The British 20th Century under the social historians' microscope

There is almost a surfeit, these days, of British social historians combing over the ashes of the second half of the century. Dominic Sandbrook’s (rather controversial) work now extends to four volumes, covering the period from Suez in 1956 to the election of Margaret Thatche in 1979r.

Chroniclers of the 1970s include Andy Beckett (When The Lights Went Out), Francis Wheen (Strange Days Indeed) and Alwyn W Turner (Crisis? What Crisis?), to name just the most celebrated handful.

Moving on to the 1980s, we have Alwyn Turner’s Rejoice! Rejoice! , Richard Vinen’s Thatcher’s Britain, Jackson and Saunder’s Making Thatcher’s Britain, Andy McSmith’s No Such Thing As Society and, most recently, Graham Stewart’s Bang! 

For the 1990s there are Alwyn Turner’s books Things can only get Bitter and A Classless Society; Britain in the Nineties

But one social historian surpasses all that – David Kynaston sequence entitled Tales of a New Jerusalem: 1945-1979, whose mission is to document the story of “ordinary citizens as well as ministers and mandarins, of consumers as well as producers, of the provinces as well as London, of the everyday as well as the monumental”. Austerity Britain: 1945-51 was his first 700-page in the series and makes for gripping reading (in 2 days I am at page 426). His notes and references cover every published source you can imagine - including the comments of ordinary people as captured in the publications of Mass Observation. 

Kynaston accomplishes this in his first volume with a prose style that balances entertainment with erudition and in-depth historical assessment with gorgeous, fact-laden word pictures, all fused together in an exemplary narrative of a fascinating period. On a particular Bank Holiday Monday in 1945, for example, he records that thirty-five extra trains had been added at Liverpool Street to make the London-to-seaside rounds and yet station queues still snaked around the block; 30,000 people were at London Zoo and only 4,500 at the V&A; and 100,000 people tried to gain entry (only half-managed) to an athletics meet at the White City stadium to see British pre-war champion Sydney Wooderson best the Swedes.
What elevate Kynaston’s Austerity Britain out of the encyclopaedic and dryly academic and into the transfixing is a potent blend of the seismic and the banal. Its breadth of geographical and socio-economic perspective distinguishes it from the wealth of other social histories written about the mid- and postwar periods: The legacy of Beveridge’s report gets expert treatment … as do postwar marital trends, cricket and racing preferences, the rise of Aneurin Bevan, the reception of David Lean’s Brief Encounter by working class audiences (hearty guffaws), the fabrics available to seamstresses and the Liverpool race riots.
Kynaston’s sources are equally diverse, ranging from government publications to industry manuals and from unpublished journals to the ubiquitous Mass Observation diarists (although he is scrupulous in drawing attention to their middle class biases).

Prospect Magazing looked at the second Kynaston blockbuster in the series  and asks how we might explain this obsession with raking over the ashes of the recent past

Does it signify anything, however, apart from the fact that they are good writers with a knack for traversing recent history in a likeable, accessible way? Can we infer anything more interesting from their success, something which is peculiar to the times we are living through now?
I can think of a couple of plausible interpretations. One is that these histories offer us an unexpected kind of consolation. Marooned as we are in a state of great political and economic uncertainty, we have become prey to a habitual sense of unease. However often we are told that history repeats itself, we never really believe it: we live in the moment, convinced that the problems we face are new and unprecedented. Modernity Britain gives the lie to this belief. It’s not just that it transports us back to an era when the cabinet was stuffed full of old Etonians comically unfamilar with the everyday anxieties of most British men and women. It shows us that in the very texture of life, in the moral temperature of the country as a whole, things were not so different back then. Here is Kynaston, for instance, quoting a BBC report on the attitude of late-1950s teenagers towards the political establishment: “Teenagers are bored by politics,” it claimed. “This is rather a bald statement, but it does seem to be true of an astonishingly large proportion of them… ‘It’s sort of corrupt.’ ‘They’re too dogmatic.’ ‘It’s all fixed.’ ‘They’re just keeping to the party line.’ At the back of it seemed to be the feeling that… they didn’t honestly believe what they [the politicians] said… and that discussion between, say, Labour and Conservative was pointless since neither was open to persuasion by the other.”
Does this not equally, and exactly, encapsulate our conviction that young voters today have become detached from mainstream politics, and are already numbed by a weary cynicism about political discourse? Again and again, reading Modernity Britain, you come upon these spectral echoes of the present day: the sense of “’twas ever thus” grows inescapable, and helps to dismantle, piece by piece, one of the most pervasive and misleading fictions about our current situation: that it is somehow unique.
For the other, more deep-rooted explanation of why this new breed of historian has struck such a resonant chord, we need only look at one recent, much-reported event: the death of Thatcher, and the barrage of contradictory responses it provoked in print and online. The election of Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979 provides either the fulcrum around which these books revolve, or (in the case of Kynaston) their future climax. Thatcher, so divisive while in office, remains such a contentious, polarising figure in British mythology that even now, more than 30 years later, there remains a profound fracture running through the body politic. Cameron’s line to the effect that “we are all Thatcherites now” will either strike you as a joyful affirmation or will send a shudder coursing through every fibre of your being: either way, you have to recognise that it has a certain chilling truth.
However strong most of us are, individually, in our convictions on this subject, the country as a whole has still not, and cannot, make up its mind about 1979: still can’t decide whether it was the moment which saved the nation, or whether it marked a disastrously wrong turn. And, as a nation, we will probably never be “at ease with ourselves” (to use perhaps the only memorable phrase which Thatcher’s successor ever came up with) until we begin to understand that moment clearly and see it for precisely what it was. If Kynaston’s Tales of a New Jerusalem helps us to do that—if it succeeds in its objective of showing us, on a scale both panoramic and intimate, exactly what the postwar governments struggled to build, and which Thatcher, just as determinedly, sought to dismantle—then it will surely come to be seen not just as one of the present era’s most important histories, but as one of its most illuminating works of literature.

Czeslaw Milosz

Every now and then, an author’s words hit you with the force of nature – no matter how quiet and reasonable they seem. The opening pages of Milosz’s Selected essays – To Begin Where I Am - about exile and his return as an 80 year-old to the landscape of his childhood Lithuania have had this effect on me. I don’t really know Milosz and bought the book simply because a blurb told me they represented a very powerful example of the essay form – which is one I love.

Some reminiscences I found on the internet suggest that he is an “unfashionable poet”. To go by the Amazon lists, he is certainly a neglected writer – with only the one set of essays (Proud to be a Mammal issued recently by Penguin Central European Classics is apparently the same book as To Begin where I am!), his poetry and The Captive Mind in print. That needs to be changed – since the man has more than 20 books to his credit – let alone his poetry. The reviewer in the Dublin Review of Books tells it well -

Czesław Miłosz, the centenary of whose birth was in 2011, had a long and productive life. After his spell in Paris, he emigrated to the United States, where he taught at the University of Berkeley in California. While he appreciated the opportunities the United States gave him (and loved its great outdoors), he remained, over the decades he spent there, rather hostile to its commercial culture and continued to note how savagely American capitalism treated those at the bottom of the heap. In his final decade, following the collapse of communism, he returned to live part of each year in Poland.
In his early adulthood Miłosz saw the world plunge into evil, but unlike many of his friends and contemporaries he survived that evil and even outlived the repressive political system he had once believed to be an inescapable destiny for his nation.
Miłosz’s fullest treatment of the part of his childhood he spent with his grandparents in the depths of the Polish (now Lithuanian) countryside (three full years, from age seven to ten) is in the autobiographical novel The Issa Valley, but there is also this lyrical passage in the sparkling miscellany Miłosz’s ABC under the heading “Szetejnie, Gineity, and Peiksva” (three hamlets close to his grandparents’ farm): The Niewiaża Valley is like a crevice cut into the plateau, from which neither the parks nor the remains of manor houses can be seen. A traveler journeying across that plateau today will not be able to intuit what was once on it. Smoke from the hamlets has vanished, along with the creak of the well pumps, the crowing of roosters, barking of dogs, people’s voices. There is no longer the green of orchards embracing the roofs of the cottages – apple trees, pear trees, plum trees in every farmyard, between house, barn, and granary, so that the village streets were framed in trees.

As a child, Miłosz writes, “I was primarily a discoverer of the world, not as suffering but as beauty ... Happiness experienced in childhood does not pass without a trace: the memory of ecstasy dwells in our body and possesses a strong curative power.” Returning to visit this landscape at the age of eighty, Miłosz feels no particular regret, or anger, or even sadness. The orchards are gone of course, but so too is the communism which could find no place for them, vanished after less than fifty years: “Among the many definitions of Communism,” he writes, “perhaps one would be the most apt: enemy of orchards.” Now, in spite of the changes in the landscape, he can see that in all his wanderings and exile he had searched in vain for such a combination of leaves and flowers as was here. “Or, to be precise, I understood this after a huge wave of emotion had overwhelmed me, and the only name I can give it now would be – bliss.”………

Perhaps the central point of Miłosz’s philosophy, certainly the key problematic to which he returns again and again, is man’s war with nature. Nature here is not to be understood as the beauty of trees, woods, rivers and flowers but as necessity, “the way things are”, “the kingdom of inertia, senseless birth, and senseless death”. Refusing to bow down before this necessity, we assert our “anti-natural freedom”, through our creation of religion and culture, politics and ideology:

We are unable to live nakedly. We must constantly wrap ourselves in a cocoon of mental constructs, our changing styles of philosophy, poetry, art. We must invest meaning in that which is opposed to meaning; that ceaseless labour, that spinning is the most purely human of our activities. For the threads spun by our ancestors do not perish, they are preserved; we alone among living creatures have a history, we move in a gigantic labyrinth where the present and the past are interwoven. That labyrinth protects and consoles us ... Death is a humiliation, because it tears us away from words, the sounds of music, configurations of line and colour ...

A couple of nice tributes are here and here.

How Economics forgot History

I used to devour critiques of the World Bank with great glee - but got fed up with the ease with which it seemed able to deflect the devastating exposes with slippery new phrases and concepts such as “transparency”, “social capital”….. Some 20 years ago Susan George subjected the Bank to a marvellous attack in Faith and Credit - comparing the Bank to the Catholic Church. It is an apt comparison – with priests and Cardinals having unshakeable beliefs in their own wisdom and the wider congregation suffering from the effects of their arrogance, myopia and abuse of power.  

A brief review of a couple of recent books on the subject directed me to some great downloads which should keep me occupied to Christmas – The Debt Crisis – from Europe to where? (2012); and the 400 page From Political Economy to Freakonomics (2009)

economics was once rich, diverse, multidimensional and pluralistic. The book details how political economy became economics through the separation of economics from other social sciences, especially economic history and sociology. It ranges over the shifting role of the historical and the social in economic theory, the shifting boundaries between the economic and the non-economic and puts the case for political economy back on the agenda. This is done by treating economics as a social science once again. It involves transcending the boundaries of the social sciences through the reintroduction and full incorporation of the social and the historical into the main corpus of political economy, by drawing on the rich traditions of the past

From this I was led to the work of Geoffrey Hodgson - a thoughtful political economist who has long been out of tune with his fellow economists as you can see in this table and longer interview 

Amazingly I was able, thanks to scribd, to download a couple of his complete books – eg the rather daunting How Economics Forgot History (2001) as well as one of Susan George’s more recent (and typically accessible) contributions - Another world is possible (2004)

The beauty of independent book publishers

Books have always been important to me – a library tends to grow wherever I put roots down for a year or so. Of course it is the content that drives my choice – but I notice that I am now giving attention to the format and aesthetics of the book itself. It was the font which started to arouse my curiousity – but then the layout, feel of the paper, design of the cover etc. American editions of books, I realise from the choices Vlad of the Frost English Bookshop in Bucharest makes, are often more attractive than the English edition – I had always appreciated their hard covers and the rough pages…..but now understand that the paperbacks are so much better.

Everyman’s library is a great hardback series - although it does belong to the Random House congomerate.

New York Review Books Classics are paperbacks which epitomise all that’s best about book aesthetics. But there are many small publishers I find myself increasingly drawn to – by virtue of the originality of their titles and production - Bitter Lemon Press, Serpent’s Tail, Pushkin Press, OneWorld, Dedalus, Hesperus, Europa Editions, Persephone Books 

A couple of years ago, the Guardian did a nice little feature on the growing importance of book design.
And bookporn is a site which gives visual expression to the sensual side of book appreciation.

Just as we need to treasure the independent bookshops which have managed to survive the onslaught of the larger bookstore chains and internet giants so do we need to recognise the value which the smaller publishers offer. So its nice to learn a bit about these companies eg Persephone. But it’s not only sad but dangerous that names like Penguin get eaten up in the capitalist onslaught (they’re now part of Random House).

Farrar, Straus and Giroux is another one which succumbed – and The New Yorker gives a nice history of the firm here. But the statistics on book publisher decline in the UK are gob-smacking - 98 fewer than last year!

I have no less than three Farrar books in the pile waiting for my attention - two collections of what look to be superb essays, one by the 1980 Literature Nobel prixe-winner Czeslaw Milosz - To begin where I am by  published in 2001. The other - Joseph Brodsky's Less than One published in 1987 - looks rather less impressive.

Also in the pile The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (pic above) of whom I have never heard; and a stunning take on the barbarities of the last century - My Century by Aleksander Wat 

Health and .....the pursuit of happiness

An article based on a new book invites us to identify what elements of city design might make a difference to resident happiness and then seems to suggest that bike lanes and pooling are the answer. 

That does seem a bit simplistic since, patently, the basic layout of a city is a crucial factor – things like densities, patterns of movement and physical structures - let alone the frequency (and price) of facilities such as public transport, parks, bookshops, galleries, theatres, swimming pools and restaurants....Not much use -trying to cycle if you are boxed in by dual carriageways and multi-stories!!

I blog quite a lot about Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, the structure of whose centre consists of narrow streets and tiny shops run by individuals - old and young. Walking around them (and the neighbouring parks) is a great joy - people carry their coffees or drink them on the doorstep, chatting over a cigarette to their neighbours; all key institutions are in walking distance and restaurants are cheap, healthy and tasty. People take care of the stray cats
It is a city like no other European one.
Mayor Yordanka Fandakova is doing a great job of clearing cars from the pavements and many of the streets. What a contrast with Bucharest whose power-mad Mayor Sorin Oprescu has new dual carriageways running through the city and is outdoing Attila the Hun in his (illegal) destruction of so many lovely old houses.

The article finishes with an important message -

By spending resources and designing cities in a way that values everyone's experience, we can make cities that help us all get stronger, more resilient, more connected, more active and more free. We just have to decide who our cities are for. And we have to believe that they can change.

I was once very active in the WHO Healthy Cities network which I see is still going strong.
Health….and happiness. Fundamental issues for us all. Honoured with so much rhetoric but increasingly displaced by Greed and Dishonesty…..I want to explore this disjunction in a bit more detail.
For 30 years, the WHO website tells us -

The primary goal of the WHO European Healthy Cities Network has been to put health high on the social, economic and political agenda of city governments. The Healthy Cities movement promotes comprehensive and systematic policy and planning for health and emphasizes:

• the need to address inequality in health and urban poverty

• the needs of vulnerable groups

• participatory governance

• the social, economic and environmental determinants of health.

About 90 cities are members of the WHO European Healthy Cities Network, and 30 national Healthy Cities networks across the WHO European Region have more than 1400 cities and towns as members.

Sadly, however, health and health inequalities have become much worse during this period – and I see little sign of the Healthy City literature recognising this – or exploring why this is so.

Indeed, as so often happens, a new vocabulary (expertise and bureaucracy) has taken over – that of the happiness minions of the OECD and UNDP , for example. This paper on the phenomenon of happiness research and indices is one particular (libertarian) slant on the past decade's work on happiness.

I get a bit impatient with those who tell us that happiness is about spending time with family and friends since that misses the political aspects - the nature and scale of the obstacles which those with power place on our enjoyment of public places and public goods. Equally, however, we need to be realistic about what can be achieved by political actions. Whatever, therefore, my sympathies with those who stress the importance of reducing social and economic inequalities, let us focus on the sorts of modest actions which can mobilise the support of large numbers of citizens - such as the removal of cars and cancelling of city motorways.....In that sense, I align with those who argue for more of a "nudge" approach to civic action - and also with those who argue for municipal (rather than government) initiatives.

Perceiving the Balkans

Patrick Leigh Fermor is a name to conjure with - as the wikipedia entry puts it -

At the age of 18, Leigh Fermor decided to walk the length of Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople He set off on 8 December 1933, shortly after Hitler had come to power in Germany, with a few clothes, several letters of introduction and a few books. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but also was invited by landed gentry and aristocracy into the country houses of Central Europe. He experienced hospitality in many monasteries along the way. Two of his later travel books, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), were about this journey. The final part of his journey was unfinished at the time of Leigh Fermor's death, but was published as The Broken Road: Travels from Bulgaria to Mount Athos in September 2013 The book draws on Leigh Fermor's diary at the time and on an early draft he wrote in the 1960s

Neal Ascherson's review of The Broken Road in the current issue of London Review of Books puts his writing in the wider context of British writing about this part of the world -

There are fewer schlosses in this book. The explanation is that after using a good many introductions to nobility across Austria, Hungary and then Transylvania, he had entered Bulgaria. Barons with Germanic titles and estates didn’t feature in this land of peasant villages and Orthodox monasteries, which had only recently emerged from centuries ‘under the Turkish yoke’. And Leigh Fermor was now crossing formidable mountain barriers – the Balkan and Rhodope ranges – as winter approached. To survive, he had to rely on the food and shelter offered to him along the way. He is in no way condescending about his hosts. This strange, penniless English boy walking to Constantinople had nothing to offer them but his curiosity, and they were as interested by him as he was by them.
‘Paddy’s travel writing is often brilliant and moving, always humane. And yet its sheer descriptiveness, its concentration on things and people exotically “other” when contrasted to some assumed English norm, does put it in a category.’ The guide here is Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (1998). As she shows, writing imaginative or purely fictional work about the Balkans has been an overwhelmingly British habit. Byron can be said to have set it off. But the genre reached its zenith in the late 19th century and early 20th. Anthony Hope’s Ruritania seems to be located in Germanic territory rather than further south-east, but other writers – ‘Sydney Grier’ (Hilda Gregg), Dorothea Gerard, Bram Stoker etc – floated their dreamlands far down the Danube and into the ‘bloodthirsty’ Balkans. Later, John Buchan, Lawrence Durrell, Evelyn Waugh and Malcolm Bradbury were among those who tried their hand at brutal, gaudy Balkan Ruritanias.

Weeping old houses

It seems that some Romanian architects at least have a soul. Some months back I mentioned a lovely little production on the rehabilitation of traditional Romanian houses produced by the Igloo architectural publishing house

And this month, an even better one has been produced by the Association for Rehabilitation which started its work in 2010 and identifies “weeping houses” ie those whose semi-criminal neglect has brought houses almost to the stage of collapse.

The attractively produced new book has the underwhelming title of The RePAD  Guide - and sets out - in English, French and Romanian - guidelines and examples for restoring old houses to their previous glory. Its available for only 7 euros!

Such initiatives need encouragement in the climate of hostile indifference which exists amongst the Bucharest and Romanian authorities! It contrasts with the celebration by the Bulgarians of their Bulgarian revival style which can be found in abundance in so many villages - one of which (Koprovishitse) I visited again only a few weeks back.