Dava Sobel - Galileo's Daughter

Despite the title, this is very much a book about the life and times of the great Renaissance thinker

Galileo Galilei. That said, it is very much illuminated by the detail within the letters of Galileo's eldest daughter who, together with her sister, he sent to a convent at a very young age. When old enough, she took the name Suor Maria Celeste and lived her life out in the convent, a life of prayer, solitude and long hours of work. In fact the book might be seen as being two linked works. One on the life of Galileo, the other on life within an order of nuns in the 17th century.

By sending her to the convent, Galileo was in no way punishing the young girl. Born out of wedlock and before Galileo's fame had brought him limited financial security, this was one way that the young girls could have a more secure future. Though to modern eyes, their life remained one of poverty and difficulties, brought about by the convent's reliance on the generosity of others.

However the meat of the biography is Galileo himself. His trials and tribulations are illuminated by the collection of letters that were sent to him by Suor Maria Celeste. Her letters are filled with the support of a young woman for her aged father, discussing his financial (and spiritural) needs and returning mended clothes and foodstuffs that she had prepared for him. Galileo's own letters haven't survived, perhaps having been destroyed after his death by someone fearful that a keeping the letters of a victim of the inquisition might bring ill fortune upon themselves. But from Celeste's responses we can see that Galileo himself responded in kind. Sending money to alleviate temporary hardships in the convent, discussing his work and theories and ultimately the problems he faced with the church hierarchy.

Dava Sobel is excellent however and drawing out the dynamics of Galileo's arguments with senior figures in the Church. Few who select this book would not know that Galileo had faced criticism for defending the work of Copernicus, whose books, arguing that the Earth was not the centre of the universe and instead circled the Sun, had been banned by the Catholic Church. In an earlier brush with the Church's inquisition in 1616, Galileo had been instructed that he could not believe Copernicus' ideas, only hold them as a theory. At his later trial Galileo had emphasised this, saying "I do not hold this opinion of Copernicus, and I have not held it after being ordered by injunction to abandon it".

Some have argued that Galileo was an early example of someone who fought against the irrationality of Catholic Doctrine, fighting it with science and reason. The truth, as Sobel explains, is much more complex. Galileo was a convinced Christian, but he understood that the problem was with those who argued the literal interpretation of the Bible as opposed to those who thought that God's word was more complex.

Sobel points out, that Galileo had once heard the Vatican librarian Cesare Cardinal Baronio say that "the Bible was a book about how one goes to Heaven - not how Heaven goes." The problem for the Church, and indeed Galileo was that the Bible itself was mostly silent on the issues of the day. Galileo had seen the four major satellites of Jupiter with his telescope, but the Bible never mentioned them, as he wrote:

"Surely if the intention of the sacred scribes had been to teach the people astronomy, they would not have passed over the subject so completely."

Indeed, one of the problems for Galileo was that his Church, in dismissing the arguments of Copernicus and those beginning to follow him, was in danger of embarrassing itself in the face of wider revelations. As Sobel notes, Galileo sought more evidence to support Copernicus, not to damage the Church, but to correct it - "For if the Holy Fathers banned Copernicus as rumour predicted they might do at any moment, then the Church would endure ridicule when a new generation of telescopes, probably manned by infidels, eventually uncovered the conclusive evidence of the Sun-centred system."

As Galileo publishes the greatest of his books on the nature of the universe he works hard to ensure it is acceptable to the Church. It is checked by a number of senior figures and he tries hard to avoid further damage. The book is in the form of a dialogue, so Galileo avoids having himself argue the Copernican position, though he cleverly frames the debate in a way that encourages the reader to a particular conclusion. When the storm of criticism hits, Sobel makes it clear that Galileo himself was stunned by the allegations against him, and clearly thought that it was an enormous misunderstanding that would be clarified when he was able to explain himself. After all, Galileo was a new type of philosopher. His writings were based on observational evidence and experimental data. They were linked to God's reality, even if they ran counter to doctrine.

Sadly for Galileo and his daughter, despite the former close friendship of Pope Urban, the Church needed to be seen to defend doctrine firmly and Galileo was a sad victim of the reassertion of the Aristotelian view of the universe. Galileo died an old man, blinded and housebound, forbidden to discuss matters pertaining to his book (though he clearly flouted these rules and continued his scientific work). His daughter deceased him by several years, a victim of disease in a period when Medicine had barely escaped its links with mystical understandings of human health. To the end she remained a loyal daughter and despite her religious position her support for her father never wavered  Her end was eased when Galileo was finally allowed to return to his home near her, and their mutual company was clearly a great help to both of them.

Sobel's book then is more than a biography, as it demonstrates the way that as the scientific revolution was beginning, new ideas, even those dealing with outer space, challenged the political status quo. By refusing to accept Copernicus and banning Galileo's book, the Church wasn't simply dismissing theories that ran contrary to the Bible, it was also reasserting the ideology that gave it so much power and wealth. For Pope Urban, this was far more important than old ties of friendship, or experimental evidence.

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Sven Lindqvist - 'Exterminate All The Brutes'

The title of Sven Lindqvist's short book comes from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It is the supposed solution to the task of the European countries in Africa and neatly sums up the violence at the core of colonial aspiration and imperialist aggression.

Part travelogue, part fiction and explicitly "not a contribution to historical research", Lindqvist's book is an account of the way that European colonialism and then more recently imperialism has subjugated the populations of other countries. His analysis differs from a Marxist one. He doesn't argue that the problem lies within a system of competing blocks of capital. But his story is no less painful and doesn't hide from pointing the fingers of blame and governments and individuals who were prepared to commit genocide in the interest of their nation state.

Conrad's writing of Heart of Darkness forms a fixed point for Lindqvist's account. He discusses the writings and activities that took place around the time, that would inform Conrad's account of massacre in Africa. Then he looks at the rise of racism and how Darwin's evolutionary theory was used to justify genocide. Lindqvist describes how one member of the British scientific establishment saw the future:

"Africa will be shared between England and France... Under European rule, the Africans will dig the ditches and water the deserts. It will be hard work and the Africans themselves will probably become extinct. 'We must learn to look at this result with composure. It illustrates the beneficent law of nature, that the weak must be devoured by the strong.'"

Such scientific distortions were all to common in the 19th century. Their influence on colonialism and slavery led to the deaths of millions and the pillage of entire continents. But Lindqvist is keen to explore the links between this historical past and more recent genocides such as the Holocaust. Lindqvist argues, that the Holocaust, in the sense of a colonial massacre of millions is far from unique. Indeed he suggests that we want to see the Holocaust as a unique act, so that we can avoid the reality of our own national history a "most comforting thought" he says. Lindqvist points out that

"Hitler.... and all the other Western people in his childhood breathed was soaked in the conviction that imperialism is a biologically necessary process, which, according to the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races. It was a conviction which had already cost millions of human lives before Hitler provided his highly personal application."

Unfortunately I think this analysis is only partially correct. The Holocaust was unique because it was the only industrially organised genocide that lies rooted in the rise of Fascism. That said, it has links to the past and  as Lindqvist suggests other Imperial powers are certainly not innocent. Fascism is a particular aberration of capitalism, but it is more than simply a more violent version.

Once again Lindqvist exposes the bloody history of colonialism and imperialism. His book is unusual in its style, but its format doesn't detract from its content. There are few positives in Lidqvist accounts. He doesn't mention those people who stood up against slavery, colonialism, racism and genocide, often at great cost to themselves. Nonetheless this is a useful demolition of those who argue that Empire and colonialism was beneficial to the majority of the population.

Related Reviews


Newsinger - The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire
Gott - Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt
Pakenham - The Scramble for Africa

Peter Fryer - Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain

Peter Fryer was a socialist journalist of enormous reputation. As related in this obituary his experiences in Hungary during the 1956 uprising reporting for the Daily Worker led him to break from the British Communist Party. He remained active on the far left, joining a Trotskyist organisation where his talents as a writer continued to be demonstrated. I've reviewed a couple of his works, including his slightly eccentric Studies of English Prudery on this blog. Staying Power however is Peter Fryer's most important book, the culmination of a lifetimes reading, writing and research. While it covers an immense period, it concentrates on the 16th century onwards for this is when the role of black and asian people becomes most important for British history. In part this is because more and more black people are living in the British Isles, but it is also because it is during the first couple of centuries of this period that slavery becomes absolutely central the accumulation of wealth for British capitalism. It is during this period, to paraphrase Marx, that capital was born into the world, drenched in blood.

Beginning with the presence of black people amongst Roman legionnaires on Hadrian's Wall, Fryer relates much of this history through contemporary accounts, quotes and frequently the voices of black people themselves. These forgotten accounts are often powerful and heart rending - the stories of escaped slaves, people who failed to escape slavery, victims of racism and violence and occasionally those who fought back and escaped persecution or their chains.

As a socialist, Fryer's sympathies are with the oppressed, rather than the oppressor. In one of the two core chapters of the book, that on slavery, he discusses how slavery was ended, first in Britain and then in the colonies. Not for Fryer is this a result of the benevolent gentleman or the sympathetic judge. While both these figures make an appearance (Fryer is too rounded a historian to ignore their contributions) his explanation is rooted much more in the activities of ordinary people, men and women, black and white. Here for instance he describes the way that slavery was ended in Britain:

"if, contrary to popular belief, slavery in Britain was not outlawed by Mansfield in 1772, how in fact was it ended? The short answer is that black slaves in Britain voted with their feet. They had always... resisted by running away from their masters and mistresses. Helped and encouraged, and to some extent protected by the Mansfield decision, they had largely completed this process and freed themselves by the mid-1790s. This gradual self-emancipation is a matter of social rather than legal history..."

Fryer also understands that not all white people had the same attitudes to the small, but growing numbers of black people in Britain. Often those who fought and organised against slavery where the white working class, instinctively understanding that, the ruling class had an interest in dividing them and using racism to undermine their collective strength. Moral revulsion at slavery from ordinary people played its role - Fryer documents a number of accounts of escaped slaves being accepted into white working class communities and protected from their former masters, including a welsh mining community. But it was at periods of "working-class radicalism" that the abolitionist movement grew. This even went to the heart of the parts of Britain which had gained the most from slavery itself:

"The 1792 petition from Manchester, whose population was somewhat under 75,000 carried over 20,0000 signatures. Even Bristol had a petition. It was the spread of radical ideas amongst working people that had brought about this change". 

Anti-slavery was part and parcel of radical activism. It was at the core, for instance, of the ideas coming out of the French Revolution and later of Chartism. This is not surprising, the racial ideas that justified slavery were in part a product of growing fear of rebellion at home, as Fryer points out, "there was an organic connection in nineteenth century Britain between the attitude the ruling class took to the 'natives; in its colonies and the attitude it took to the poor at home."

He continues:

"Though the Chartist movement evaporated after 1848, by the 1860s working people in Britain were once more challenging the political and economic power of those who ruled and employed them. Faced with this challenge, 'the proponents of social inequality slipped all the more readily into racial rhetoric'."

The second core chapter, and perhaps the most important is the one were Fryer shows how racism was consciously created and encouraged on the plantations. This invention of racism was needed to justify what was happening to the slaves and to allow slavery to continue. It was simply too profitable for the slave owners and traders, yet without racial justification for the slave trade, it would have been impossible to continue with it. In part this was pseudo-scientific racism, in part it was simply the extension and development of the myths and prejudices that existed about Africa and the non-white world. Africans were "lazy", "childlike" or "simple" and Fryer details the development of such racist ideas and how they spread through the British Empire. One of the reasons this is so crucial is that it demonstrates that racism (as opposed to prejudice or ignorance about black people) has not always existed. It is not some inherent part of human nature, rather a product of the need to make profit by trading in people from Africa.

As always there were those who argued against this, and Peter Fryer quotes one such man a minister, Morgan Godwyn in 1680, who pointed to the "economic basis and role of plantocracy racism". Godwyn's book argued that in dehumanising black people, slavery was justified. One aspect to this, was the way that slaves were denied religion, which served, as Godwyn points out, to;

"The issue whereof is, that as in the Negroe's all pretence to Religion is cut off, so their Owners are hereby set at Liberty, and freed from those importunate Scruples, which Conscience and better Advice might at any time happen to inject into their unsteadie Minds."

Godwyn believed that the "'public agents' for the West Indies, 'know know other God by Money, nor Religion but Profit'." That the first such blows against slavery were struck in the language of religion is no surprise. They were not to be the last.

Racism did not end with the abolition of slavery. Indeed racism was to prove, as the above quote demonstrates, too useful in dividing the working class. Fryer follows the story of the battles against racism, and the experiences of black people in Britain, through the 20th century. He shows how, despite forming an integral part of the armed forces during World War One, and increasingly being accepted into British life, racism reared its ugly head. As the War finished and black soldiers weren't needed, they were forgotten, deported or ignored. Fryer uncovers the forgotten history of the race riots when groups of white men attacked (often on a huge scale) black people, their homes and clubs. These riots, particularly those in Liverpool and Cardiff in 1919 were terrifying and the authorities looked the other way.

There is much more in Fryers book. He tells the stories of various attempts to build anti-colonial movements in the UK, or to support existing struggles elsewhere. On a lighter note he documents the stories of musicians, boxers and artists who came to Britain from the West Indies and Africa.

The book finishes, abruptly to the contemporary reader, in 1981 in the immediate aftermath of the riots that swept the country. Riots that were both a response to institutionalised racism and the poverty and unemployment that often goes with it. There are many echoes of this past today, not least in the experience of the 2011 riots in Britain. The problems that Fryer identifies in 20th century capitalism for Black people have not disappeared in the early 21st century.

As a social history this book has no equal. Fryer's scholarship is detailed, but his work is immensely readable. It is a book that should be on the shelf of everyone committed to fighting racism, every socialist and every trade unionist. It is a singular history of Britain that demonstrates the way that ordinary people, black and white, have been the victims of the quest for profits, but how they have also organised to improve fight for a better world.

Related Reviews

Fryer - Hungarian Tragedy
Fryer - Mrs Grundy: Studies in English Prudery

Owen Jones - Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

Owen Jones is clearly a rising star of the Labour left. I've arrived late to review Chavs which has been extensively reviewed, debated and discussed here in many different publications (see for instance, The Guardian, Lenin's Tomb, Socialist Review and The Daily Telegraph). Since its publication in 2011 its seen (as reflected in the number of reviews) enormous success. It has also seen a further deepening of some of the trends portrayed in the book, which the author argues in his new preface helped detonate the riots of the summer of 2011.

Jones points out, back in that strange week when the forces of "law and order" seemed to have lost control of their inner-cities, there "was little appetite for social and economic explanations". In reality it wasn't so much that "People just wanted to feel safe and for those responsible to be punished", there was also a ready appetite from the media for simplistic explanations that placed the blame on greed, feckless young people and uncaring people.

Jones locates the riots in the wider problems in British society. For the left many of these are obvious - the current ConDem coalition is rightly condemned for its austerity policies that have cut back enormously on public services and the welfare state, cut funding for the few facilities for young people and of course, the police racism that helped spark the riots in the first place.

Jones begins the book by arguing that the last few decades have seen a growing "demonisation" of working people. The Chavs phenomena, the image of a social underclass, that is both permanently unemployed and unemployable, given to petty crime, racism and unwanted pregnancies is, for Jones, both a reflection of this demonisation and part of the problem. Comedians, newspaper columnists and politicians paint a picture of the Chav (Council Housed And Violent as one backroynm has it) that reinforces popular perceptions of such a section of society.

In reality, Jones argues that what has changed is the systematic destruction of working class communities, jobs and workplaces that has created vast pools of poverty and under-employment. Jones' book is in part a detailed explanation of some of these trends, for instance the growth in short-contract, low-waged, unskilled jobs, and the expense of well-paid, skilled, long-term jobs that created the basis for a wider community. Such communities, Jones argues, helped to solve other social problems, but once the core work was destroyed, whole areas went into decline.

Secondly Jones argues there has been a deliberate transformation of attitudes towards the working class by politicians. This he rightly locates in the Thatcher era, where the Prime Minister spearheaded a conscious drive to instill ideas of individuality into the mass of society. At the same time, her government laid waste to whole sections of British industry in an effort to destroy the very organisations, the Trade Unions, that helped workers protect themselves and their communities. One key example of this, is the destruction of Council Housing.

Thatcher's Right-to-Buy scheme helped transform Britain from a country where 2 in 5 lived in council housing to one in ten. Councils have been blocked from building new homes, and the under-mining of these estates, combined with the encouragement to own your own property helped undermine the wider community. The boom in housing buying coincided with an increasing sense of individualism. Now one had to fight everyone else to get ahead, rather than standing together for ones interests.

This destruction of council housing was important, not simply for what it did to the communities, but for how it has shaped the perception of working people since then. As Jones' explains:

"Because of the sheer concentration of Britain's poorest living in social housing, council estates easily become associated with the so-called 'chavs'. While it is true that about half of Britain's poor own their homes, they too tend to live on estates. The increasing transformation of council estates into social dumping grounds has provided much ammunition for the theory that Britain is divided into middle-class society and a working-class rump, suffering from an epidemic of self-inflicted problems."

Despite this assault, Jones argues, a lot has survived. Trade Unions still have enormous numbers of members and still have the power to terrify governments when they act together. Over half the population still describe themselves as working class, despite the way that successive governments have tried to undermine the words meaning, and working people still stand together to try and improve their collective lives in the face of austerity and indifference from on high.

Part of this indifference comes from those governments that have followed Thatchers. While Jones rightly reserves enormous contempt to the Tories (which comes across in his interviews with former Tory MPs and ministers), Jones also lays part of the blame at the feet of the Labour administration. Right from the time of Thatcher, Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband have aped the Tory views that being working class is bad and middle class is an aspiration for all. Indeed, Jones points out that Gordon Brown fought the 2010 general election on the slogan of creating "a bigger middle class than ever before".

The failure of Labour governments to undo some of the chains that bind working people (such as anti-union laws) have only accelerated the destruction of working class communities. But Jones also argues that their policies have copied and made this worse. In a interesting chapter on racism in Britain, Jones points out:

"New Labour launched a £12 million project specifically designed to help white working-class communities. Of course it is true that there are many working-class - and yes, largely white - communities that have been neglected or even abandoned by New Labour.... But this approach takes us further down the road of linking the problems of working-class communities to their ethnic identity, rather than their class. More dangerously it encourages the idea that working-class people belonging to different ethnic groups are in competition with each other for attention and resources."

This approach must be lauded coming from someone inside the Labour Party and Jones spends a good section of the book demonstrating that the working class is not the bigoted mass that liberal journalists often think it is. He does however over-state the question when discussing the Lindsey Oil Dispute. In this strikes, mass numbers of workers walked out, some of whom carried banners with the phrase "British Jobs for British Workers". While not everyone in the strike was racist, and there were those who argued against this slogan, the slogan itself was racist and demonstrated the potential for anger at government and job-losses to be turned down a more ugly direction (for more on this, see this article).

Jones builds up an impressive mass of data that undermines current government policy and demonstrates the mistakes of previous ones. His research also demonstrates just how wrong popular perception of society actually is, take for instance his figures on single-mothers, widely blamed it seems by Tory MPs for everything from economic crisis to rioting. Rather than single mothers being feckless young women, "only one in fifty single mothers are under eighteen. The average age for a single-parent is thirty-six, and over half had the children while married."

Jones' arguments that the anti-union laws should be repelled, that council houses should be built to high environmental standards to reduce emissions and create homes and jobs, and many other ideas are very positive and must be supported. But Jones' limitations come in the final twenty or so pages. The problem is, that individual socialists can all come up with alternative economic policies. What we also need are strategies for winning them.

For all his criticisms of Labour in power, Jones clearly believes that the only way forward is a reformed Labour party, which has better economic policies aimed at improving the lot of working people. While a laudable aim, the problem with this approach is that it ignores the reality of the current Labour Party, as well as Labour over the last 100 or so years. Labour consistently has signed with the capitalist system against working people. Labour's role as a reformist party that plays the systems game to try to win a few bread-crumbs, means that inevitably it sides with that system. Indeed, the real problem that runs through this book, as it has done for Labour thinkers throughout the last century, is that the working class must be a passive recipient of benevolence from reforming government, rather than an active agent of change.

It is true that Jones supports strikes and protests, though they have only passing mentions in this book. But  the problem is, that in order to survive the current economic crisis, working people are going to have to fundamentally challenge the priorities of the system. Labour politicians, and many of their leading supporters in the unions run terrified of such a response from below. For them, and Jones, the system must be reformed in the interests of the majority in society.

Revolutionary socialists have a different starting point. For us, the system leads inevitably to economic crisis. It has war, bigotry and environmental destruction built into it. This is a fact of life, not a aberration. This is a system that must be smashed, and the only social force that can do this, is the working class. This requires political organisation outside the Labour Party.

While reading Chavs I was seized on a number of occasions by enormous amounts of rage. What has been done to working people by successive governments over the last two or three decades is appalling. Jones' book documents well what has taken place and the consequences here. Marshaled inside this book are vast arrays of facts and figures, together with detailed arguments, that undermine the actions of the current government. For these reasons it deserves a wider readership. It is part of a weapon in our armoury against those who rule in the interests of banks and big business.

But this book is also a starting point for a debate. That debate is about what sort of political organisation working people need. Do they need a Labour Party that asks them to vote once every few years, or do they need parties that try to strengthen resistance, to unite different struggles, to push for stronger action to win the changes that are needed? Such a debate has been taking place since the beginning of Social Democracy. The weakness of the Labour Left in the last few years has muted it, but Owen Jones has helped revive the debate and his book is an excellent starting point for this discussion.

Robert Roberts - The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century

Taking it's title from Frederick Engels' description of Salford, The Classic Slum is part social history, part autobiography and part oral-history book. I've reviewed Robert Roberts' account of his childhood, A Ragged Schooling here, and was surprised to find that The Classic Slum is not a dry historical account of Salford. While there are some similarities between the two books and they cover similar periods, Roberts has created a very readable account of slum life in Salford. His account covers everything from education to crime and punishment and often he illustrates his point with a personal anecdote. Making this a very readable work of history. The descriptions of school life, or post-war dance halls are fascinating and occasionally too brief.

At the centre of Roberts' account is the First World War. Roberts' argues that before the war, most of the slum dwellers were part of an undermass. Men and women who had unskilled work, if they had any work at all, whose lives were marked by poverty and the constant quest for money to buy food or pay the rent. He dismisses those who look back on the period as some sort of golden age, arguing instead that the grinding poverty held little rosiness for most of Salford's population. Their lives were rarely happy and many people coped simply through drink, or violence.

The First World War, Robert's suggests led to a dramatic change. This is, he argues, not simply in the way that employment patterns changed, or the fact that many men joined up, the war he says, "cracked the form of English lower-class life and began an erosion of its socio-economic layers that has continued to this day". While I don't think that English class was so much as eroded, certainly it was changed. After the war, Robert's shows how the expectations of those who'd had decent wage packets for the first time, or returned from that army, were dramatically changed. So to was the position of women in society. Characteristically, Robert's shows this with a bitter-sweet recollection.

"My father was typical. In his cups he was wont to boast that, at the lathe he had to manipulate a micrometer and work to limits of one thousandth of an inch. We were much impressed, until one evening, in 1917 a teenage sister running a capstan in the iron works remaked indifferently that she, too, used a 'mike' to even finer limits. There was, she said, 'nothing to it'. The old man fell silent. Thus did status crumble!"

Roberts points out that during the war so 642,000 women went into government factories and millions more men and women were "doing manual work of almost every kind and developing new skills and new self-confidence." These people were changed and so was the perception of work and society. "The awe that many simpler souls had felt before the mystery of craft began to evaporate, to be replaced by at least some rational understanding."

This helps to explain the political transformation that took place. Roberts shows that socialist activism and politics was always part of Salford life. In fact the description of a great dock strike and a big solidarity demonstration by women is one of the highlights of The Classic Slum. But most of the "undermass" that Roberts described remained he says, indifferent to socialist agitators and parties. After the war this changed. The impact of the Russian Revolution, as well as the changes to peoples lives and work meant new ideas were about. People gathered to listen to socialist speakers on the street-corner near Roberts' family shop, where before they had ignored them. When his area elected its first Labour MP, Roberts' mother cried and they felt part of a new world.

This is no sentimental, rose-tinted view of working-class past. This is a book seeped in the sad history of Salford, where tens of thousands suffered from poverty and unemployment. Occasionally, those men and women fought back, struggling for change. Most of the time, they were ignored by the establishment, except when church or schoolmaster lectured them on morality and behaviour. While I don't necessarily agree with every aspect of Roberts' analysis (I'd like to see more studies of the people who made up the "undermass" for instance, and to what extent they could break out of this poverty trap), because this account is rooted in Roberts' own recollections, it is a living history one in which real people lived, suffered and struggled, sometimes laughing, often crying. For these reasons it deserves to be read by everyone, even those who have never visited the city.

Related Reviews

Roberts - A Ragged Schooling
Mayhew - London Labour and the London Poor
Fishman - East End 1888
Wise - The Blackest Streets

Nick Davies - Flat Earth News

In 2001 I was in Genoa, Italy for anti-capitalist protests against the G8. These were marked by extremely violent attacks by the Italian police on protesters. In one of these, a young anarchist activist called Carlo Giuliani was shot dead by an Italian policeman. As a result of this,, the next day saw Genoa swamped by enormous protests. I was one of the press contacts for a British anti-capitalist group in Genoa and I did a number of interviews with the British press. During the course of the day, as it looked that there might be further clashes between police and protesters, I was asked to do regular interviews for a 24 hour news channel. The problem was, I was told by a journalist on the phone from London, that the news organisation had no journalists in Italy. They had been cut to save money.

Similar stories about the changes to the international, but particularly the British media, are a running theme through Nick Davies' book. He charts the decline of journalism and locates the problems not with individual journalists, most of whom he points out are hard-working, underpaid and over-worked. Rather, Nick Davies argues that the systemic changes to the media since the Second World War, and specifically since the 1980s are the root causes. These lie with what Davies describes as a “grocer” mentality, the notion that the sole purpose of the media is to make the maximum possible profits. In order to do this, media workers are increasingly pressured to produce the maximum number of stories, in the shortest possible time with decreasing numbers of staff and resources.

This would be bad enough and Davies demonstrates particularly by looking at local British newspapers, the way that staff are unable to do more than regurgitate press-releases and rehash stories from other media sources. Often this is done by staff without proper training, payment or experienced colleagues. However the problem is exacerbated Davies argues, by new industries that systematically distort stories and shape the news agenda.

“The old model, where news editors and reporters selected stories and angles, is in a state of collapse. We have seen how the structure of corporate news has converted journalists from active news-gatherers to passive processors of material – only 12% of which could be shown to be free of the mark of wire agencies and PR consultants.”

These arguments are backed up by some impressive studies, where Davies' researchers systematically analysed newspapers stories and matched them up with press-releases and other coverage. A truly depressing picture of the state of British media is painted. The limitations are further shown, by a shocking figure that Davies highlights, the amount of news reported by Google News. Google News it should be remembered, is not a news agency, it aggregates, or reports the sources of other news outlets – from the BBC and The Guardian, to Socialist Worker. In one day in 2006, Google News offered “access” to some 14,000 stories, “yet on this day they were actually accounts of the same 24 news events”.

While large sections of this book are devoted to exposing the practises of PR agencies and so on, large sections are devoted to a couple of major news events. One of these, the build up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was, as part of the “War on Terror” and the events of September 11th 2001, probably one of the biggest news stories of the last twenty years. It was also an enormously manipulated story. Everyone from governments to intelligence agencies was involved in creating a story that justified and encouraged the attack on Iraq. In Britain, Tony Blair's government played a particularly shady role in first supporting the US government but then attempting to manipulate public opinion though a series of lies, half-truths and cover-ups. 

They were aided in this, by a number of over-friendly senior figures in the news industry. Davies studies in particular the career during this period of Kamal Ahmed, the political editor of The Observer a newspaper with a previous reputation as left-wing, which had in the past been happy to critique government policy and challenge the status-quo. Instead, despite the reservations (and anti-war position) of many of the journalists, the paper took a pro-war position. This meant that stories against the war, or in one case a serious work of investigative journalism that showed through interviews with senior US intelligence officers that the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” did not exist, were spiked. Links between senior news figures and Downing Street meant that such criticism was hidden at the first hurdle.

Davies shows how changes at newspapers such as reduced numbers of staff and resources mean that journalists are less able or less willing to check facts and stories. In an era of 24 hour news reporting this reduces the ability of the news rooms to find information, simply regurgitating existing stories, or stories that appear to come from reliable sources (such as the Press Association). But it also encourages the journalists themselves to fit a particular political agenda. In this sense news stories are less about explaining a particular situation and more about pushing a “line”. This can mean that work from journalists is distorted or re-written to reflect a certain existing viewpoint. As Davies comments about the Sunday Telegraph (in particular its Insight Team):

“When the Insight Team were tasked to look at immigration and asylum, they found that it was true as right-wingers had alleged, that the asylum process was in chaos; but they also found impressive evidence that immigration was good for the country. They were allowed to only write the first part of the story.”

Nick Davies argues convincingly that a key problem is what he calls Flat Earth News. These are the stories that “everyone” knows to be true – immigration is bad, policemen are mostly good, the Iraq War was about ending the terrorist threat and so on. Pressure to conform to these existing ideas limits media investigation and critique.

The structural changes to the media that Nick Davies highlights are part of wider social transformations. The beginnings of the break up of the media, reductions in staffing levels and the switch to stories that would maximise sales of newspapers coincide with the era of neo-liberalism. Many of the stories told in this book have their roots in Margaret Thatchers first government, with its attacks on the power of the unions and the beginnings of the destruction of the welfare state. The same forces were at work in the media industry and the friendship of individuals like Rupert Murdoch with governments since then have accelerated this. This is not a process that is limited to the low-end mass market tabloids either, as Davies comments while discussing the activities of newspapers like The News of the World whose journalists routinely broke the law in pursuit of a story;

“Ever so often, one of these stunts would break out into the public domain. The tabloids would deny everything and the post papers would look straight down their noses and write slightly smug, slightly amused pieces about those wild and whacky red-top chaps and their dodgy ways, as if this sort of activity was something entirely alien to them. The truth is, that by the mid-1990s the posh papers were bang at it too – because they were suffering from exactly the same commercial pressures which had corrupted their tabloid colleagues.”

Nick Davies finishes this book on a less than optimistic note. He clearly believes that the era of proper journalism and genuine media is at an end. In part he hopes (with some justification) that the internet can undermine this, but he clearly thinks that the forces of the market have finally destroyed the golden age of the journalist. While the picture painted of the media in Flat Earth News is very depressing, I think that part of the solution lies in ordinary people taking control of their own lives. This might seem far-fetched, but in Greece in the midst of the struggles against austerity, some journalists have taken over their newspaper and written what might be called proper news. On a smaller scale part of an answer must surly lie in the rebuilding of workers organisations at the newspapers, in order to give journalists an opportunity through collective action to stand up to the bullies and editorial lines forced upon them.

Despite this minor disagreement I heartedly encourage people to read this book. Its expose of the realities of the modern media will be eye-opening to everyone, even those who are already deeply cynical about the press. For those of us who have campaigned over the last few decades against war and racism, many of the stories from the news-rooms inside will explain why what we rarely made the headlines. And, for all those who despise the Daily Mail Nick Davies explains the real reasons for its relentless right-wing, scapegoating politics and the lies in its stories (as well as some accounts of its shocking internal racism). Ultimately, the problem with the media lies in a political and economic system that is filled with fear of ordinary people, that needs to divide and rule and which is driven by a hunt for profits at the expense of all else. Nick Davies' book is an extraordinarily fascinating insight into a small, but very very influential part of that world.

Related Reviews

Molyneux - Will the Revolution be Televised? A Marxist Analysis of the Media

Peter Fryer - Mrs Grundy: Studies in English Prudery

Peter Fryer's history of prudery begins by pointing out that the Roman Cicero advised his friends not to say, "little pavements" because the Latin word created, would suggest the word penis. Some two thousand years later, Fryer points out, that the Birtish Transport Ministry, avoided using certain three letter letters because they hinted at words that apparently Cicero wouldn't have liked. So Birmingham number plates could use BOC and DOC, but not the appalling COC. Leeds, AUM or CUM, but not BUM.

Such anecdotes make us smile today, though even in these enlightened times self censorship, or prudery pervades many public bodies. We might like to think of ourselves as better than the Romans or the Victorians, but despite the changes we have seen, much remains the same.

Fryer's book is mostly an account, if a structureless one, of changing attitudes. He begins with language, early chapters trace the changing words, the way that the word belly (first used in 1340) became replaced gradually by stomach (1375). "Respectable Englishwomen" he tells us, were shocked by European doctors who used the word belly in the 1900s. Embarrassment about ones own body seems a particular affliction of the English speaking lands. The idea that one could be shocked by the use of the word belly seems strange, but far less strange than those Americans who could not bear to describe individual legs,  as it drew attention to the shape of their bodes. Fryer includes stories of Doctors unable to treat patients who couldn't tell him which "limb" was hurting. Animals and inanimate objects suffered too, the "leg of a chicken became second wing in Britain, second joint or trotter, or the dark meat in the USA".

Fryer's history continues. On occasion it becomes mere lists of words, the succession of synonyms that came into favour, and then were considered offensive, reading like a line rude schoolboy poetry;

"perform the work of nature (1607), ease nature (1701), obey the call(s) of nature (1747), do a job(for oneself)...pay a call, pay a visit, relieve nature, see a man about a dog and wash ones hands"

But there is much more than this to Fryer's history. The chapters on dancing and Sunday's in particular demonstrate the battle that took place between some in society (almost always those at the top) who wanted to restrict the behaviour of the masses. Even in Medieval times, the establishment was forbidding drinking and dancing on Sunday's though, in the case of Richard II this was more to encourage archery practise. By the time of the reformation and later, attacks on such behaviour was an attempt to regulate people into worship on their sole day off.

Its at this time that attempts to police behaviour increasingly come to the fore. Networks of informers and gossipers, spying on those who danced, made love, sang or had a glass of beer on Gods Day, led to more than one person being put in the stocks, imprisoned or ostracised.

The most entertaining chapter is that which deals with attempts to reduce drinking. Drink, the curse of the devil, was supposed to destroy morals and set people onto a road of wickedness. Fryer tells use the stories of debaters and pamphleteers who set up stall against the brewers and publicans. Of huge campaigning organisations that tried to force pubs to close on Sundays and educate the masses about the dangers of drink. Many of these books and stories raise a wry smile:

"Another curiosity of teetotal prose, standing out even in a genre where eccentricity of presentation is never unexpected, is 'Tippling and Temperance' (1890) by Charles Bateman. Everyone of its 1289 words begins with the letter t, and 'this terse treatise... trenchantly traverses tattling, time-serving table-talkers; temerarious tolerance to the trivial, trifling, truckling toss-pot"

Sadly, this is really all there is too the book. In Fryer's introduction he declares what he won't do:

"different classes tend to have different standards of sexual morality; it would be an arduous undertaking to study the changing class attitudes to sex in this country over the last four hundred years..."


Which is disappointing, because such a study would have been of great interest, and Fryer, the man who wrote the monumental "Staying Power" a history of Black people in Britain, would surely have been capable of such a work. So despite Fryer's 1960s warning that there is "no reason Mrs Grundy is incapable of returning to a position of influence", his book lacks any attempt to understand the root causes of changing social attitudes. There is nothing here, for instance, which tries to explain why, in the 19th century, male doctors suddenly were expected to assist at childbirth without a woman removing her voluminous dresses. Why were medical men no longer able look at a woman's naked body? What had changed in attitudes to women, and why? Sadly, the lack of such social context, turn this history into little more than an entertaining smirk at the prudes of the past. Without offering any analysis of why things were like Fryer describes. Given Fryer's Marxism and other radical writings, this is a surprising ommision.

 Related Reviews

Fryer - Hungarian Tragedy

David Graeber - Debt: The First 5,000 Years

David Graeber has produced an important and stimulating book. It is a radical book that clearly has its roots in the anti-capitalist movements that the author has been part of. But it is more than simply a book that is designed to challenge capitalism. Graeber is attempt to argue that the conventional way of looking at the world is wrong, and that the way we have lived our lives in the past has been very different to how we do today.

Debt, Graeber argues, means a very specific thing to us today. It is an obligation that we accept we have to someone else, be that someone a bank or a loan shark. The obligation we feel is the sense that the debt (usually money, though not always) must always be paid back. Graeber contrasts this, with how obligations have been viewed in the past. For most of human history we have organised our lives through hunting and gathering of foods. In these societies, the obligations we had were never the result of someone making a loan with their own material interests. There were no hunter-gatherer loan sharks. Graeber illustrates this well with an example from a well documents group of hunter-gatherers, the Innuit.

One person who lived with and studied the Innuit described returning empty handed from a hunt. Fearing hunger, he found a successful hunter giving him several hundred pounds of meat. The man objected to his thanks.

"Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter. "And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs."
Such attitudes do not simply come from shortages. Other anthropologists such as Eleanor Burke Leacock have documented how hunter-gatherer tribes share food out, even when there isn't enough for everyone. In other words, the obligations people feel are rooted in their collective life, not out of self-interest.

The way these attitudes change is a great theme of Graeber's book and would be difficult to cover here. He is at pains to argue that debt as a general notion has existed throughout history, though most of the time it has been more to do with human social relations than with material gains. These social debts might be the obligations you take on when marrying someone - the promise to feed and look after them. They might also be the money you give as a dowry - not a payment, but a donation towards the cost of living. Over time, Graeber argues and in many ways, such social obligations take root as material debts.

Graeber upsets a great many apple-carts. One of which is in his discussion of Adam Smith and the conventional economics that have flowed from his ideas. In trying to answer the question "what is money?", Smith and others always answer in similar ways. "Imagine a world without money. We'd have to survive with barter. I have a bag of nails, you have a loaf of bread. I must exchange bread for nails. This barter economy is cumbersome, so money develops". I paraphrase, but you get the idea.

Graeber argues that there is no evidence for "barter economies". Those who say for instance, that when the Roman Empire declined in an area, society "returned to a barter economy" are placing their vision of what they think happened over reality. The truth is that Roman money disappeared, but in its place remained alternative currencies, sometimes virtual ones. "Barter economies" says Graeber did not exist, exchange took place through elaborate systems of credit. With the development of urban economies rather than early agricultural ones, people might need bread, and only have nails, but the loaves would have a particular value assigned to them, as did nails. Graeber cites plenty of examples of societies which have distributed goods to people who need them, waiting for future payment when fishermen returned with their catch or the nails were manufactured.

So explains that after the Romans left, villages might no longer have Roman money. But they did have Roman prices. They might value a sheep as so many pieces of gold and bread as so many pieces of silver, and this allowed exchange to take place. Money wasn't real, debt existed by in a concrete sense of credit. Not an abstract one. Presumably the person who failed to come good on his or her debt was eventually refused assistance.

All this is very interesting, and it certainly seems plausible. The problem with the book for me was that I don't think that Graeber really gets a handle on what drives human economies. It isn't debt, nor is it finance. Production exists because people need to provide for their material needs and the way that production is organised determines all the other aspects of their society. The way that the forces of production in society develop, challenging and changing the relations in society ultimately helps bring about change. This is a very short explanation of historical materialism, but I think Graeber would have benefited from expressing his history in terms similar to this. Otherwise you are left feeling distinctly like human history being a series of events that are connected only through a gradual development of a money economy.

I also feel that Graeber misses out a class analysis. That's not to say he doesn't acknowledge the existence of classes. He is very clear that these do exist in society and critical of the attitudes of the rich towards the majority of society. But I don't think he explains what motivates people in different classes. Why do the rich behave like they do? Why are they so irrational in their behaviour?

Capitalism is a fundamentally different human society to earlier ones. Its economic dynamic is the need to accumulate wealth, for the sake of accumulation. This is not the same as earlier class societies. The lord of the manor did not go out and exploit the peasants for the sake of it. He did so until he had satisfied his needs. Capitalism exploits workers because it needs more wealth, to reinvest and restart the treadmill of production. This difference also shapes how we perceive ourselves and our relations to others. In this context debt between people takes on a different meaning under capitalism then it did in previous societies. We are atomised and individualised, set competing against each other.

That said, Graeber has some good insights into different eras of human history and it may well be my own personal predilections that lead me to think his chapters on hunter-gatherers are the most interesting. This is a book that will be debated and discussed at length and is worth study. While there are holes to pick and arguments to be had, the themes are generally of interest.

Readers wanting a more in depth critique of Graeber's book are directed towards this review here.

Adrian Bell - Men and the Fields

There is always a danger when reading books about the rural past, of falling into the trap that there was a wonderful utopian life that has been forgotten, destroyed or superceded. Adrian Bell's book avoids this trap precisely because it is a celebration of what he saw and loved, rather than an attempt to pretend the world  was something it was not.

Bell was himself a farmer, though he was an accomplished writer. He loved nature, people and the landscape. Men and the Fields is his celebration of those things in various rural parts of lowland Britain, particularly Suffolk and the south coast. Bell's gift is a brilliantly economic style that sums up his surroundings without feeling like the reader is having descriptions piled onto descriptions. Here he ruminates on the view from a train station, but equally important is the station master:

"Out of the cottage came a countryman dressed in gold lace: he was the station master. He gave me my ticket and recommended the view from the end of the platform. I said I had seen in beautifully from the river. He insisted it was better from the platform: you could see all along the valley both ways. So I went and sat at the end of the platform. There were two sets of arches: the railway and the road, bridging each other and the depth at different levels. It was like a dim picture of ancient viaducts I remembered sitting opposite once in a farmhouse dining room. I would have thought I had made it up from that picture in a dream. But somehow that railway ticket was never collected. I have it still."

For Bell, the countryside cannot be seperated from the people who live and work there. His descriptions of fields rarely ignore labourers. His love of birds and plants frequently are linked to locals who tell stories of them. Here's a delightful description of a farming couple:

"A woman comes round into the wind; a big woman dressed in sacks and gum boots. The sacking bulks her out and the boots make her legs look like a horses. She comes out into the gale and hardly pauses in the force of it but pushes on through giddy straws across the stackyard... Then she stands full blast and shouts orders to a man in the field - she looks stronger than the wind."

The rigid class differences of the agricultural world lie, barely concelled below the surface of Bell's accounts. The deep respect from labourers for their masters, is often combined with a cynical attitude to those betters who think they know it all. There's a telling tale from a labourer who recounts the different attitudes of farmers towards their workers. The one who offers a cold glass of beer on the doorstep on a winters day, the other who stands him by the fire with a warming whiskey.

Bell was writing about the 1930s. British farming was coming out of an enormous depression caused by withdrawels of wartime subsidies. It was about to be transformed again, the Second World War led to an enormous expansion of farming and the massive motorisation of the industry. As he writes, rural Britain is on the cusp of change. Bell notes the changes to the roads, the impact of the motor car on flocks of sheep, but he doesn't reject these, he sees them as part of an evolving, changing countryside. The beautiful language combined with the wonderful colour paintings that accompany the book, by the artist John Nash combine to make this a lovely read and a lovely piece of art in itself.


Related Links


Whitlock - Peasant's Heritage
Archer - A Distant Scene
Kerr Cameron - The Ballad and the Plough

Age of Uncertainty has more of John Nash's paintings from Men and the Fields here.

John Molyneux - Will the Revolution be Televised? A Marxist Analysis of the Media

John Molyneux's short book on Anarchism that I reviewed recently is an excellent and fraternal critique of the main threads of Anarchist thought. His book on the media, which came out nearly simultaneously is a very important book, given some of the scandals and issues that arose in 2011, notably the crisis of the Murdoch press following the 'phone hacking scandal.

Molyneux sets out to answer a number of questions that radicals often pose about the media. His starting point though, is the irrationality of the system. The fact that there is poverty in the midst of plenty. Hunger and over consumption co-existing. Billions spent on weaponry, yet death due to absence of simple medicines. Molyneux asks why it is that people tolerate this system? Why do people accept ideas that are manifestly untrue? And consequently, why do people accept this state of affairs.

One answer that is often given, is the media. The media is seen as an all powerful force, disseminating ideas that are favourable to the capitalists and under-mine those of the radicals. The media as a whole serves the status quo. Molyneux sets out to examine the media - who runs it, and in whose interest as well as ask whether it is, indeed all powerful.

The media, be it television, radio or newspapers is demonstrably the tool of the wealthy. Murdoch's empire shows this. As a result, the media tends, to portray a particular view of the world. One in which capitalist ideas are the norm. Molyneux gives several examples, not all of them obvious. Most socialists and radicals are used to the way that even so called "independent" or "non-political" news outlets fail to report even the most enormous protests. When they do so, they often concentrate on the actions of a small minority, or accept, unquestioningly figures from the police for attendance. More subtly though, Molyneux shows how many other aspects of the media's output back up the status quo. Gameshows for instance, encourage the idea of competitiveness. Prizes are awarded to a lucky few for outdoing their opponents.

Molyneux argues that this is very much because of the interests of the system. That the media is not neutral, but is part of a system that protects itself from criticism, and were "common sense" ideas are those of the status quo. Even prestigious outlets, like the BBC, supposedly neutral, rarely allow critical voices to be heard. For them, neutrality lies midway between the left and right of mainstream politics. Yet the mainstream parties of the UK are all pro-capitalist. Neutrality hear gives no voice to socialist or other anti-capitalist ideas.

There is much more to Molyneux's short work. There is a fascinating examination of reality TV, how it has developed and how it again, portrays a particular image of society. Molyneux tries to explain the popularity of these. While I am not sure I entirely agree with his conclusion that "in watching the programmes and, importantly, in discussing them with family, friends, workmates etc, viewers are able to use them as a sounding board by which to judge standards of conduct, norms of behaviour, in times when these are changing rapidly", it is certainly an interesting point.

Molyneux looks at other aspects of culture, perhaps rarely discussed by Marxists. Why are their so few non-white people in Eastenders? A programme set in one of the most ethnically diverse areas of London? Similarly, why are so few of them actual workers, rather than owners of small businesses? His brief examination of the role of advertising in setting the agenda of newspapers is also interesting.

Finally Molyneux argues that rather than the media giving consumers "what they want", they create a market for what they offer. In times when millions of people question the world around them, and more importantly, when they are engaged in collectively changing things, such as during the Egyptian Revolution, Molyneux shows how "what people want" from the media changes dramatically. In fact, his examples of voting patterns and social attitudes from studies of newspaper readers show how even the hold of this media on its dedicated readers is often tenuous and more complex. Not everyone who reads the Daily Express is, it turns out, actually a rabid racist.

I suspect that much of what is in this short book will not be new to those studying the media. But I recommend Molyneux's analysis because it is remarkably clear and cuts through some of the academic jargon that dominates discussion of this topic in academia. He also points the way forward to some interesting articles for further study.

Related Reviews

Molyneux - Anarchism: A Marxist Critique

Gavin Stamp - The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme

The battle of the Somme defies numerical analysis. Mere military statistics have little meaning when used to describe suffering and death on such a scale. Early on in this book Gavin Stamp sums up the battle with a quote from a military historian "a battle fought from July to November 1916 saw the British and German armies fire thirty million shells at each other and suffer a million casualties between them in an area just seven miles square".
Stamp avoid spending too much of this book on the actual battle. Though his brief summaries underline what was surely one of the greatest military wastes of human life in human history. Stamp's contempt for the a British military leadership "quite prepared to lose half a million men in the Somme campaign" who then "colluded with Douglas Haig after the war to falsify the record to try and protect his reputation" shines through powerfully. Further anger is reserved for the church and its leadership who preaching forgiveness, were prepared to "prostitute themselves to nationalist myths".

But the bulk of this book is about the memorials and the cemeteries in which the bodies of those who died are laid. In particular, the great, powerful Thiepal Memorial to the Missing is at the heart of this history. Prior to World War I, little effort had been made by the authorities to mark the place were men fought and died in their country's interest. After Waterloo, most ordinary soldiers were buried in mass graves. Yet the scale of the Great War meant a different response was required. A government that asked for sacrifice on this scale, could not be seen to ignore those who gave everything.

Stamp looks at the growth of the War Graves Commission, who from the early years of the War took on the task of recording graves of those who died and designing memorials. The great architect Sir Edwin Lutyens was the man chosen for most of the monuments. His task was enormous. His designs were simple and powerful. Lutyens argued that the memorials and graves should not differentiate rank or religion. Despite protests, it became illegal to remove a body from France or Belgium back home. As Stamp remarks, once you joined up, your body, dead or alive, belonged to the King. Men were buried were they fell, the cemeteries marking the lines of the battle fields.

The scale of the task is summed up by the enormous arch at Thiepval. It is covered in the names of 73,357 names of those missing from the Somme battles. There are similar arches across the front lines. Lutyens designed graveyards for British soldiers across Europe, and in their simple elegance are a powerful reminder of the costs of war. Lutyens himself comes across as an interesting man. His designs do not glorify war, nor celebrate victory. They mark sacrifice and this seems appropriate.

Gavin Stamp's book is an architectural history. But it avoids the trap of seeing Lutyens' work as being outside of the world around. There is no doubt that his designs were the work of genius, yet they were also of their time. A break from the classical past, a precursor to a more modern architecture. Yet the hundreds of memorials designed by Lutyens, that mark villages across Britain and battlefields across Europe remain a powerful symbol of the pointlessness of the First World War. As Stamp concludes, "The Great War continues to haunt us because it was the ultimate war, innocence really was destroyed, and we can only hope that we are never asked to undergo what the men of 1916 endured".

Related Reviews in the Wonders of the World series

Miller - St Peter's
Watkin - The Roman Forum
Fenlon - Piazza San Marco
Tillotson – Taj Mahal
Goldhill - The Temple of Jerusalem
Gere - The Tomb of Agamemnon
Ray - The Rosetta Stone
Hopkins & Beard - The Colosseum

Oliver Rackham - The History of the Countryside

Oliver Rackham's history of the countryside is a remarkable book. It is also an unusual and slightly odd book. It's oddity stems not from its content, but its style. In essence it boils down to a very detailed and systematic exploration of every feature of the British landscape - from the woodlands, ancient and modern, to the roads, fields and waterways we see around us. It is odd because what we end up with is really a very complicated and detailed list. Don't let this criticism mean you ignore this. Rackham's book is a great scholarly work, it is by turns fascinating, amusing and enlightening and should instruct the keenest historian of the interaction between humans and the natural world.

What we learn, is that very little of the British landscape is natural. At the end of the last ice age, most of the British Isles were rapidly covered with wild wood - trees that spread from what was then the continent. With the arrival of humans, this was almost immediately under attack as our ancestors reduced the trees for agriculture or cultural reasons. The other changes they made - consciously or unconsciously on the flora and fauna are faithfully recorded - the disappearance of larger mammals like the auroch, the wild boar and so on. The introduction of species from outside, in both ancient and modern times have changed the world we look at from our train windows, and the place would be unrecognisable to an ancient Briton, transported in time to the 21st Century.

In particular, Rackham shows how agriculture and industry have changed the countryside - the fields, with ancient walls and hedges, to the strip fields of the medieval age, and then the heavily enclosed farms of modern times. The hedges are fascinating. They're sometimes natural, sometimes not, they can grow spontaneously along a human-made ditch or line and they can help spread plant species.

Even some of the most impressive areas of the landscape we might take for granted - the Norfolk Broads, or some of the large woodlands are very rarely natural. The Broads are the remains of systematic medieval peat extraction. Many age old forests are the remnants of parks and gardens made a few centuries ago.

The style of the book is lovely. Oliver Rackham comes across as a slightly eccentric expert, passionate about his subject, prepared to delve deep into ancient forestry records and dusty books to prove that a local feature is actually only a few years old. "Much as been written on the history of Irish woodland, but in a vague and general way; except in Killarney there is not one wood whose history over the last 400 years is known" he complains at one point.

My disappointment peaked at the end of the book, which finished abruptly with a brief mention of a fish weir on the River Calder. I had hoped for some interesting concluding remarks on perhaps the conservation of "nature" and what that meant. Nevertheless, there is much here to learn from. Rackham's book is often mentioned and referenced. I've followed it up with a reading of Francis Pryor's latest book on "The Making of the British Landscape". Pryor has referenced Rackham's work in the past and I'll be interested to compare the two. Watch this space, as they say.

John Newsinger - The Dredd Phenomenon: Comics and Contemporary Society

There is a large part of me that never really got into comics. Partly this was due to a slightly snobbish, middle class attitude that my have existed during my early youth. They were not proper books, so they can't have been anything more than simplistic entertainment. Radio 1 to literature's Radio 3.

Later on, I discovered 2000AD. It's cynical social commentary made it clear that there was something more to comics and graphic novels than those who assumed it was all the Beano might think.

John Newsinger's brief survey of comics is locates them in the the periods when they are being penned. Written in the immediate aftermath of Tony Blair's election in 1997, he firmly roots the popularity of Judge Dredd and 2000AD in the writers' ability to extrapolate from the authoritarian social policies of Thatcher, Major and then Blair.

You can see this most obviously, and perhaps slightly crudely, with the B.L.A.I.R.1 strip which I found immensely enjoyable in 1998. Here Blair is a robotic monster, driving through his plans and wrecking people's lives to make Britain safe for big business. It is only with tongue slightly in cheek that the writers introduced Judge Straw into the mix.

Newsinger argues that the popularity of comics like 2000AD is their ability to hold a lens up to the world. Whether this provokes the readers into further confrontation with the priorities of the politicians and policies that are so elegantly subverted in the stories is another question. Certainly their popularity can only be because most readers spot a little part of the world around them in the panels. I'd forgotten how detailed some of the stories are. In one, Newsinger points out, the Judges, lawmakers, enforcers, judge, jury and executioners, recognise they need to liberalise their policies or risk loosing complete control. They decide to remove the prescription on keeping Goldfish from the list of crimes that can be committed. Though breeding Goldfish still requires a permit, least it gets out of the control of the state.

So the contradiction - that one of Britain's most popular comics has as a hero a semi-fascistic policeman is squared because it is clearly about tackling the excesses of other aspects of 20th and 21st Century capitalism. Other stories, writers and comics mentioned here-in The Preacher, The Invisibles, From Hell and the ABC Warriors also take up other contemporary issues - crime, drugs, religion and violence. They are part, Newsinger argues, of a reaction to those comics that are pure escapism.

Newsinger has a convincing case. Hopefully this book, which has not dated at all since the heady days of 1997, will continue to encourage a critical reading of comics and more of a enjoyment of a wider range of slightly less mainstream graphic novels than your parents might expect.

Related Reviews

Newsinger - The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire
Newsinger - Fighting Back: The American Working Class in the 1930s
Newsinger - Them and Us: Fighting the Class War 1910-1939

Rosemary Hill - Stonehenge

It is rare that I express disappointment with a book. Usually I am aware enough of the contents to feel that I know what I am about to read, so it is unusual to find myself criticising one.

However, it may be that my own criticisms of this book are misplaced. The Wonders of the World series has been extremely enjoyable and I would encourage others to read these short books. There are links to previous reviews below.

Rosemary Hill's book though suffers from not really being about it's subject matter. Now this is true of all the series to a lesser extent. You can't really discuss the Temple of Jerusalem or the Colosseum without mentioning their impact on society and cultures that have come along after they were built, or destroyed.

But this book on Stonehenge suffers from seeming to barely mention any detail about Stonehenge at all. Apart from the very first chapter, and some of the later chapters which deal with modern archaeology. We learn very little about the monument itself. Hill is correct of course to point out that there are many unknowns about Stonehenge. Any book about the place could and indeed should point to the controversies that still exist. Instead we're treated to large chunks about the influence of Stonehenge on various different cultural stages of British history - the Antiquarians, The Romantics and so on. Stonehenge as an idea, has had a big impact - its influence extended to the architects who put together major bits of Bath and Covent Garden for instance.

Hill tells this story particularly well, but I for one found myself not really caring much. The various different suggestions about the origins of the monument that have been put forward by various scientists, amateurs and crackpots over the years are also interesting, but they reflect more of contemporary history, than illuminate the past.

However, I do think Hill does her story of Stonehenge well. I can't fault that, and I did enjoy her account of the more recent history of the monument - the changing social attitudes to conservation of ancient places, access rights and so on. Her final chapter has plenty of ammunition that can be used against recent governments (including I think the Coalition that is in place while I write this) for their attitudes to places like Stonehenge.

But I did feel disappointed. There should have been more about Stonehenge itself and the people who built it, as well as the epic monumental landscape that it is a central part of. Readers who might like more of that, are encouraged to search out Francis Pryor's excellent book Britain BC, which delves into some of this.

Related Reviews in the Wonders of the World series


Watkin - The Roman Forum
Fenlon - Piazza San Marco
Tillotson – Taj Mahal
Goldhill - The Temple of Jerusalem
Gere - The Tomb of Agamemnon
Ray - The Rosetta Stone
Hopkins & Beard - The Colosseum

Eleanor Burke Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance

Eleanor Burke Leacock's collection of essays, Myths of Male Dominance (Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally) is one of the most important works for those who argue that the way we live our lives today is not the natural order of things. Leacock's articles are a powerful defence of the Marxist notion of "Primitive Communism" - the idea that in humanity's past, our societies were egalitarian, private property was unknown in a general sense and class differences nonexistent. Most interestingly, this means that there were also differences in the way that men and women related - monogamy has not always been the natural way of doing things, men have not always been dominant in relationships or society, and different attitudes to sexuality have been far more common that most commentators would have us believe.

Leacock's own research was centred on a Canadian tribe called the Montagnais-Naskapi. These were people who, in their hunter-gather past had lived in a "primitive communist" society. What is almost unique about them, is that this lifestyle had been extremely well documented by the Europeans who encountered them. The Montagnais had lived by collected the fruit and berries of their local area, as well as hunting the plentiful game at different times of the year. European traders arrived in the 1600s and began to trade goods, with the Montagnais in exchange for vast quantities of furs - beaver and the like.

This caused a fundamental transformation of Montagnais life. From a society were private property was almost unknown, were decision making was a collective process and status in society was not based on property or any form of economic power, the Montagnais were transformed into a people were private property (in this case the animal traps and the associated areas of rivers / land) formed part of their lives. This introduction of private property changed all the other relationships in their society, as did the cynical and regular interference of Jesuit missionaries. The Jesuits who documented the lives of the indigenous people, also attempted to introduce more European things - like leaders, monogamy, physical beating of children and so on. Prompting one Montagnais to say "You Jesuit's love only your own children, we love all of them".

By the time Leacock was able to live with the Montagnais, a surprising amount of their earlier social relations still existed. She describes how hard she found it to understand the collective decision making process as someone who has only lived in a society with leaders and social hierarchies.

These experiences and the documentary evidence of a people with a completely different set of relations of productions to those we see in the vast majority of the world today shape most essays in this book. Leacock looks at the role of women in Montagnais society - and similar societies around the world, family relations and so on. She also look critically at the ideas of two of the thinkers who have most often dominated this form of discussion for the left - Lewis Morgan and Fredrich Engels.

Collected here is her introduction to Lewis Morgan's classic book of anthropology - Ancient Society. The book itself informed Engels' own work (as well as Marx) in particular, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Leacock wrote a classic introduction to this as well, of which sadly only part is in here.

Rather impressively, Leacock also includes articles and critical responses from other anthropologists - together with her reactions. This is of great interest, in part because she is a born polemicist, but also because it is fascinating to see her ideas tested, and passing the test.

For anyone with an interest in ancient cultures, this is a fascinating book. However it should also be required reading for everyone who wants to argue, or dares to believe that the "natural" relationships that we experience under capitalism are anything but natural.

Related Reviews

Dee - The Red in the Rainbow - - Sexuality, Socialism & LGBT Liberation

Engels - Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State