet’s daily life (“having wolfed down eggs and bread at some miserable inn”) and focuses her attention and considerable erudition on the barely over a hundred poems that survive—poems without title, put in sequence (most likely) long after their author’s death—to reconstruct Catullus’s biography, the man replaces the shade and the millennia dissolve.

Born into a wealthy family in Verona, then a part of Gaul (Cis, not Trans), Catullus, who died aged around thirty, in, probably, 53 B.C., spent much of his adult life amid Rome’s hipster priviligentsia. He was a prominent member of a circle of poets hacking away—somewhat subversively, griped Cicero—at the staid conventions governing poetry in that era. In a turbulent time in the history of the republic (complicated, but well described by Dunn), Catullus loitered on the fringes of politics, insulted the, ahem, “penetrated” Julius Caesar in Poem 57, briefly took a financially unrewarding government job in Bithynia, and mourned a lost brother. Crowning (albeit, in the end, with thorns) a busy sex life, there was his passionate, but doomed, affair with “Lesbia” (almost certainly Clodia Metelli, the wife of an aristocratic politician), a relationship—and its sour aftermath—he chronicled in some of his best-known poems. Metelli was, scolded Stuttaford, “a woman entirely without moral sense,” a description that may not have been entirely unfair, even by relaxed Roman standards.

Much of the delight in this book lies in the details—not all of them scandalous—of Roman life that Dunn provides: the recipe for garum, a “coveted” fish sauce that could also, it was said, “heal a crocodile bite;” the aristocrats plebbing down their accents two thousand years before Tony Blair’s glottal stops started; the appeal of nearly transparent Coan silk, “a favorite among the less virtuous.”

In Catullus, Dunn has a caustic and gossipy accomplice:

I was idling in the Forum when my friend Varus

Saw me and led me off to the home of his lover,

A little tart (as she immediately struck me),

Though not obviously inelegant or lacking in charm.

Yes, much of Poem 64, Catullus’s longest surviving and, to Dunn, “most accomplished” work, dwells on the old myths, myths of a type thought to be more proper fare for the verse of the time, but they were woven into the bedspread that inspired her book’s title. It was a mildly meta conceit (even if that bedspread belonged to one of the Argonauts), a nod, perhaps, to the interest that Catullus and his circle found in describing the everyday. Discussing Poem 27, Dunn tells how the Romans drank their wine watered down, something, she relates, that appalled Catullus the Gaul. Thus the sly anachronism in Dunn’s rendering (in her The Poems of Catullus: A New Translation) of the poem’s final lines:

And you, water, spoiler of wine, away from here

S’il vous plaît. Off you pop to the dour kind.

Here is Bacchus’ wine, neat.

S’il vous plaît.

Gauls talked in a different way too, Dunn writes, tending “to keep their mouths open more often than the Romans as they spoke, causing one word to leak into another like a loudly dripping tap. Gaping vowels gave rise to strange inflections and distinctive dialogue, which was exceedingly difficult to lose. And Catullus was not minded to do so. The sheer languidness of the elided vowel lent itself perfectly to love.”

Reviewer mops brow.

But Catullus was a more sophisticated poet than his naughty reputation might suggest, technically highly accomplished in ways that Dunn makes accessible to the layman, sometimes beautifully so: “[T]hese lines begin so abruptly—da, dein, deinde—it as if we hear them with Catullus’ quickening heartbeat.” He was an innovator, a writer about writing (in Poem 50 Catullus recalls “playing now with this metre and now with that”), the member of a literary set, a magpie, this from the street, that from the Greeks. Catullus’s Poem 51, in which he describes how he feels—not great—watching Clodia being watched by her husband, was inspired by a poem written by Sappho some six centuries before. It’s a reminder of the remarkable continuity of culture in the classical world, and it was a challenge of a sort. Catullus wanted his verse, he humblebragged in Poem 1, to “survive . . . for over a hundred years.”

And here we are.

But more recent generations have not always found it easy to deal with Catullus. His preference for the quotidian over the epic brought, as Dunn notes, “the corporeal and the earthy” in its wake. In Poem 32, he asks his sweet Ipsitilla, “meae deliciae,” to invite him round for “nine consecutive,” well, “fututiones,” the thought of which already excites him as he lies back after a good meal: “I poke through my tunic and cloak.”

Reviewer worries how his editor will deal with that.

To read Catullus is to be offered a glimpse of a sexual morality so alien to Christian tradition that generations of translators, particularly in the more Puritan corners of Christendom (not least those rainy islands inhabited, according to Poem 11, by horribiles uitro ultimosque Britannos), have tried to consign a good number of Catullus’s poems to the Memory Hole. When, in the preface to his Catullus: A Commentary, published by Oxford University Press in 1961, the Scottish classicist C. J. Fordyce admitted that he had omitted “a few poems [actually nearly thirty percent of the total] which do not lend themselves to comment in English,” he was just the latest in a long line of embarrassed Brits to do so. In the preface to his 1912 work, poor Charles Stuttaford stated that he had previously come under fire for annotating poems that some critics carped would have “been better to have left unexplained,” and, so, in 1912, that’s what he did. No less cautiously, some poems, including Poem 32, were included, but only in Latin: A reader able to translate fututiones (a word invented by Catullus) could cope with its shocking implications.

Stuttaford also did his best to haul Catullus back in the direction of respectability, in essence claiming that much of his poetry was, to borrow a fashionable phrase, no more than locker-room talk. Maybe. More plausibly, he argued that some of Catullus’s outrageous—and often outrageously entertaining—invective, including the notorious first two lines of Poem 16, was no more than “vulgar abuse” (to see just how vulgar, check out the 1990 translation by the British poet and classicist Guy Lee). What provoked them was the suggestion by two other poets that Catullus’s love poems were a touch effeminate. Catullus’s response was, as Dunn, delicately describing the indelicate, indicates, to assert “his masculinity once and for all.”

If that doesn’t make you turn to Mr. Lee, I don’t know what will.

How Not to Fix the Euro: More Leftism

Joseph E. Stiglitz - The Euro: How A Common Currency Threatens The Future of Europe

National Review, October 10, 2016

Imagining that a large number of very different economies could be squeezed into a single poorly constructed currency was one fatal conceit. Imagining that the story of what happened next could be squeezed into one rigid “narrative” was another — but that’s what economist Joseph Stiglitz has done in The Euro, a badly flawed book about a disastrous idea.

Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and a Columbia professor, has been crusading for years now against the wickedness of “neoliberalism,” a term that, like “late capitalism,” says more about the person using it than about what it purports to describe. Check out the titles of some of his more recent books: “The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do about Them,” “The Price of Inequality,” “Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy.” The Euro is the latest installment in a long leftist tirade.

Stiglitz has valuable points to make on the EU’s dangerous monetary experiment, but it’s easy to lose sight of them amid all the pages devoted to his insistence that the devastation caused by the single currency is another example of the havoc that “market fundamentalism” has wrought.

Yet the euro was, at its core, an exercise in central planning. Stiglitz concedes that it was a “political project” to accelerate the process of European integration. But more than that, it was to be a challenge to the supremacy of the dollar and a permanent brake on the unruliness of foreign-exchange markets, ambitions far removed from market fundamentalism. Indeed, one of the earlier critics of the proposed new currency was Milton Friedman, not that Stiglitz finds the room — or the grace — to mention it.

Stiglitz questions the economic rationale behind the euro (arguing, intriguingly, that, contrary to the claims of its advocates, it was always likely to operate against convergence within the bloc) and the way that it was put together: The structures needed to make it work properly weren’t there. Yet his list of those responsible for the inevitable crisis is tellingly incomplete. To be sure, he acknowledges the important (and often overlooked) fact that individual governments could — even within the constraints of the euro zone — have done more to head off disaster than conventional wisdom now suggests, but, for the most part, he blames the Left’s preferred bogeymen, greedy bubble-blowing bankers and their accomplice, light-touch regulation.

But while there were undoubtedly areas in which regulation was too lax, the greater problem was that regulators were nudging financiers in wrong directions, whether it was toward real-estate-linked lending or into the belief that Greek sovereign risk was not that much greater than German. In the early years of the euro, Greece had to pay (on average) less than 0.3 percent more to borrow than Germany. That was nuts, but those steering the euro zone had persuaded themselves that the economies of the countries now locked into the currency union had truly converged. They hadn’t. And, crucially, the warning signals that would have been sent by the currency markets of old — a drachma crash, say — had been silenced. Ideology trumped reality, politics trumped markets, and the result was catastrophe. There’s a lesson in that, but Stiglitz doesn’t appear to see it.

Stiglitz is on safer ground criticizing the steps, from bullying the Irish government to assume private bank debt to the indiscriminate emphasis on “austerity,” taken by the euro zone’s leadership after the crisis erupted. The former is very hard to defend, and the latter was, in some cases at least, overdone, poorly timed, or both: There’s a limit to the extent to which a country can be expected to deflate its way to recovery. But to attribute — as Stiglitz does — the tough love shown by the “Troika” (the European Central Bank or ECB, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund) responsible for the euro zone’s bailouts to market fundamentalism is, to put it at its kindest, a misreading. What drove it was the complex internal politics of the currency union.

Stiglitz rightly highlights the difficulty of reconciling the management of the single currency and basic democratic principle. As he notes, voters in the euro zone’s laggards were offered no serious alternative to the harsh and sometimes questionable treatment prescribed for their countries. Beyond that essential but unremarkable insight, he touches on a broader, somewhat neglected issue: what it means when a democracy transfers the oversight of key areas of the economy from the legislature to technocrats and, specifically, to “independent” central banks such as the ECB, a practice Stiglitz attributes to the then (supposedly) prevailing “neoliberal ascendancy.”

That’s a debatable proposition to start with and it has next to nothing to do with the independence of the ECB, which echoes (as Stiglitz recognizes) the traditions of the Bundesbank (Buba), Germany’s legendary central bank. Far from being the product of late-20th-century neoliberalism, Buba’s independence — and its inflation-fighting mandate — date back to its origins in a ruined country that believed it knew where debauching a currency could lead.

Without Germany, there would have been no euro. But, proud of their Deutschmark, German voters didn’t want to switch to a new currency. Sadly, they were never given the chance to reject it, but assurances from their government that the ECB would, for all practical purposes, be a Buba 2.0 were part of a package of promises (no bailouts was another) designed to soothe their unease. Stiglitz discusses the fact that Germany shaped the ECB but fails to give enough weight to the democratic concerns that help explain why.

In any event, those promises were broken, and not just by a series of bailouts. Whether by effectively permitting local central banks to “print” new euros, or by allowing unpaid balances to mount up in its clearing system, or, belatedly (Stiglitz would argue), by a series of increasingly elaborate market operations culminating in the European version of “quantitative easing,” the ECB has turned out to be far less stingy a central bank than German voters had been led to believe it would be.

Stiglitz does not seem too bothered by this: Some democratic failures are evidently more equal than others. He is (legitimately) angry about the way that the Troika forced out the socialist Greek premier George Papandreou (his “long-term friend”), but he has nothing to say about the not-dissimilar putsch that replaced a less ideologically sympathetic figure, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, with an unelected, obedient proconsul.

Then again, this is the Stiglitz who claims that the objectives of European integration included “strengthening democracy” — a revealing interpretation of a project born of the notion that Europe’s voters could not be trusted to keep the peace. The idea behind what became the EU was that power should be transferred away from democratic nation-states to a supranational authority staffed by largely unaccountable technocrats. And over the decades, it was, often by the sleight of hand made necessary by European electorates’ stubborn suspicion of Brussels’ relentless drive toward ever closer union.

But a new currency was not something that could be introduced on the sly. People would notice. To a greater or lesser degree, the inhabitants of the future euro zone would have to consent to such a change, and to a greater or lesser degree they did. But they were not prepared to surrender enough sovereignty to give the euro a better chance of success. As much as Stiglitz might wish otherwise, that hasn’t changed. If there is to be any realistic prospect of keeping the current euro zone intact while restoring prosperity to its weaker brethren, it will, one way or another, involve a pooling of resources, but the richer countries won’t agree to that on terms that the poorer could accept. This impasse owes nothing to market fundamentalism and a great deal to the absence of a shared identity: Germans are Germans, Greeks are Greeks; neither are Eurozonian. They lack the needed sense of mutual obligation.

Stiglitz maintains that if the euro zone’s members won’t agree to a more comprehensive monetary union, big trouble lies ahead, threatening not only the euro but, maybe, the broader European project. I’m not convinced: “Muddling through” with what Stiglitz labels a blend of “temporary palliatives” as well as some “justly celebrated” deeper reforms has kept the currency going so far, albeit at a terrible cost. It could continue to do so for quite a while yet. And, despite the best efforts of the rebellious Brits, the EU seems set to endure too.

It’s worth adding that Stiglitz’s definition of that more comprehensive monetary union begins, understandably enough, with a credible “banking union,” debt mutualization, and the like, but then spills over into a vision of a command-and-control euro zone that — if that is what is really required to make the currency union work well — is another good argument for putting a stake through it once and for all.

A different way to go could, reckons Stiglitz, be the creation of a system under which euro-zone countries (or groups of countries) adopt “flexible euros” that trade against each other within a (much) more tightly managed version of Europe’s earlier exchange-rate regimes. He also puts forward yet another solution, some form of “amicable divorce”: Either Germany (alone or in conjunction with other northern European countries) should quit the euro zone, or the currency should be divided into new euros — northern and southern, a division that has, in my view, long been the right way to go. What unites these alternatives is the welcome recognition that one size does not fit all: A currency must reflect the realities of its home economy. Tragically, there’s no sign that the central planners in Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt, Paris, and Berlin agree. After all, they tell us, the euro-zone crisis is over.

We’ll see

Not Too Tricky To Be Ike's Veep

Irwin F. Gellman: The President and the Apprentice - Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961

Standpoint, March 1, 2016

The thing about “archive rats”, to borrow Stalin’s useful insult, is that they unearth facts that unsettle the authorised version of history. It’s a label that Nixon scholar Irwin Gellman can wear with pride. He has been burrowing in the archives for decades in obvious places (the National Archive, the Nixon Library), overlooked places (the Cabot Lodge papers), and in places (he none too subtly implies) that other historians could not be bothered to inspect — every one of the approximately 845 boxes of the “largest part of the Nixon manuscripts, called the 320 series”. 

The result is The President and the Apprentice, a somewhat obsessive, intriguingly contrarian retelling of the story of Nixon and the Eisenhower presidency. Traditionally, Eisenhower’s time in office has been regarded as a wasted opportunity, only partly redeemed by the supposed disdain he felt for his vice-president, Richard Nixon. More recently, academics have been re-rating Ike (it probably helped that doing so made his Republican successors look bad) but that re-rating has yet to percolate through to a popular consensus still shaped by dim memories of high-school history lessons and, more vividly, media depictions of Eisenhower’s America as a land that progress forgot.

Nixon has also benefited, to a degree, both from the attention of revisionist historians and the passing of the decades since his disgrace. His funeral was attended by President Clinton and all his surviving predecessors (Clinton was representing, he declared, “a grateful nation”). For all that, to most Americans Tricky Dick remains a President Evil, snarling while he plots dark deeds and incriminating tapes whir. He has never been forgiven by liberal opinion-formers for his role in exposing the traitor Alger Hiss (“vindicated” again, I note, in a book published last autumn).  Nor have they forgiven him for his style — or styles, all those “new Nixons” — for his abrasiveness, his awkwardness, his embarrassingly obvious striving and, worst of all, for a series of election victories that announced that America was more like him than them.

Even those historians willing to look beyond the standard caricatures of this complicated man’s complicated career have struggled to put Nixon’s relationship with Eisenhower in a positive light, something that Mr Gellman, previously the author of The Contender, an account of Nixon’s Congressional career, sets out to correct. This is no hagiography; it is a scholarly work, but a combative one too. Reinforced by what he has mined from all those archives, Gellman debunks myths, he challenges the comfortably liberal narrative, and when people have lied he says so. Nixon was brought down by his lies, but to no small extent his reputation has been trashed by the lies of others. To take just one: No, Mr Truman, he didn’t call you a traitor.

While The President and the Apprentice leaves a generally favourable impression of the Eisenhower administration, it is not a broad rethink of this already rethought presidency. It is too narrowly focused on the Nixon vice-presidency for that. But Gellman does attempt to address what has become a central criticism of those years: that Eisenhower did too little too slowly to come to the help of African-Americans, at the wrong end of institutionalised racism across the country and, in the South, victims of something very much worse. Nixon, whatever his private thoughts on racial matters (the much later White House tapes do not make pretty listening in this respect), had no time for Jim Crow, segregation, or the petty (and not so petty) viciousness of the racial discrimination of the era. And nor, despite some attitudes that might dismay in 2016 (as a father, he would not have been too happy to discover who was coming to dinner) did Eisenhower, a man, it must be remembered, brought up in turn of the 20th century Kansas. That said, even allowing for a difficult political environment, the duo’s reluctance to make more use of the bully pulpit in support of civil rights must count against them. And their hopes that changing attitudes and improved African-American access to the voting booth would be enough to do the trick were at best wishful thinking.

True to form, Gellman does not let the Democrats off the hook, highlighting what was once in plain sight, but is now often consigned to the memory hole. Democrats did much to obstruct and (in LBJ’s case, for a characteristically calculated blend of reasons) dilute the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first legislation of its kind since 1875. This was a reflection of the priorities of their southern redoubt, as was the unwillingness of many Democrats (including, Gellman points out, both JFK and LBJ) to offer public support for Eisenhower’s decision to send in the army to enforce the integration of Little Rock Central High School, Arkansas.

To be sure, President Truman ordered the desegregation of the military (although it was the Eisenhower administration that essentially implemented it), but, after reading this book it’s hard to deny that Truman, later an opponent of the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters (organised by “Communists”, apparently), and no stranger to the N-word, has been credited too much, and Eisenhower too little, for what they each did to push the US further down the long march to racial equality, an imbalance that, of course, fits all too neatly into the historical perspective of the American Left.

To FDR’s first Veep, “Cactus Jack” Garner, the vice-presidency was “not worth a bucket of warm piss”, but Gellman makes a strong case that Nixon made far more of this unloved position than might have been expected. He was not any sort of co-executive; the Dick Cheney vice-presidency lay far in the future. But he was valued for his contribution to, and coolly objective analysis of, the frequently rough political scene at home (a melée that the grand old general preferred to be seen to soar above, but understood enough about to know — usually — what he didn’t know) and, as the years passed, also for his thoughts on abroad. Nixon was, so to speak, a youthful understudy whom Ike (conscious of how ill-prepared Truman had been when he took over from FDR) felt a patriotic obligation to train, but he was also a real force within the White House, given real jobs to do.

Not unreasonably, Gellman sees this as proof of the faith that, particularly in the second term, Ike put in Nixon: “The president gave assignments to those he trusted, and he trusted Nixon.” That’s true, but, in the case of Eisenhower, cold behind that five-star beam, that word “trust” should be read as conveying a faith in Nixon’s competence rather than anything with more emotional resonance. Gellman backs up his more upbeat take on the relationship between president and vice-president with a series of letters and obiter dicta from Eisenhower signalling the respect and affection the president had for Nixon. Maybe, but they can also be interpreted as pats on the head for a promising young subordinate by a man who knew how to motivate those under him. And Gellman cannot avoid the reality that Eisenhower let Nixon twist in the wind, not once, but twice. 

The first time was when, during the 1952 election, a scandal blew up over a fund that had been raised by some Californian businessmen to help the far-from-wealthy Nixon with his senatorial expenses, an arrangement that did not deserve to be labelled as corrupt. A larger, possibly more questionable fund that benefited Adlai Stevenson, the liberal icon running against Eisenhower for the presidency, received rather less coverage: how odd! Eisenhower made clear Nixon was on his own, but even when Nixon had vindicated himself with the brilliantly manipulative “Checkers” speech, still hesitated to stand by his man. The second occasion, four years later, was when Eisenhower effectively made Nixon beg for his slot on the re-election ticket, a position that he had clearly earned, a cruel spectacle that the normally indefatigable Gellman finds “baffling”.
And then, four years after that, there was the moment during a press conference when Eisenhower was asked to cite a major contribution that then presidential candidate Nixon had made to his administration. Ike replied that, given a week, he “might think of one”.

Gellman fillets these incidents with his customary diligence, handily demolishing some of the mythology that surrounds them and adding some detail  often omitted from the historical record (for example, Eisenhower promptly apologised for that remark). But, despite Gellman’s best efforts, the sense that something was awry between the two men lingers.

If I had to make a guess (and when it comes to the enigmatic Ike, one can only guess) the key to Eisenhower’s behaviour was partly the sense, not unusual among the great, that no one could be good enough to succeed him. But there was something else at play, and Gellman points to it with his argument that Ike’s leadership style was in peace as it was in war: “he led a team of subordinates, who were expected to go where Ike sent them, be his eyes and ears, provide intelligent and informed advice, deliver his messages, and occasionally become casualties.” They were, therefore, in the end, disposable.

But Nixon hung on. 

Money Manager

Ben Bernanke: The Courage to Act  - A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath

The Weekly Standard, February 5, 2016

Georgetown, Washington DC, November 2008 © Andrew Stuttaford

In The Courage to Act, former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke reveals, a little unexpectedly, that he can tell a taut tale well, and in a manner accessible to someone who wouldn’t know a CDO from an Alt-A mortgage. After a likable autobiographical beginning, the book is centered on the Fed's response to the financial crisis that started to unfold just over a year after Bernanke took office in 2006. Bernanke was right to see that catastrophe threatened to engulf more than Wall Street, and he was right to see that, in the much-mocked phrase, something had to be done.

It's easy to criticize the technical aspects of bailouts based on Depression-era powers usable in "unusual and exigent circumstances" and put together with "chewing gum and baling wire." But that misses the point. Financial panics feed on themselves. What mattered about the rescue packages was not their structure but what they symbolized: Money, a lot of money, was available, and the mechanisms were in place to dole it out. With confidence gone and liquidity evaporating, that was what markets needed to know.

Neither left nor right nor center rejoiced in what was widely characterized as a helping hand for the rich, but there were more explicitly ideological objections to the bailouts, too, most notably from congressional Republicans. They ranged from the nutty—TARP as "Bolshevism," a label that would have surprised Lenin—to a more intellectually coherent insistence on greater respect for the disciplines of laissez faire.

But to argue against the interventionism of 2008-09 on the grounds that markets are best left to sort themselves out was (as the ebbing Bush administration also appreciated) to succumb to a form of fundamentalism with no connection to political reality. From Greece to Spain to France to Italy, economic stagnation, or worse, has shaken the European Union's political order to a degree largely unimaginable a decade or so ago. And not in a way that bodes well for free enterprise.

Over here, the maelstrom on Wall Street did its bit to propel Barack Obama into the White House. The feebleness of the economic recovery that followed has played its part in the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. To maintain that America's political center would have held in the event of a collapse in the banking system—empty ATMs and all the rest—is absurd.

As it was, the mayhem triggered by the implosion of Lehman Brothers offered a taste of a larger calamity dodged. Bernanke would have preferred to help out Lehman, too—both the Fed and an essentially helpless Treasury understood that its failure would be an "epic disaster." But the law, he writes, stood in the way: Lehman Brothers was in such bad shape that it wasn't eligible for the emergency financing deployed elsewhere. It's been suggested that this was merely a convenient excuse. Bernanke himself admits that the Fed was reaching the limits of the politically and financially feasible. Market conditions were such that any assessment of Lehman's underlying strength (and eligibility for aid) was more art than science, leaving some wiggle room had the Fed been prepared to take it.

Nevertheless, I'm inclined to believe Bernanke's insistence—his version of events, unsurprisingly, is more or less in line with what Tim Geithner and Hank Paulson have to say in their memoirs—that the law counted. In an age of technocratic excess, that's cause for mild patriotic celebration. In marked contrast to the lawlessness that scarred the defense of the eurozone, the Americans stuck by the rules.

But any celebration is tempered by the knowledge that the Fed's emergency powers have been rewritten in the wake of the Dodd-Frank Act to exclude lending to specific institutions ("broad-based" lending is still permitted), a right Bernanke claims to have been "happy to lose." This change was cheered on by the likes of Elizabeth Warren; the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, fretting about moral hazard, thought that it did not go far enough. As it is, this restriction will almost certainly make it impossible for the Fed to give the sort of support it gave to smooth J. P. Morgan's takeover of Bear Stearns, let alone to AIG. And that'll be fine—until it's not.

When it comes to moral hazard, Bernanke notes that "no firm would willingly seek Bear's fate." It wasn't insouciance over risk that brought so much ruin, but the failure to understand it.

Drawing the correct line between the necessary independence of the Fed and necessary democratic accountability is (as Bernanke clearly appreciated) not straightforward, particularly during a financial rescue operation when the maintenance of market confidence—and thus, often, secrecy—is of the essence. A couple of years after the bailouts, it emerged that the emergency financing extended to Wall Street's finest was much larger than realized. Congress would not have taken the news well had it known this at the time.

Given the seriousness of the situation—and the fact that the Federal Reserve had to do most of the heavy lifting—Bernanke likely found an acceptable balance between the needs of finance and the demands of Capitol Hill. But occasionally some of his comments ("even the risk of a once-in-a-century economic and financial catastrophe wasn't enough for many members of Congress to rise above ideology and short-run political concerns") betray the impatience of the technocrat with democracy's rougher edges.

There are hints, too, of technocratic bias in Bernanke's analysis of the causes of the crisis. He's unwilling to let interest rate policy take much of the blame and, to be fair, he makes a decent case why it shouldn't. He does admit that the Fed was slow to notice the problems that were developing and slow to fully grasp their significance. He acknowledges that a ludicrously fragmented regulatory system had failed to keep up with rapidly evolving capital markets. But in the end, private sector culprits—including subprime lunacy, the bewilderingly intricate interconnectedness of the modern financial system, and good old-fashioned panic—dominate his perp walk.

Hyman Minsky, the economist who, decades ago, warned that a prolonged period of financial stability could lead to dangerous investor complacency, gets the shout-out he deserves. But did the widespread perception—boosted by heavy, if misdirected, regulation—that markets were well regulated reinforce that overconfidence? There is also the inconvenient fact that capital adequacy rules strongly encouraged banks to favor mortgage lending and, critically, the purchase of mortgage-backed securities—so long as the latter were rated Triple A by the rating agencies that were, themselves, given a privileged position by regulators.

Triple A! What could go wrong?

Bernanke also has little to say on the way that postcrisis regulation has hit the willingness of banks to lend. That's ironic, given his belief that shrunken credit flows made the Great Depression worse; doubly so, as reining in the banks has probably canceled out no small part of the boost that the ultra-low interest rates generated by quantitative easing (QE) were meant to bring.

Bernanke recalls that after QE1 and QE2, he had concluded that the Fed's securities purchases had been "effective" but "not enough, on their own, to achieve an adequate pace of economic growth and job creation." QE3 came next. That began to taper off toward the end of his tenure, by which time Bernanke believed that the economy was in considerably healthier shape.

It was impossible, he concedes, to know how much of the recovery was due to the Fed's work, but Bernanke is convinced that "unconventional monetary policies" promoted growth and reduced the risk of deflation. That could be true. But there may eventually be a harsh price to pay for choosing to put the laws of economics to one side for so long. Years in which interest rates—the cost of money—have been so disconnected from market forces have left a trail of mispriced investment and unwise borrowing that is likely to end up in a nasty bust. What will an already overstretched Fed be able to do then?

Bernanke was not given the benefit of the doubt that Alan Greenspan—the "Maestro"—enjoyed. Tough times will do that. His immediate response to the crisis infuriated many. The measures he took in the years that followed were greeted with another round of jeers by many and crossed fingers by more. Even those who profited from the stock market recovery built on his cheap money seemed suspicious of their friend at the Fed.

Only a few brave contrarians have called Ben Bernanke a maestro. His historical reputation will probably be all the better for that. By detailing what he did and why he did it, this book won't hurt it, either. In the end, the consequences of his grand gamble will count for more. And we still don't really know what those will be.

A Distant Funhouse Mirror

Christopher Buckley: The Relic Master

National Review, January 25, 2016

By the late Middle Ages, scraps of Mary Magdalene were strewn all over Europe. Not only was her body (or most of it) on display in the town of Saint-Maximin in Provence (it’s still there, if you want to take a look), but, as Charles Freeman notes in his Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe (2011), “there were three more of her bodies” to see, one near Ancona, one in Rome, and one in Constantinople. Lucky Abbéville had a head; Cologne had embraced two of her arms, and “five more were known” elsewhere. Relics were part of the sea of faith, to borrow a phrase, in which most Christians swam, but they were also a handily profitable device to prop up temporal and spiritual power. As such, they were an excellent business opportunity.

Enter Dismas, the Swiss hero of The Relic Master, Christopher Buckley’s beguiling, funny, and slyly erudite new book. Dismas (named, not inappropriately, after the penitent thief crucified alongside Christ), a former mercenary — a Reisläufer — and former monk (“couldn’t get used to the hours”), has become a dealer in relics, one of the best, a man not without a certain degree of integrity. Disdainful of the sloppier and more disgraceful frauds, he deals in nothing he knows to be false. He stands by that leaf he sold from the Burning Bush.

Dismas is in Basel for the 1517 relic fair, a fair that never existed but is located by Buckley in a city that plays host nowadays to an annual fair showcasing contemporary art. The kneecap of Saint Afra then, a spot painting by Damien Hirst now, objects of desire and of worship, objects that magically bestow much-coveted properties on their owners, some sort of holiness in the first case, some sort of sophistication in the second, as well as the status that comes with buying anything — kneecap or spot — that is outrageously expensive enough.

Such relics often fetched tidy sums, not least because of the revenues brought by the pilgrims who came to venerate them, thereby possibly improving their prospects in the afterlife — for a price: “Donate such and such sum,” writes Buckley, “to venerate such and such relic, and so many years would be deducted from your term in Purgatory.” They could be useful, indulgences: get-out-of-purgatory-sooner cards, never short of takers. After Basel, Dismas delivers a haul of relics to one of his two main clients, an archbishop of great splendor and greater cynicism. After careful episcopal evaluation, it is determined that the 296 relics “would provide an aggregate indulgence value of 52,206 years off time in Purgatory. And provide his grace with a tidy return on his investment.” It was madness, but, like many manias, not without its internal logic.

Buckley’s tone is amused and amusing, but choosing to write such a book now, after the Internet bubble, after the 2008 bust (how were collateralized mortgage obligations, uh, valued, anyway?), and at a time when billion-dollar “unicorns” gallop through private-equity portfolios, undercuts any suggestion of condescension. Thus Dismas and many, many others discover that their cash has been looted by a crooked financier, Master Bernhardt. The locals contemplate what might be an appropriately grotesque punishment — burning, death by bear, something even nastier involving fishhooks? In the end, he gets off with a “well-attended” beheading. Absent the beheading, an echo of Madoff there, I thought; Bernie, Bernard, ah.

The year 1517 is an interesting one — a year at the cusp — for Buckley to pick. Within weeks of Dismas’s expedition to the relics fair, he is in Wittenberg, visiting his other key client, the Elector Frederick of Saxony. And Dismas is with Frederick when the elector is told that Martin Luther has been busy at the Castle Church: “‘Ninety-five [theses],’ Frederick smiled, ‘is our church door sufficiently commodious?’”

Dismas is soon wondering what Luther’s less than indulgent treatment of indulgences might mean for his trade: “Many indulgences were earned by venerating relics. If indulgences were abolished, who would come to venerate the holy bones?” He was right to worry: Frederick gave up collecting relics within a year or two. And then there was grim John Calvin. His Treatise on Relics (1543) is a work far rougher on those souvenirs of sanctity than anything you’ll find in Buckley. So much of the Virgin Mary’s milk was on display, jeered Calvin, that “had the Virgin been a wet-nurse her whole life, or a dairy, she could not have produced more than is shown as hers in various parts.” A dairy.

Hints of the shift in thinking beginning to percolate through Europe at this time are scattered through The Relic Master. Dismas is a traditionalist, but he struggles to answer some of the increasingly awkward questions that his friends are beginning to ask. Surely the “indulgence business” was in the Gospels “somewhere.”

I’ll pause now to reassure anyone worried that he or she has stumbled into a discussion of a learned volume on 16th-century religious controversies rather than a review of the latest book by Christopher Buckley, a famously enjoyable writer related, so to speak, to this magazine. Fear not: The Relic Master covers some serious historical ground and boasts an impressive list of sources at the end, including Freeman’s book and an account of a marriage in 16th-century Nuremberg that I, for one, will be hurrying to read — one day. But it also features killings, torture, hand-to-hand fighting, attempted crucifixions, a beautiful girl, bizarre superstitions, three loutish arquebus-slingers, trout nibbling at a severed arm, power politics, a lecherous Medici, herbal Viagra that works, black humor (“Frederick’s not a burner”), good jokes, and some splendidly wry writing: “Tetzel was a supple theologian. He’d pioneered a new form of indulgence whereby you could buy full indulgence for sins you had not yet committed. Even Jesus hadn’t thought of that.” Supple.

It’s never easy to know how to handle the distant past in fiction. Hollywood’s classic couldn’t-care-less generated some terrific lines (“War, war! That’s all you ever think about, Dick Plantagenet! You burner, you pillager!”) but failed to convince, while more respectable attempts at the old ye olde were neither authentic nor readable: Sir Walter Scott, I’m looking at you. Others have mined history to make fun of the present, or to make fun of the past; some — Robert Harris, for example, in his Cicero trilogy — have treated it seriously, both as a window into a vanished civilization and as a device to reexamine more modern times. Others still (such as, in his own way, Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose) have tried to understand a way of thinking that can seem impossibly alien today.

There are glimpses of that lost sensibility in The Relic Master. Buckley’s characters are not Enlightenment folk centuries out of time, or even Bob Hopes cracking wise on the road to Chambéry — but their 16th-century attitudes are presented lightly and never weigh down what is essentially a romp, a caper, written with a wink (“A German pope? Judgment Day will come first”) in breezily contemporary prose (not a “prithee” in sight). Buckley is often described as a satirist, but in this book he comes across more as someone enormously entertained by man’s perennial absurdity, an absurdity he relishes pushing just that bit further, teasing then — and now.

So far as the plot is concerned, the MacGuffin involves the faking of one Jesus burial shroud and then the taking of another (it’s complicated). Dismas’s dream of a prosperous retirement in safe, neutral Switzerland (Harry Lime might sneer, but the Swiss have long been a sensible people) has been trashed by the banker who looted his savings. That compels him to go on one last, atypically dodgy “mission” — that’s where the shroud(s) come in — to earn back that retirement in the mountains. And as we all know, one last missions have a way of turning tricky. Dismas’s farewell tour is no exception. I won’t be a spoiler, but I will say that, once again, fishhooks have an unpleasant role to play, that a ridiculously narcissistic Dürer (yes, that Dürer) is an accomplice, that the girl shoots a mean crossbow, that an imperial posse is thwarted, that disguises are deployed, that a performance of the Last Supper is sabotaged, and that the arquebus-slingers — Unks, Cunrat, and Nutker, three goons with strong Three Stooges characteristics — turn out not to be so bad in the end.

It’s a story that — as capers should — rolls merrily along. It was clearly fun to write, and it is certainly fun to read, but the very best of this book comes in moments such as this, included in the description of Dismas’s arrival in Wittenberg:

“Did you bring wonderful things?”

“One or two. Saint Barbara. A toe.”