No comments about Gladstone: God, Politics and the Million.

1 comments about Winston Churchill: His Life As a Painter.

1. I enjoyed reading this oversized book, I went through it like water! The book is well illustrated and gives a good sampling of his works (landscapes, still lifes & portraiture). It is an easy read, this book was not written for those in academia--its a very approachable book.
   The author, the daughter of Winston Churchill, Mary Soams, did a marvelous job of creating a lively narrative. She goes into the reasons why he began to paint, what his philosphy on painting was and how he learned (via a wide circle of artist friends). She also mentioned that he was accepting of using modern inventions (photos) to aid in his memory and composition of creating his paintings. She also included many humorous stories of her father.
   The book is very inspiring in that Churchill, who already had an extremely full life and who started late in life painting, was able to create such beautiful works of art. The book shows that he did have natural talent, BUT, that he also worked hard to build upon that talent and the book clearly shows this.
   The chapters are lavishly illustrated with his paintings, and many times the book describes the creation of the paintings that are in the book (and it includes the page number where you can find them). My only complaint is that in the last few chapters there are virtually no paintings and I wish I could have seen more of his later works, even though they may not have been up to the same artistic value of his earlier works.
   This was a fun and inspiring read, go out and buy this book.

1 comments about Diplomacy and Disillusion At the Court of Margaret Thatcher: An Insider's View.

1. It is hard to remember how bad things seemed for the West in the 1970s. Western economies reeled from the Oil Shocks and stagflation. The communist world grew to include South Vietnam, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia. The Soviet Union began a campaign to intimidate Western Europeans through the installation of SS20 nuclear missiles capable of vaporizing every NATO base in Europe in a matter of minutes. In 1979, one might have been forgiven for being pessimistic about the West's prospects. Nonetheless, that was the year Margaret Thatcher came to power, just in time to catch the coming neoliberal wave which would bring free market reform from Chile to China and destroy the Soviet Empire.
   
   There is much more to Thatcher than that, however, as this book (Diplomacy and Disillusion at the Court of Margaret Thatcher) by the Hungarian-born specialist on Eastern Europe George R. Urban. An occasional informal adviser to Thatcher (the subtitle "An Insider's Account" is somewhat an overstatement), Urban gives us his account of the Iron Lady. Initially he is enamored with her. Literally. Seduced, as many men strangely were, he found her "an attractive lady" who though in her fifties had "retained the movements, the legs and walk of a young woman." He wrote some of her "Churchillian rhetoric" calling for the rollback of the state at home and the defeat of communism abroad. Upon meeting her for the first time, he was delighted that "this highly intelligent, well-informed and resolute lady would make mincemeat of the American leadership." He adds "what a pleasure to see a person of ideas in charge of declining Britain!"
   
   The book is a selection of Urban's diary entries introduced with short passages that explain the time and context. The story is that his gradual disenchantment with Thatcher as someone systematically opposed to both `Europe' and Germany. He records her saying as early as 1984 (!) that "there is no question that if the Germans were reunited they would, once again, dominate the whole of Europe." Needless to say, this would pose some problems later.
   
   In particular, Urban wants to set the record straight on the "Chequers Seminar" in March 1990 in which Thatcher invited a number of historians and experts to give her advice on Germany. It eventually was leaked in the press that the seminar's participants, and Thatcher herself, had an extremely anti-German tone. Urban, with most other participants, pleaded that they had not been anti-German or conspiratorial, but that that had been the Prime Minister's attitude. As her guests asked her to accept unification she would answer with statements like "Yes, yes, but you can't trust them." or "Ah well, but not when you are talking to Germans. They will always be the same." In fact, she had reached her conclusion some days before, echoing Mitterrand's 1913, she told him "we may be going back to the state of affairs preceding the First World War."
   
   The debate central to Urban's book is a little surreal from today's vantage point. But a contemporary reader unfamiliar with both British domestic politics and end of Cold War foreign policy will, however, find many other things of interest. Telling things on the era. I don't think Urban had 9/11 in mind when he wrote to Thatcher, downplaying Europe's potential problems with German and Russia, that "it is possible that the real problems of the future - and of course there will be some - will be quite new: for example Muslim fundamentalism in France and Britain supported by Libya or Iran." Who cannot see some vindication for Vladimir Putin when Urban told Thatcher, "half in jest" that in Yeltsin's Russia "what the `dark masses' need is the periodic application of the whip, as so many Russians have been telling us. The present chaos, too, is waiting to be sorted out by a strong man of one kind or another. [...] Even today, many Russians will volunteer the opinion that only a Tsar-like figure can keep them in order."
   
   Urban is writing before Tony Blair coined the term `Cool Britannia'. His Britain, only 10 or 20 years ago, is a weird place. The infamous and legendary anti-immigration populist Enoch Powell writes that the idea of the Soviet Union being bent on world domination is a self-serving American lie that has "no basis in fact". As though it were the 1950s, Urban notes that "it is English chic to show Spartan exterior if not downright poverty." Whole pages of the book are made up of Urban or Thatcher's lamentations of the state of English: Why did all Britain's goods come from Germany or Japan? Why were the only stores open till late at night owned by Pakistanis? Why were the English so sloppy, lazy, easy-going and humble? It was quite embarrassing for a statesman's nation to be thus: "Thatcher is in many respects too good for Britain... She is cut out to be the leader of a nation with the thrift and work ethic of Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Taiwan, perhaps even the US, where her vision, resolve and free-market enthusiasm would produce lasting results."
   
   This tension, not like unlike that between De Gaulle and France, between Thatcher the English patriot and her distinctively un-English qualities (Urban notes a few: "moderation, give-and-take, respect for minority views, the distrust of grand schemes and theories...") is only one of the paradoxes of her character. She is far more complicated than what many people who praise her legacy today seem to think. Thatcher, who according to Mitterrand "becomes like an 8-year old girl when she is with Reagan," was outraged when the US invaded Grenada, on the grounds that it violated "Commonwealth sovereignty". Thatcher, the Cold Warrior, like George Bush went to Kiev to oppose Ukraine's independence (No "vive le Quebec libre" here...), supporting the collapse of communism and the integrity of the USSR. Thatcher, the nationalist, justifies this with a critique of Wilson of which given the troubles we have had, even today in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq, I can only approve: "It is Woodrow Wilson, of course, who is ultimately responsible for the damaging myth of the single-nation state. Such states cannot work. Wilson got it all wrong. He is the one to be put in the dock of history." Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, Thatcher, for 15 years leader of the Tories, eventually came to dislike the term "conservative": "we are a party of innovation, of imagination, of liberty, of striking out in new directions, of renewed national pride and a novel sense of leadership. That's not `conservative', is it?!"
   
   The paradoxes and complexities escape her image in the United States. Urban describes a lavish party hosted by the Heritage Foundation with her as guest of honor: "It was a black-tie occasion. Everybody who is anybody in Washington and beyond was there - some fourteen hundred of them... The queen couldn't have done better, what with the country-club conservatives, corporate America and the military all gathered under one roof... America was conferring on MT the sort of honorary imperial presidency she had vainly sought at home... But here in Washington, seat of the only remaining superpower, with the symbols, and the reality, of the might of America so theatrically displayed, she could, for a brief hour or two, savor the rewards of history she felt were her due. She was praised by her hosts to the point of embarrassment. When the black ties stood up to toast her, it was like a regimental gathering drinking to the monarch."
   
   This kind of honor is not something that Thatcher could receive in Britain without some heckling: hated by a large part for the mass unemployment her policies caused, thrown overboard by her own Conservative Party for the poll tax's unpopularity, disliked by the foreign policy establishment for her opposition to both German unification and European integration... In Britain, the aggressively neoliberal/libertarian/neoconservative (whatever you want to call it) streak is quite alien to the nation's character. She has only found an enduring appeal to the Euroskeptics still fighting against `Brussels'.
   
   It is strange that of all foreign leaders, only British ones like Churchill and Thatcher ever have conservative cults dedicated to them in the US. Her hallowed place in the Pantheon of American conservatism, like Churchill's, is a skewed one: she has been reduced merely to the proponent of limited government and the flamboyant Cold Warrior. She has been stripped of all the idiosyncrasies, contradictions and petty parochialisms that make up every political life and every human being. One wonders if she can truly take comfort as she basks in the glory of being etched into the memory of the Americans, for what they see in her is not her, but a vain reflection of themselves.

No comments about ROOSEVELT AND CHURCHILL: MEN OF SECRETS.

1 comments about Man Behind the Smile: Tony Blair and the Politics of Perversion.

1. These are the author's own phrases characterising Blair's premiership, so first a word about who he is. Leo Abse, now in his late 80's, is a retired Labour member of parliament from the mining community of South Wales. He is the author of a similar study of Margaret Thatcher, but what I had mainly remembered about him was the story of a meeting he addressed in his own locality at which the chairman referred to him as `Mr Abs'. His surname has two syllables, so he murmured in the man's ear `Call me Abs-ey', to which the chairman replied `That's very nice of you, call me Jonesy'.

   He has a fine sense of humour himself, and some of the cattier sideswipes at various figures in this book are very entertaining. This is a study from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, and it takes in not just The People's Tony himself but his wife, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, the fearsome former Downing Street media supremo Alistair Campbell, Blair's political Svengali Peter Mandelson and certain others. The book originally appeared in 1996 before Blair came to power under the title Tony Blair: the Man Behind the Smile, with updated editions in 2001 and 2003. The problem for me with a psychoanalytic account is that I do not have enough knowledge of the technique to form an independent judgment of my own. Abse's approach is distinctly partisan and hostile, as his phrases that I have used in my caption to this review make very clear. It is all easy enough to understand, it is coherent, systematic and seemingly well-researched (sources are listed at the back) but there is no question that this is a full-scale frontal attack on Blair as a politician. An analysis using this technique belittles its subject, as this book is manifestly intended to do, and ordinary detachment and fairness suggests that there must be at least some temptation, for someone fluent in the terminology, to use it to promote a point of view rather than carry out a genuinely objective enquiry.

   Abse is `old Labour' as he says himself, and he draws his inspiration from the post-war Labour government whose socialising approach he believed Blair could have emulated. Among more recent Labour figures he singles out the late leader John Smith. I had the honour of knowing John personally long before Abse did, and all I can say is that if he really was the conflict-unaverse full-blooded socialist that Abse depicts he must have changed a good deal since I used to know him. Whether Abse is precisely `left-wing' is questionable, and he is manifestly unimpressed by certain recidivist trade union leaders of the kind who made the trade union movement as deeply disliked as it became in the 1960's and 1970's. He is basically a fair-minded and decent-minded socialist who believes that Blair and his motley outfit of modernisers have, in his own words, stolen the soul of his party. He recognises explicitly that the kind of social legislation he aspires to is not going to be achieved without conflict. However as he sees fit to characterise Gordon Brown as being willing to face up to anyone except himself (Brown, that is), I suppose I can legitimately question whether Abse in his turn is really facing up to the sort of obstacles his own preferred policies confront in this day and age. This is a book review, not any kind of political statement of my own. What I would have wanted from Abse is his own honest answer to the question `Given that Britain is a member of the European Union, and given even more the extent to which governments are in the hands of international capital, do you think you will achieve anything except disaster by taking on hopeless odds?' If the political will is there, anything might indeed be possible. Can he honestly claim to detect it at this stage of the world's history?

   There are real touches of brilliance in this book and it is in the main well-written, so much so that I shall ask - can there really be such a word as `aggressivity'? There wouldn't be if I had anything to do with it. There is categorically no such word as `wreaked', the word is `wrought'; it is a solecism to use `proportions' to mean dimensions; and does he mean `atactic' or `ataxic'? I enjoyed the book thoroughly. The sincere sense of disappointment that comes through it is shared from various political standpoints, not least from the prevalent view that we have no visible alternative government.

No comments about Gladstone and Women.

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