Book Catalogue

E-BOOKS

History (13)

A history of the West: 1 The ancient West; 2 The medieval world; 3 The West awakes; 4 Revolutions in the West; 5 Twentieth century West

Parallel Trials; The German Nexus: The Germans in English History; The English Difference? – The Tablets of their Laws; Terror and the Police State: Punishment as a Measure of Despair; A tale of two nations – Uncle Sam from Down Under; Looking down the Well: Papers on Legal History; Some History Papers: Essays on Modern History in England and Europe; Listening to Historians: What is Truth?

Literature (3)

Windows on Shakespeare; Some literary Papers: Tilting at Windmills; Top Shelf, or What used to be called a Liberal Education.

Philosophy (2)

The Humility of Knowledge: Five Geniuses and God; Different Minds: Why are English and European Lawyers so Different?

Autobiography (4)

Confessions of a babyboomer; Confessions of a barrister; Summers at Oxford and Cambridge; Up your North

In print (5)

The Journalist’s Companion to Australian Law; The Arbitrator’s Companion; Law for Directors; The Making of a Lawyer; The Common Law – A History

TWENTY-TWO EBOOKS

The Ancient West

The general history of ancient Greece and Rome is traced separately and then their contribution to the West is looked at under the headings Gods, Rulers, Thinkers, Writers, Artists and Historians.  This is the first in a five volume History of the West that is published at the same time.  One theme recurs – in what sense was either ancient Greece or Rome civilised?  66,000 words, fully annotated, with chronology.

The Medieval West

The book covers about 1000 years from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance under the headings the Spectres of Dante and the Pilgrims of Chaucer; Mohammed and Charlemagne; Saint Augustine and Saint Aquinas; Serfs and Peasants; Lords and Vassals; Soldiers and Priests; Knights and Lords; Kings and Popes; Crusaders and Charlatans; and Lawyers and Judges. It is the second volume of A History of the West.  45,000 words fully annotated.

The West Awakes

This book deals with three phases of the history of the West (now including the U S) known as the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. The rebirth commenced largely in Florence.  It was followed by what was traditionally called the High Renaissance centred in Rome.  The spiritual Reformation exploded hotly in Germany.  It was followed by a very cold version in Geneva.  Typically, the English went their own perverse non-European way.  There the reformation had almost nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with politics.  History has not paid enough attention to the impact of this attainment of religious Home Rule on the later revolutions in England.

Volume 4 of A History of the West goes beyond the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.  The German philosopher, Kant, said that enlightenment is our emergence from our self-incurred immaturity.  The Enlightenment is the name given to the period following the events under the umbrella of renaissance and reformation when thinkers and artists focussed more on man than gods, and the quest for freedom became doctrinaire.  The book also looks at German classical music and the birth of the U S.

The book follows all these themes through the life stories of the main players.   It is 65,000 words, and fully annotated.

Revolutions in the West

Five revolutions made the modern West.  The English have an unchallenged genius for deniable, incremental change, in a constitution which they built up over a thousand years or so, but even they had two authentic revolutions, one in 1641 and one in 1689, and they had a gruesome civil war in between.  Additionally, we shall look at the American War of Independence (starting in 1776), the French Revolution (starting in 1789) and the Russian Revolution (starting in 1917).

The recurring theme is the willingness of those who get into a club to slam the door in the faces of those coming after them.  People who think that the glimmer called the Arab Spring can be dealt with inside, say, five generations may wish to reflect on the English experience, or the Russian, or even the agony of France for the century after 1789, or the guilt of the United States before it was purged by its Civil War.

This book first looks at the old regimes before each revolution, the crises in those regimes, and then looks separately at the five overthrows.  The book looks in detail at the terror in two of them, and draws conclusions about revolutions elsewhere.  Volume 4 of A History of the West is 74,000 words fully annotated.

Twentieth Century West

We will now look at the completion of the industrial revolution and the current onset of the technological revolution (which is destroying minds, manners, and jobs); the horror of peoples’ wars and nuclear weapons; a world depression and the threat of a recurrence of economic collapse; the popular sterility of modernism in the arts apart from jazz; the claimed death of God, and the complete absence of any alternative, and the humiliation of a world church; the rise of professional sport as a business and as the new opium of the masses; the appalling moral collapse of three entirely ‘civilized’ nations (Italy, Germany, and Spain); the depravity of three of the most evil people in history (Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler – Mao is outside our field); the way that Einstein and computers can leave us feeling powerless in a world that we now have to take on trust; wins and losses on racism; the challenges of what will be the dominant religion, Islam, the faith of the East, and what will be the strongest economic power, China; the mediocrity and possible seizing up of democracy; the extinction of the aristocracy, and the movement of wealth from land to capital; the growing divide between rich and poor; and what some see as the closing of the western mind, the emptiness of its art, and the failure of its pillars and institutions.

We shall look at these questions while looking at the lives of Kaiser Wilhelm, Henrik Ibsen, Henry Ford, Lloyd George, Edith Cavell, Albert Einstein, James Joyce, John Maynard Keynes, Sigmund Freud, Joseph Stalin, Louis Armstrong, Francisco Franco, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pablo Picasso, Charles de Gaulle, Harry Truman, Walt Disney, Elvis Presley, John Kennedy, Maria Callas, Muhammad Ali, Margaret Thatcher, Silvio Berlusconi, Bill Gates, and Angela Merkel.  The American weighting is not surprising in what we now call the American century.  We shall additionally look separately at the following issues: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Two Economic Crashes; The Rule of Law and Racism; The Technological Revolution; Annihilation; and, The Death of God, Sport, and Manners?

This is volume 5 in A History of the West.  The book is 95,000 words.  It is fully annotated.

Parallel Trials

This book considers the two most raked over trials in history.  It looks at them in tandem under the following headings: Sources; Powers; Laws; Accused; Teachings; Accusers; Courts; Charges; Prosecutions; Defences; Verdicts; Reactions; Conclusions; History; Responsibility.

No book has analysed either trial in such a way.  In order to keep some kind of narrative going for both trials, some of the more controversial issues in the trial of Jesus are looked at in detail in Appendices.  They set out the relevant terms of one of the gospels and give some comments on the difficulties that flow from them, and raise questions like: Was it blasphemy for Jesus to claim to be the son of God?  Could the Sanhedrin have enforced a death sentence?  Can we say what actually happened?

The evidence for the ‘trial’ of Jesus is very thin.  It looks like there was a Jewish charge of blasphemy and a Roman charge and finding of sedition:  There was evidence of the first but not the second.  What is clear is that the accused offered no defence to any charge against him.  What is less well recognised is that Socrates in substance offered no defence either.  As a defence to either charge against Socrates, the Apology is demonstrably fallacious in logic.  Socrates then invited the death penalty by his submission on penalty.

The book aims to be an independent analysis of the evidence and law and the procedure for each trial by a practising lawyer who does not profess any relevant faith.  The final appendix gives extracts from books of two distinguished judges on either side – Christian and Jewish – which accounts are obviously disfigured by bias.

The work is fully annotated.  It is about 71,000 words

The German Nexus

This book of 27,000 words has three essays on the impact of Germany on England.  The Anglo-Saxons were the first English, coming from Germany with the seeds of the language and kingship, and the glimmer of individualism.  Two Germans did not take root in England, although their influence was very great elsewhere – the second essay looks at why Luther and Kant had no impact and the great difference in thinking in the two countries.  The third traces the history of the current royal house which came from Germany.  The three essays, which are fully annotated, look at themes I have looked at in detail elsewhere.  It is deliberately idiosyncratic.

The English Difference? The Tablets of their Laws

Why are the English so different to and difficult for Europe?  This is a history of the English constitutional story from Anglo-Saxon times to now for the general public or for lawyers.  Germans (410-1066) deals with Anglo-Saxon kings and dooms up to the Conquest.  The English did not, like the rest of Europe, accept Roman law.  Barons (to 1399) covers Magna Carta, on which most subsequent English legal history is just a commentary, and the birth of Parliament and a legal profession.  Protestants (to 1603) sees English Home Rule, which legal historians underrate, and the rise of Parliament and the judges.  Gentry (to 1776) shows a century of conflict where the Stuart kings faced king-breakers from hell like Cromwell, leading to the Bill of Rights, which the Americans sent back as the Declaration of Independence.  Shopkeepers (to 1911) sees parliamentary party democracy as we know it after the crisis of the People’s Budget of Lloyd George and Winston Churchill.  Women (to 2014) covers universal suffrage, the accession of women and workers, and the current development of the rule of law.  Reference throughout is made to the present, and to comparable events in Europe and the U S.  The author is not British, but he has written extensively on the history of law and ideas.  The book of 48,000 words is fully annotated.

Terror and the Police State: Punishment as a Measure of Despair

This book looks at terror and terrorism, and its cause or effect, the police state.  It is a proper subject of study now.  This book therefore looks at a comparison of the role played by terror in France, Russia, and Germany, during the periods referred to.  After setting the scene, the book proceeds under these headings: enduring emergency; righteousness; good bye to the law; the instruments of terror; waves of terror; degradation; secret police; surveillance; denunciation; fear; popular courts and show trials; scapegoats, suspicion, and proof; gulags; propaganda, religion, and cults; the numbers; and the horror.  The book concludes by trying to describe common threads in the three regimes, and with something like a plea for Robespierre.

The book does not deal with the Holocaust.  I have enough on my plate already – sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof – but it may help in trying to understand that moral landslide to see the extent to which it might be related to the evils that are discussed in this book, which I now commend to you, my reader.

The book is 113,000 words and fully annotated.

A Tale of Two Nations: Uncle Sam from Down Under

This book plots in outline the histories of the US and Australia.  This is not a potted history of either, but a collection of snapshots of each taken side by side as these nations negotiated some of the principal stepping stones in their progress across the stream of history.  I have the pious hope that the selection of the subject matter of the snapshots may be uncontroversial if not prosaic, leaving discussion only for the inferences to be drawn and comments that might be made, but experience suggests that such a hope is likely to be illusory and hardly pious.

Both America and Australia started out as refuges for boat people, two terms of abuse now in some quarters, but although they share an original common ancestor, their stories are very different.  How, and why, is this the case?

I should disclose my sources of prejudice.  I am an Australian white male, middle class professional, who is much closer to death than birth.  I have no political affiliation, but I have a mistrust of government in general, and politicians and their parties in particular.  My perfect government is one that has as little to do with me as is decently possible – especially the part that hands out speeding tickets.  I have made a handsome living from a profession that we in this country derive from England.  I have an unlimited sense of admiration for the contribution that England has made to the civilization of the West and to the history and character of both America and Australia, and an almost equally unlimited frustration at the inability of my nation to cut what I see as the apron strings tying Australia to England, and to stand on its own two feet.  A dark cloud hangs over my descent into the dust – that I shall leave this earth before my country gets what I regard as its independence.

I have no belief in a personal God, but I believe that the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are a little like cutlery – they are what distinguish us from the gorillas.  As the white people took America and Australia, they committed crimes against the native peoples of those lands in ways that violated every part of the great religious laws that I have mentioned, but in common with most other people, I have no real idea of what to do about those wrongs now.

Doubtless other of my prejudices will become apparent to you as you go through this book, which I hope that you will enjoy.

The book is 100,000 words and fully annotated.

Looking down the Well: Papers on Legal History

The book has 18 essays or notes on the legal and constitutional history of England that underpins all common law countries.  The essays are annotated.  The book is 95,000 words.

A great English judge, Lord Devlin, said that the ‘English jury is not what it is because some lawgiver so decreed, but because that is the way it has grown up’.  That is so true of almost every part of our law.  Our law is its history.  This is why anyone claiming to be a real lawyer, and not just a bean-counter or meter-watcher, needs to get hand to hand with our legal history.  It is a rollicking story going for more than a thousand years of a people with a genius for law-making while pretending that they were doing no such thing.  It is the story of how the world got its only workable way of protecting people against bullies and each other – whether in the form of government or at large.

That which took a millennium to construct could be washed down the drain in a generation.  We have already trashed two vital parts of our governance – responsible government, and an independent civil service – and we have been scandalously weak in standing up for juries.  These failings come in large part because we have chosen to forget and then betray our heritage.  Sadly, I see no prospect of that decline being reversed.

Some History Papers: Essays on Modern History in England and Europe

These papers were written between 2008 and 2015.  They relate to what we call the modern history of Europe and Britain.  Some were written in or as a result of Summer Schools at Cambridge and Oxford.  For example, the two pieces under the heading Foretelling Armageddon were first written as course notes at Clare College Cambridge, and now can be found in the fifth volume of A History of the West.

Five of the essays deal with the two big questions that have followed me for fifty years – how did France and Germany, two of the most civilised nations on earth, succumb to their total moral collapses, and with such frightful consequences for the rest of the world?  If you are being raped or killed by a soldier, do you care about the motives of those who sent him.

Three of the pieces deal with issues in Stuart England, and all come from Summer Schools.  My notes on Cromwell come from a remarkable weekender at Cambridge taught by Dr David Smith; those on the Stuart parliaments come from a week at Oxford taught by Dr Andrew Lacey.  The story of the Treaty of Dover should be told in a play or film.

There is a long look at the very flawed views on the Atom Bomb of A C Grayling, who might just be too busy to be able to indulge in scholarship, and a piece on the great story of Lloyd George and Winston Churchill on the People’s Budget – at a time when politics had real leaders.  The piece on witchhunts is the oldest, but the bullying of the majority is still just as threatening.

These are contributions by a lawyer and a legal historian whose professional training teaches him to proceed by example, and to look at what goes on elsewhere.  I hope that you enjoy them.

128,000 words.  The major essays are annotated.

Listening to Historians: What is truth?To write history is to tell a story.  The better the story, the better the history.  There are two parts to telling a story – stating what happened; and choosing how you will describe those events.  If you tell the story well, the reader will hardly notice the distinction.

The rise of the professional historian has moved the focus to what happened from how those events are described – the focus is on evidence, rather than style.  The writers, or historians, have brought this change on.  The readers do not like it.  They like their stories to be well told.  They want to listen to the stories.  For that they want to read good writing.

This book is loaded with good writing – not by me, but by some of the best writers in the West.  There is a good spread in time and place – five British (Gibbon, Carlyle, Macaulay, Maitland, and Namier), three French (Michelet, Taine, and Bloch), two Germans (Ranke and Mommsen), one Dutchman (Geyl), one Greek (Thucydides), one Italian (Tacitus), these last two being ancient, and one Swiss (Burkhardt).

The book concludes by considering truth in history and meaning in art.

Historians are fond of talking about what history is.  They might better ask why people read it.  Do people read history so that they might know more or be better informed about the past?  Do they read it to gain insight into and some connexion with other people?  Or do they read it just for pleasure?  Do they read to listen?

The book is 55,000 words and is fully annotated.

Windows on Shakespeare

This book is an introduction to the world of Shakespeare.  Chapter I is headed ‘A Writer in Time and Space’ and puts Elizabethan England in its context in the evolution of western theatre starting with Greece, and looks at Elizabethan education and theatre, and tells all that we know of the life of Shakespeare (which isn’t much).  Chapter 2 contains a note on each of the thirty-eight plays (averaging about 2000 words on each play, but loaded heavily in favour of the most played and celebrated pieces.)  Chapter 3 offers an overview of the plays in groups – Problem, Romance, History, Classical, Comedies, and Tragedies.  Chapter 4 gives a commentary on the ranges of recordings available, and includes a catalogue of recordings on cassette, CD and DVD.  Chapter 5 looks at the greatest players of Shakespeare on stage and screen.  Chapter 6 looks at the main streams of literary criticism from time to time.  Chapter 7 concludes with general observations on this genius and his continuing presence in our life.  There are no footnotes, but references are given at the end of each chapter, or note on a play (in chapter 2).  The book is about 98,000 words.  No other handbook of Shakespeare is structured like it.

Some Literary Papers: Tilting at Windmills

These essays and notes come from the last five years or so.  They come from a lawyer and they do not claim to be works of scholarship.  I have written elsewhere about Shakespeare, great writing in history, and our great novels.  About half of the present pieces relate to Shakespeare, some in an anecdotal manner, although the grip of the Big Four goes on.  Most of these have been published by the Melbourne Shakespeare Society.  The other pieces relate to other kinds of writing, from cooking to crime, but with a few on novels.  The two substantive essays deal with great peaks in our literature – the role of Achilles and Satan in our two greatest epics, and our two greatest characters, Falstaff and Don Quixote.  If you said that the whole book was Quixotic, I would be happy.

82,000 words.  Some essays are annotated.

Top Shelf, or What used to be Called a Liberal Education

A survey of the best fifty writers or books selected by the author in literature, drama, poetry, history, philosophy, religion, science, films, cooking, and sport.  A description of every book is given – it is either leather bound at least in part or slip-cased.  They sit above the fireplace as life companions of the author.  This book of 75,000 words is different from other ‘top’ or ‘best’ lists: it is sincere.  If you get across this lot, you will be going bad to be called uncivilised.

The humility of knowledge: Five Geniuses and God

This book considers the relations between God and Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Gibbon and Wittgenstein.  The Foreword says: ‘These five thinkers represent the flower of the Western Enlightenment or philosophy.  They maintained that religious belief or faith was a no-fly zone for philosophy.  That simple proposition seems obvious enough to most people.  You do not get to the bottom of God by using logic any more than you get to the bottom of Michelangelo, Mozart, or Melbourne Storm by using logic.  But here is this simple proposition being laid down as a matter of logic by the biggest hitters that philosophy has known.  That leaves two questions.  On what grounds do some philosophers – not noticeably the most humble or tolerant of them – say that they can dictate to others what they should or should not believe about God?  If philosophers succeed in abolishing God, what, apart from that abolition, will philosophy have to show for itself for the two thousand years’ efforts since Aristotle?’

The issue is discussed sequentially for the five thinkers under the headings Times, Lives, Teachings, Reactions, and Beliefs.  There are three general chapters and a chapter ‘Other Geniuses and God’: Milton, Newton, Bach, Mozart, Goethe, Darwin, Tolstoy, Holmes, Yeats and Einstein.  Most of the subjects have a generosity of mind and spirit that is sufficient to put intolerant and dogmatic God abolishers in the shade.

There are no footnotes, but the book is fully annotated.  It is about 50,000 words.

Different minds: Why are English and European Lawyers so Different?

By looking at the comparative legal and political histories of England, France, Germany and the U S, and at the great differences in philosophy on either side of the Channel, this book looks at the variations in the way that European lawyers think compared to Anglo-American lawyers.  This book is essential for any lawyer who wants to be more than a bean counter.  There are as well chapters on rights, lawyers, jurists, trials and judgments.  The author has written on many of these themes elsewhere.  He has practised law for more than forty years and has presided over statutory tribunals for thirty years.  He has reflected on a lot of the issues raised in this book in many summer schools at Oxford and Cambridge, and one at Harvard.  He has practised at the Bar and in a major international firm, and has been briefed in the U K and the U S. The book is 47,000 words and is fully annotated.

Confessions of a babyboomer

This book is an autobiographical memoir of the author.  It goes through to when I turned 30.  Eleven days later, Gough Whitlam, the P M, got sacked.  Innocence, if not paradise, was lost.  The book is meant to give a snapshot of what it was like to grow up in a very different Australia – if you were born here at the end of the War.  References are made to outside political and sporting events, and to social customs and consumer habits to round out the picture.  One theme is the difference between three generations.  My parents, Mac and Norma, left school at about 13, and had to survive the depression and a real war; they got by with hard work and saving and a very pinched way of life, with both of them in work; they looked for their reward in the next generation rather than in a frugal retirement; they knew the value of money and saving.

My generation was not tested by a depression or a real war; we grew up in God’s country and we had everything before us – there were hardly limits to what we could achieve; we came into money, and we forgot its value and purpose.  ‘We babyboomers had enjoyed our day in the sun.  We had taken what was on offer when the war ended.  We actually got to walk along what Churchill called the broad sunlit uplands.  This was a promised land, it had been promised to us, and we had been cocooned in it.’

But the next generation looks very different – they grew up amid at least the trappings of wealth and an image of an urbane lifestyle as we sought to cast off the cringe (while clinging grimly to the Queen) and give them the best, but these children did not seem to be looking at a world of opportunity; au contraire, they were looking at threats and broken illusions.  My conclusion is that my generation were ‘the luckiest bastards alive’, and I doubt whether we have done all that we could to redeem the faith that our parents put in us.

Since this is a personal memoire, there are no footnotes.  This book is nearly 40,000 words.

Confessions of a barrister: Learning the Law

This is a memoire of the professional life of an Australian Babyboomer as a lawyer. The author has practised law for more than forty years as a barrister or solicitor, and has presided over one or another statutory tribunal for thirty years.  Of late he has concentrated on his writing in history, literature, and philosophy.  He has learned much from many summer schools at Cambridge, Harvard, and Oxford.

The author wanted to thank those other lawyers who have helped him as a lawyer, and to try to pass on to others the lessons that he has learned in practising law in various ways.  The book is dedicated to the idea that the required professional skill and attitude only come from vocation and experience, and that a good life is open to those who are prepared to put in the time and effort, to acquire the judgment, and to show the loyalty and courage that membership of this profession calls for.

Aspects of the boyhood and youth of an Australian babyboomer may be seen in a companion volume, Confessions of a Babyboomer.  64,000 words.

Summers at Oxford and Cambridge and Elsewhere

A traveller’s reflection on history and philosophy- and place

Reflections on Summer Schools at Oxford and Cambridge, and visits to Scotland and Europe, and on the subjects taught, including opera, history and philosophy.  There are essays on the philosophy of religion and Cromwell, but most of the writing is of contemporaneous impressions of Berlin, Paris, London and Scotland.  41,000 words.

Up your North

The Kimberley and Kakadu: A Seniors’ Guide from Broome to Darwin in 14 days by 4WD

A personal diary of a trip from Broome to Darwin in 14 days by a lawyer and writer in a 4WD with commentary on the outback and people living there and advice on how to avoid the mistakes of the author.  17,000 words.  Humour is guaranteed.

A new book is available on Amazon Kindle.  The blurb and Epilogue follow.  The latter raises issues of moment.  A revise catalogue follows.

Listening to Historians: What is truth?

To write history is to tell a story.  The better the story, the better the history.  There are two parts to telling a story – stating what happened; and choosing how you will describe those events.  If you tell the story well, the reader will hardly notice the distinction.

The rise of the professional historian has moved the focus to what happened from how those events are described – the focus is on evidence, rather than style.  The writers, or historians, have brought this change on.  The readers do not like it.  They like their stories to be well told.  They want to listen to the stories.  For that they want to read good writing.

This book is loaded with good writing – not by me, but by some of the best writers in the West.  There is a good spread in time and place – five British (Gibbon, Carlyle, Macaulay, Maitland, and Namier), three French (Michelet, Taine, and Bloch), two Germans (Ranke and Mommsen), one Dutchman (Geyl), one Greek (Thucydides), one Italian (Tacitus), these last two being ancient, and one Swiss (Burkhardt).

The book concludes by considering truth in history and meaning in art.

Historians are fond of talking about what history is.  They might better ask why people read it.  Do people read history so that they might know more or be better informed about the past?  Do they read it to gain insight into and some connexion with other people?  Or do they read it just for pleasure?  Do they read to listen?

The book is 55,000 words and is fully annotated.

Epilogue

In 1940, the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl had to face the war in Holland.  He was put off his normal work.  He turned to read about Napoleon and he wrote an essay on him.  When the Dutch capitulated, Geyl got back his manuscript endorsed with a message to ‘tell the printer to be quick.’  He had not referred to Hitler in the paper, but the parallels were obvious.  Geyl was arrested by the Germans and spent time in Buchenwald.  He gave lectures on Napoleon there and the comparison with the Fuhrer amused his hearers.

Curiously, Hitler may have been good for the reputation of Napoleon.  Napoleon had his critics but, apart from Stalin, no one could compete with Hitler for evil.  But where does that leave Napoleon?  Geyl was able to make an informed comparison in his Preface to his book Napoleon: For and Against.  ‘The French police were hated and feared in the occupied and annexed territories, but when one reads about their conduct with a mind full our present experiences [October 1944, before liberation], one cannot help feeling astonished at the restraints and resistances they still met with in the stubborn notions of law and in the mild manners of a humane age….And yet methods of compulsion and atrocities are inseparable from the character of the dictator and conqueror, and we shall see that Napoleon incurred bitter reproaches, at home and abroad, for some of his acts.’

Well, that is one reason that we read history – to understand the world and be able to take part in the conversation of mankind.  Geyl touches on the other reason – we read history for pleasure.

In two ways I have myself been constantly fascinated while I was engaged…First by the inexhaustible interest of the figure of Napoleon….And in the second place I have, I may almost say continuously, enjoyed the spectacle presented by French historiography.  What life and energy, what creative power, what ingenuity, imagination, and daring, what sharply contrasted minds and personalities!  And all the time the historical presentation turns out to be closely connected with French political and cultural life as a whole.

So what did the Dutch historian think of the Corsican adventurer?

He was a dictator who attempted to break with new legislation what resistance was left in the old society; who intensified his power in the State by means of centralised administration; who suppressed not only all organised influence or control and expression of opinion, but free thought itself; who hated the intellect, and who entered upon a struggle with the Church which he had first attempted to enslave; and who thought that with censorship, police and propaganda, he would be able to fashion the mind to his wish.  He was a conqueror with whom it was impossible to live; who could not help turning an ally into a vassal, or at least interpreting the relationship to his own exclusive advantage; who decorated his lust of conquest with the fine-sounding phrases of progress and civilisation; and who at last in the name of all Europe, which was to look to him for order and peace, presumed to brand England as the universal disturber and enemy.

More shortly:

What was Napoleon?  The destroyer, the despiser of men, the foreigner, the Corsican, especially scornful of Frenchmen, careless of French blood, devourer of generations of young men, suppressor of all free opinion, demanding of writers a toll of flattering unction as the price of permission to publish – in a word, the tyrant.

When we come to the question in the title of this book – what is truth? – it helps to distinguish that question from others.  Libel lawyers learn that the questions are easy – it is the answers that are hard.  What do the words complained of mean?  In that meaning would they make others think less of the person being talked about?  If so, in that meaning, are they true?

So, take a newspaper that says a politician who charges people a lot to dine with him is a politician for sale.  What does that mean?  Does it mean that he is on the take – that he takes bribes?  Or does it mean that he is just as greedy and venal as the rest?  (If you asked whether it meant that he was ‘corrupt’, would you advance the discussion one iota?)  Then the question is: would a publication with that meaning make others think less of the politician?  Plainly the answer is yes on the first, but the issue is doubtful on the second.  It then merges with the third question.  In that meaning, are the words true?  You can imagine the expensive games that lawyers play around that sort of question.

We might see a similar kind of division of questions when we look at either the evidence of history or its written statement.  What does an inscription or primary source mean?  What does the historian mean if they find an artful epigram in which to couch their views?  In that meaning, what consequences do the words carry?  And in that meaning, how might we seek to verify the proposition?  The analogy is very far from complete, but it may help us in looking at what we get and learn from our fourteen master historians.

People in physics say that they investigate events, not facts, but there is no point getting hung up on words.  One of Pirandello’s characters said that a fact is like a sack – it doesn’t stand up until you put something in it.  As one historian of the Middle Ages said: ‘The history we read, though based on facts, is strictly speaking not factual at all, but a series of accepted judgments.’  There is a lot to be said for that view.

But at least in the empirical tradition, people make history, not the reverse.  Karl Marx said: ‘History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, fights no battles.  It is rather man, real living man who does everything, who possesses and fights.’  That goes for all abstractions, and there was no such thing as the French Revolution.

The fourteen writers we have looked at still speak to us now.  That is why they have the standing that they have.  They have survived.  And they still give us pleasure.  They do so for people all around the world.   At least when they are in narrative mode, each of our historians is best taken read out loud – the way that some used to create their work.  This is important.  A lot of us read history to listen.

For the most part, it requires art to impart insight.  You need to be very careful when people like Ranke say that ‘We on our side have a different concept of history: naked truth, without embellishment, through an investigation of the individual fact, the rest left to God, but no poeticising, no fantasizing.’  We are getting this in translation (a process that is very tricky with Kant), but individual facts, naked and unlyrical, will soon put people to sleep, and convey no message at all.  And there is not much dispute left now about bare facts.  We should not think that Ranke was saying that there is no art in writing history, a proposition that he sought to contradict with nearly his whole life.  The truth, whatever that is, about bare facts is not likely to lead to insight or to promote understanding.  That is why some people read history for pleasure, and then read novels or go to the theatre to find out what is really going on in the world.

If, then, history involves art – even if it must be scientific as well – we may need to look at the tricky question of the role of meaning in art.

If you had asked El Greco what he meant by Christ Cleansing the Temple, or Michelangelo what he meant by the Pieta, or Beethoven what he meant by the Moonlight Sonata, your best response may have been one of hurt puzzlement.  Even if you had asked Milton what he meant by the phrase ‘darkness visible’, your best result may have been uncomprehending pity.  The premise of any response would have most likely been ‘If I could have expressed what I wanted to express in words, and dull prose at that, I may as well have done so, and not sweated over dredging up what I happen to see as a work of art.’

Why should a picture or a tune or a poem mean anything, much less have something to say?  Can you undo the Pieta, or, may God be unwilling, deconstruct it?  No, of course not.  We are talking about the workings of our imaginations, and the effect on our emotions.  Intellect, logic and meaning may have little to do with it.  If you treat art as using your imagination to give a lyrical reflection on our condition, then it may, like faith, hardly be susceptible to intellectual analysis.  (Some say the same about love.)  Even when it comes to thinking, Einstein said that he rarely thought in words – and if it was good enough for Einstein in physics, it was good enough for El Greco, Michelangelo, Beethoven and Milton in art.

But while we may argue about the meaning of a work of art, there may be little doubt about its effect.  When the Spanish made a film about El Greco, they naturally spent some time on his immortal portrait by that artist of the Grand Inquisitor.  It may just be the most intriguing portrait ever painted.  If you had to choose one epithet, it might be ‘shifty’.  In the movie, the subject says that he wants the artist to do it again.  The cardinal was very unamused.  We can certainly see why.  Whatever the painting may be said to mean, it was anything but flattering of its subject.  If you ever met that person, you be looking at your back for a long time afterwards.

Well, vast industries and empires right across the globe are built on the express repudiation of our premise.  They proceed on the footing that we can analyse art intellectually and make it the subject of meaningful discussion and assessment and judgment.

The best example is Shakespeare.  He wrote plays for a living.  He was a professional entertainer and playwright.  He wrote plays to entertain people and to get paid for it; or, as I heard an American student at Oxford say, he did it for the mortgage.  He was a high-end showman who developed a very profitable business from the shows he put on.  But it may safely be said that many more people now get paid to analyse and discuss his plays than to perform them, and for people many of whom hardly ever get to see him in production.

So, we may have to take with a grain of salt the suggestion that the intellectual analysis of art is moonshine.  But we should at least be wary of those who claim to have the answer on art.  They are likely to be as deluded as those who claim to have the answer on God, or sex.  If you hear someone claiming to be able to show that in some verifiable manner Anton Rubinstein playing the Moonlight Sonata is better than Elvis Presley singing Blue Suede Shoes, then you may be sure that you are getting moonshine.

You can, I think, see examples of darkness visible, the title of a book by William Golding, in some of the better known paintings by Turner at the National Gallery, but that is not the point.  We engage with Milton to listen to the music, and not to analyse verbal detail.  We do not assess the symmetry of the Pieta, or Tyger, tyger, burning bright, by the rules of double-entry accounting, just as we do not ask why Jussi Bjorling is singing None shall sleep (Nessun dorma) in Italian in the court of a murderously deranged Asian princess.  You might fairly be asked to leave the room if you engaged in either such process.  After all, some of us might be interested if not charmed by a paradox.

So, art and meaning are uncomfortable terms in bed together.  But if in your conversation, you contented yourself with the truth and nothing more, you would not be the best companion for a long haul flight.  It would be like reading a telephone book.  (In a queue in the West End, I once heard a lady say that she could listen to Maggie Smith read a phone book, but I think that we can regard that inclination as exceptional.)

This is a little like the quandary of philosophy.  If you want to be safe and sound, you stay with the a priori ( with maths or straight deductions from given premises); but if you want to say something new, and try to add to the knowledge of the world, then the best you can hope for is probability – and you might be proved to be dead wrong.

The narrator of the novels of Victor Hugo appears to confuse himself with God, someone said.  (A lot of women may have said the same about the author.)  In Les Misérables, the author allowed himself this reflection: ‘The clash of passions and of ignorances is different from the shock of progress.  Rise, if you will, but to grow.  Show me to which side you are going.  There is no insurrection but forward.  Every other rising is evil; every violent step backwards is an emeute [riot]; to retreat is an act of violence against the human race.  Insurrection is the Truth’s access of fury; the paving stones which insurrection tears up, throw off the spark of right.  These stones leave to the emeute only their mud.  Danton against Louis XVI is insurrection, Hébert against Danton is emeute.’

Well, Tolstoy’s War and Peace shows us that good story-tellers make lousy political thinkers – in which of his categories would Hugo have put the execution of Danton by Robespierre?

But Hugo has a point of substance.  Presumably this great writer was saying something that he thought would convey sense – and good sense – to his readers.  If so, his readers may not think in the same way that Anglo-Saxons tend to think.  Somerset Maugham said that the style of Gustave Flaubert was rhetorical.  He also said: ‘The French language tends to rhetoric, as the English to imagery – thereby marking a profound difference between the two peoples…’  In all the histories we have been looking at, there is no shortage of rhetoric – but the point is that the rhetoric that had a different meaning for those involved.

Victor Hugo then spoke of ‘truth’.  Tolstoy said that his hero was truth.  What is truth?  We go to great writers – and each of Hugo and Tolstoy was a great writer – for insight, understanding, or enlightenment.  If we want mere facts, we can go to the registry of births, deaths, and marriages, the colonial version of Somerset House.  For present purposes, I regard each of the fourteen historians we have looked at as a great writer.

In 1949 an English Shakespeare scholar, John Danby, published a remarkable book, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature, A Study of King Lear. Its first sentence reads: ‘We go to great writers for the truth.’  Well, we may be a bit more comfortable with ‘insight’ or ‘understanding’ than the nervous-making ‘truth’, but the author later says:

‘It is only dramatically that the manner of living thought can be adequately expressed.  A discursive philosopher is tied to the script of his single part.’

This is an invaluable insight.  On one view it could obliterate the whole of literary criticism in one hit.  Later, Mr. Danby referred to the well-known aphorism of Thomas Hobbes that the life of man is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.  That is not so much an ineluctable proposition of philosophy as a working hypothesis toward a philosophy of life, but where do you think you might better seek enlightenment on the nature of life – The Leviathan by Hobbes or King Lear by Shakespeare?

Later still in his book, but before Hannah Arendt had described Eichmann as ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’, Mr. Danby described the evil daughters in King Lear as ‘eminently normal’ and ‘eminently respectable’.  The point is that there is something of Regan and Eichmann in us all, and people who cannot bring themselves to accept that simple truth are frequently the cause of the whole bloody problem.

Those who are squeamish about facing up to evil in the world could do worse than to start by confronting it in King Lear.  Au fond, it is useless to ask what this play means. It makes as much sense as asking what is the meaning of the works of art referred to above – or to inquire after the meaning of God.  It is as useless to ask what Shakespeare intended when he wrote this play as it is to ask what a parliament intended when it passed a statute.

We are left with the ‘thing itself’; the rest is moonshine.  If Shakespeare had tried to convey his meaning prosaically, he would most certainly have failed, and he would not have left us with the drama that may fairly claim to be our Everest.  This play on its own could have been the warrant for that wonderful remark of Emerson: ‘When I read Shakespeare, I actually shade my eyes.’

So, if we want to understand, if we want insight into what we are, we turn to the dramatists, like Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Racine or Ibsen.  There is something to be said for a kind of poetic or imaginative truth, the sense of insight that we get from high art, the insight that cannot be expressed in mere words, the emotional click and then affirmation that we get on looking at the Goya painting of a military execution (The Third of May, 1808).  This was the painting that Sir Lewis Namier referred to when he was speaking of the juggernauts of history, ‘revolting to human feelings in their blindness, supremely humorous in their stupidity’.  The great historian looks to have been uncomfortable there in trying to spell out his vision – there is nothing humorous about war crimes.  But at a time when religion is dying, we might look more to our writers to be our seers and prophets than to our priests and rabbis..

George Orwell admired D H Lawrence for ‘the extraordinary power of knowing imaginatively something that he could not have known by imagination.’  This is itself a large insight, and not just for history as art.  A big job for those who tell our story is to show what happens when the slight veneer of civilisation is ripped off us.  Many fail to see the horror not because they are blind, but because they do not have the insight or imagination or the nerve to see it for what it is.

Speaking of the night we know as Crystal Night, Ian Kershaw, the biographer of Hitler, said: ‘This night of horror, a retreat in a modern state to the savagery associated with bygone ages, laid bare to the world the barbarism of the Nazi regime.’  Shortly afterwards, Hitler gave a solemn prophesy of ‘the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe.’  But the savagery of neither the pogrom nor the prophecy of the Fuhrer was enough to generate insight into the horror of the barbarism to come.  We – the Germans – did not have the imagination or nerve to see it (even if Keynes had foreseen it all at Versailles).  Mussolini was a Cesar de carnaval, a braggart and an actor, a dangerous ‘rascal’ and possibly ‘slightly off his head’, but the insight of the Italian people into this grotesque buffoon did not extend to seeing him hanged upside down beside his lifeless mistress – until that is how they wanted to see him.

Very rarely, we get artists who give us a history that is more like an epic poem than a mere record of fact.  In this book, we have been looking at great historians who all wrote with imagination – even if they would have been coy or indignant at the suggestion.  They wrote so that we could listen to them.  They wrote with a sense of theatre.  In the trenchant words of Mr Danby, great historians give dramatic expression to living thought.

Carlyle, for example, wanted to breathe life into the past – he wanted to ‘blow his living breath between dead lips’.  This ‘Rembrandt of letters’, with his Ezekiel Vision, a man that belonged ‘to the company of escaped Puritans,’ understood profoundly that our little life is rounded with a sleep – like that other great Romantic, General George Patton, he thought that once we dispensed with time, the dead were with us.  Carlyle was then able to indulge what Chesterton finely called ‘his sense of the sarcasm of eternity.’  Like Dickens, he was intent on articulating a sense of the grotesque.  At times the work of Carlyle, the misplaced Hebrew prophet, looks like a dream or hallucination.  Perhaps he may come back into vogue as a kind of secular seer now that God is on the outer.

An Israeli scholar wrote a book called English Historians on the French Revolution.  It is heavy going, but you come up with insights.  The words ‘darkness’ and ‘chaos’ pervade the account of Carlyle, and the more he thought that he did not understand, the hungrier he got for ‘truth and fact.’  ‘Facts, facts, not theory’, ‘facts more and more, theory less and less.’  The author makes a most illuminating remark about readers of Carlyle’s book.  ‘Tired of being told what to think about the Revolution, people were glad to glimpse a painting of it.’  He quotes John Stuart Mill: ‘This is not so much a history as an epic poem; and notwithstanding this, or even in consequence of this, the truest of histories.’  All these labels have their uses and abuses.  Perhaps one problem with a lot of history is that it has an inarticulate premise: ‘Your silly author thinks that he understands all this.’

A sense of darkness and chaos, and a sense of the grotesque, and a power of imagination, are essential in trying to follow events in France after 1789 or in Germany after 1933.  It is a power that was most fully realised in King Lear, which is a study of the grotesque.

KENT: Is this the promised end?

EDGAR: Or image of that horror?

The French author Guy de Maupassant said this: ‘I have seen war.  I have seen men revert to brutes, maddened and killing for pleasure, or through terror, bravado, and ostentation.  At a time when right existed no longer, when the law was a dead letter, when all notion of fair play had disappeared, I saw innocent people encountered along the road shot because their fear made them suspects.  I saw dogs chained at their master’s door killed by men trying out new revolvers, and cows lying in fields riddled with bullets for no reason – for the sake of shooting, for a laugh.’

The only thing standing between us and the apes may be cutlery – or this level of art – or perhaps the Coen brothers.  Dickens dedicated Tale of Two Cities to Carlyle.  You can see the connection throughout the whole book.  This is how Dickens prefigures the outpouring of the mob of Saint-Antoine during the satanic period known as the Terror.  A wine cask has spilled on to the street.  ‘The wine was red wine and had stained the ground of the narrow street….It had stained many hands, too, and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again.  Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker…scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees – BLOOD.’  It may remind you of the hellish September Massacres in Paris, when Carlyle said that the berserk killers took refreshment from wine from to time to time before laying into the next batch of screaming victims with their bloodied sabres.

At times, the painting or war by Tolstoy in War and Peace has an El Greco lightning-strike scale of illumination.  While Moscow was waiting for the French, the population descended to animal lawlessness with scenes like those in Paris at the height of the Terror.  In one of them, Tolstoy reflects unmistakably on the Passion.  The Governor of Moscow, Count Rastoptchin, hands one suspected traitor over the mob.  ‘You shall deal with him as you think fit!  I hand him over to you!’  The resulting massacre is bestial, and resembles in part the September Massacres in Paris twenty or so years before.  As the Governor goes home in his carriage, an asylum spills out its lunatics:

Tottering on his long, thin legs, in his fluttering dressing-gown, this madman ran at headlong speed, with his eyes fixed on Rastoptchin, shouting something to him in a husky voice, and making signs to him to stop.  The gloomy and triumphant face of the madman was thin and yellow, with irregular clumps of beard growing on it.  The black agate-like pupils of his eyes moved restlessly, showing the saffron-yellow whites above.  ‘Stay!  Stop, I tell you!’ he shouted shrilly, and again breathlessly fell to shouting something with emphatic gestures and intonations. 

He reached the carriage and ran alongside it.

‘Three times they slew me; three times I rose again from the dead.  They stoned me, they crucified me  …  I shall rise again  …  I shall rise again  … I shall rise again.  My body they tore to pieces.  The Kingdom of Heaven will be overthrown  …  Three times I will overthrow it, and three times I will set it up again’, he screamed, his voice growing shriller and shriller.  Count Rastoptchin suddenly turned white, as he had turned white when the crowd fell upon [the victim of the mob].  He turned away.  ‘Go, go on, faster!’ he cried in a trembling voice to his coachman.

The beginning of that picture is pure El Greco; the whole is unmistakably Russian and equally unmistakably universal.  It might test your faith to have to believe that it was all composed by a man born of woman.  What does mere history have to offer against art like that?

There, as it seems to me, is where you get truth brought to you by imagination.  France and Moscow after it had become a wilderness of tigers, like the whirlpool of evil and pain and death painted in Titus Andronicus, but Dickens clearly shared the view of Carlyle that there was more to it in France ‘than cheap bread and a Habeas-corpus act.  Here too was an Idea….It was a struggle, though a blind and at last an insane one, for the infinite, divine nature of Right, of Freedom, Country.’

In The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Kurtz confronts his own hell ‘with that wide and immense stare embracing, condemning, and loathing all the universe.’  All that he can offer is ‘the whispered cry, The horror!  The horror!’  Here, as it seems to me, is where a great story-teller decently accepts the limits of language, and the story is no less effective because of that acknowledgement; rather, it is better for accepting that mystery is the other face of magic, and that mere words may be little more than mere signposts.

In truth, France went back to the Dark Ages from time to time for decades after 1789 – as Germany would do after 1933.  What did this mean, the Dark Ages?  This period of darkness over the earth was described in the great epic poem, Beowulf, written in about the seventh century.

All were endangered; young and old

Were hunted down by that dark death shadow

Who lurked and swooped in the long nights

On the misty moors; nobody knows

Where these reevers from hell roam on their errands.

…….

Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed

Offering to idols, swore oaths

That the killer of souls might come to their aid

And save the people.  That was their way

Their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts,

They remembered hell…….

…………Cursed is he

Who in time of trouble has to thrust his soul

In the fire’s embrace, forfeiting help;

He has nowhere to turn…….

So that troubled time continued, woe

That never stopped, steady affliction……

There was panic after dark, people endured

Raids in the night, riven by the terror.

That is almost a photographic picture of Dresden under the Gestapo or under the RAF.  Here is a picture of Spain under Napoleon as seen by Goya.  (Geats were a Nordic tribe in this epic.):

A Geat woman sang out in grief;

With hair bound up, she unburdened herself

Of her worst fears, a wild litany

Of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,

Enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,

Slavery and abasement.  Heaven swallowed the smoke.

What was it in their or our psyche that prompted one writer to see the hair of a woman ‘wound’ and the other writer to see the hair of his woman ‘bound’?  Can the prosaic record of history ever stand up against the image of a world ‘where these reevers from hell roam on their errands’ or where a woman ‘unburdened herself of her worst fears, a wild litany of nightmare and lament’?

Or is it only in very big Russian novels that the hero says: ‘I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it was all for?’  Or do we just accept that we are mortal and on notice?

The oldest hath borne most: we that are young

Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

That brings us back to where we started in the Prologue.  ‘Historians are fond of talking about what history is.  They might better ask why people read it.  Do people read history so that they might know more or be better informed about the past?  Do they read it to gain insight into and some connexion with other people?  Or do they read it just for pleasure?  Do they read to listen?’