Historians From England

"Journalists who sneered at the incompetence of the intelligence services, and jeered that the Establishment was only interested in protecting its own, never considered that the rule of law is something that protects us all. That is the price one pays to live in an open society."

"Oxford, Cambridge and the other elite universities are the guardians of intellectual life. They cannot teach the qualities that people need in politics and business. Nor can they teach culture and wisdom, any more than theologians teach holiness, philosophers goodness or sociologists a blueprint for the future. They exist to cultivate the intellect. All else is secondary."

"Noel Annan captures the last generation's spirit in his wide-ranging, superficial but annoyingly perceptive book Our Age. This was the ethic of the inheriting classes, the public school and Oxbridge intelligentsia and Civil Service élite. Its members staffed the bureaucracies and the media, devised the welfare state, dismembered the Empire, and sanctioned the plural society. They called themselves the great and good."

"Throughout the long years of his retirement, Noël Annan maintained a reputation as one of the most controversial academics of his time... he was a man with whom it was notoriously imprudent to tangle, particularly in the correspondence column."

"The story is well known, but Sir Arthur's account makes us tingle again at the dangers, anxieties, and triumphs. He is excellent also on the Armada, making us share the heightening tension as the Spanish galleons sailed up the Channel and feel for their ultimate appalling fate... Sir Arthur has read widely, and generously acknowledged, the work of our finest Elizabethan historians. But it is his own intense imaginative commitment which makes The Elizabethan Deliverance so vividly and splendidly readable."

"The transformation of the English from a predominately rural into a predominantly urban people makes the substance of his narrative, in which his gift of vivid description and his intense feeling for national idiosyncrasy have effective expression. He finds the cause of the social change—which he wholeheartedly deplores—in the dogma of laissez-faire, with its consecration of the profit motive and the rights of property, and its reduction of the state to a system of machinery for the protection of individual rights. His diagnosis of the evils proceeding from the change combines that of the Marxists with that of the Nazis—that is, he sees competitive capitalism driving the world to war, and individualism and urbanization resulting in the deterioration of the race. But his remedy is neither Communism nor Fascism, but a Toryism based on the teaching of Disraeli. He believes in a method of government that is so far paternal that it has always in mind the welfare of the community, future as well as past, overriding the immediate interest of any individual."

"Bryant's conservatism was of the broadest sort. He admired and reverenced what he saw as the best legacy of the Middle Ages to the centuries preceding the Industrial Revolution – the independent spirit of the peasant and yeoman classes of England. At the same time he heartily loathed the degrading aspects of laisser-faire capitalism and saw it as having corroded the English spirit."

"Sir Arthur is a patriotic historian. He shows the British in all their bloody-mindedness but argues that they are better than anyone else. He deals not merely with kings and high officials but with the common people, how they lived and thought, and how they began to force their freedom from their rulers... [I]t is a pleasurable way of absorbing history painlessly: a triumph for a historian aged 85 who takes in the broad sweep, without losing the road, in the manner of Gibbon or Macaulay."

"For all his aristocratic taste, he had popular sympathies. He liked prize-fighters, old-fashioned trade unionists, and of course Army and Navy men, among whom he had a devoted following. He was miles away from Bloomsbury intellectuals, at the opposite pole to Lytton Strachey in several respects."

"A fascinating volume. No brother historian but will envy the beauty and simplicity of the writing. You have achieved your avowed purpose more completely than any other book of its kind that I remember."

"So how much of all his work remains? There was a good deal of honest research. His large work on Samuel Pepys certainly stands. His Regency trilogy offers an authentic picture of the age, both vigorous and sympathetic. But I best liked his essays, collected in such books as Historian's Holiday. He was a born writer, as few are, and he dedicted perhaps obsessively. His thinking was emotional, and that was of a piece with his gifts."

"[T]here is one fundamental issue at stake in Thursday's Referendum. It is whether the British people of the future are to retain the age-long right through Parliament and parliamentary elections to decide their destiny without being bound by the authoritarian and dead hand of the past imposed by some rigid bureaucratic formula devised by continental constitutionists. What is at stake is the preservation of the great libertarian principle of popular "consultation and consent" which has run like a golden thread through our history. The essence of our unwritten constitution has always been that, while the elected Parliament of the day, interpreting the will of the existing electoral majority, can enact whatever it chooses, it cannot prevent future Parliaments and electorates from exercising the same elastic right."

"By using intelligently the diaries of Field-Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Sir Arthur Bryant had made a contribution to the inside story of Hitler's war which was of the greatest importance. He had given on a broad canvass a faithful picture of the two greatest figures on the British side."

"What any elector who feels that this is fundamental has, therefore, to decide is whether he or she has sufficient confidence in our present rulers of all parties to resist the declared intention of those who, out of however sincere and high-minded motives, hope to make our continued membership of the European Economic Community a first and irreversible step in the creation of a supra-national political union in which our nationhood—the most important of all the political assets we inherit from the past—would be submerged for ever. If that were the sole issue of the Referendum—the sacrifice of a national society evolved over 1,500 years of Christian history—the answer would be undoubtedly No."

"The most exciting story in the world, and splendidly told. If Volumes II and III are equal to Volume I, I predict that it will be holding the same place as Gibbon."

"Weapons change; it is the ability to command the sea that matters. The Battle of Britain, like the defeat of the Armada, was fought for command of the sea. The work of Bomber Command, like the invasion of Europe, was an exercise of offensive power from our inviolable sea-base."

"The ability to deny to the enemy the use of the sea for the movement of armies and supplies, while enjoying it for your own, would continue to be the most vital factor until the distant day when troops and supplies could be carried over its surface without interference. Like Napoleon, Hitler was thwarted by a few miles of salt water."

"The chairman of the Cromwell Association Maurice Ashley] asks why Charles II's escape from the Battle of Worcester 300 years ago deserves commemoration. It is because in the days that followed Cromwell's victory poor and humble men, in the face of overwhelming power and in extreme peril, out of their faith in God and their loyalty to the Crown dared everything to save their King. Whatever may be our opinions of the characters of Cromwell and Charles, most of us are agreed that the hereditary Crown was infinitely worth saving. The symbolic faith and courage of that little woodland community around Boscobel belong to the proud annals of our history as much as Cromwell's genius, and after the lapse of three centuries there is room in our pride and gratitude for both."

"Entry to the Common Market involves, for certain, an end to the untrammelled sovereignty of the Parliament of the day which for centuries has been the governing principle of our constitution and a main source of our political greatness and stability."

"In weaning pagan man from his primitive and bloodstained creeds of terror and human sacrifice the Church's supreme achievement was to domesticate and humanise the conception of Eternity. Everywhere he was confronted, in church and wayside shrine, with homely and familiar reminders of the Heaven he was enjoined to earn through the virtues of love, faith, compassion, humility, truthfulness, chastity, courtesy—virtues that came so hard and were so much needed by a passionate, hot-tempered, primitive people."

"The Luddites, he thought, were right, and the Industrial Revolution "has so far harmed man even more than it has benefited him"."

"It is admirably done, with warmth, vitality and colour. The familiar criticisms of "popular history," that it lags a generation behind scholarship, would misfire if levelled against this work. It stands fair and square on the results of modern research."

"He has the gift of making the record of past events continuously moving and exciting."

"Mr. Bryant has a wonderful tale to tell, he sees the whole picture and has the gift to make us see it."

"Without justice and charity there can be no England. That is the historic and eternal English vision."

"The English were what they were because they had long wished to be. Their tradition derived from the Catholic past of Europe. Its purpose was to make Christian men—gentle, generous, humble, valiant and chivalrous. Its ideals were justice, mercy and charity."

"It is my hope and belief that your Toryism, without ceasing to be Toryism, is broadening into Englishry, as I hope my Whiggery has to some extent so broadened in the course of years. You will hold an important place—you do already—as interpreter of the country's history to the new generation, probably more important than anyone else now—so it matters a lot."

"I have read it with delight. Every page of it is alive with the sense of the reality of those times. To read it will hearten us all for the struggle in which we are now engaged. It will warm your heart and teach a lesson too."

"Before the British regiment of the line is sacrificed to logistics—if sacrificed it is to be—I should like to put on record a historian's conviction that the greatness of our infantry soldier in the past, as in the present, has been due primarily to the fact that in the regiment, with its personal pride, loyalties, and traditions, the individualistic and liberty-loving qualities of the Briton have found their natural medium in war."

"Even more striking than England's unity has been the freedom of individual choice on which it has been based. Because the Channel lay between her and the continent, her people were able to develop a form of government in which power, instead of being centralised in a few hands, was distributed in many. Not being threatened across a land frontier, they had no need to entrust their rulers with standing military forces or despotic rights over private liberties. Authority normally was exercised only after those subject to it had had an opportunity to make their views known. From the Saxon Witenagemot to the twentieth century Parliament, from the village hustings and manor court to the trade union lodge and parish council, there was nearly always some working machinery in England by which those in authority could test the opinion of those over whom authority had to be exercised. Government was conducted subject to the right of the governed to criticise and, within lawful limits, to oppose. "His Majesty's Opposition" is the most characteristic and certainly the most original of English contributions to politics."

"Peace—real and enduring peace—must always be our supreme and ultimate aim, for with our swollen industrial population we are dependent on trade with a peaceful world and a world, moreover, that can honour its debts and trade obligations. Our true war aim is an assured system of international law and cooperation that will alone make a real peace possible."

"Mr. Strauss's subsequent statement in a supplementary question that my Fascist sympathies were "well known." They may be well known to Mr. Strauss, but they are certainly not known to me. It has, however, for some time been a practice of the Communist Party to attribute "Fascist" views to those of its opponents whom it regards as in any way dangerous to itself and whose reputation it is therefore desired to blacken. These would now appear to include any writer who has the temerity to express his support of Mr. Chamberlain's foreign policy."

"It is hard to see how any assured peace can exist in Europe so long as Herr Hitler—that incalculable man of temperament—continues to direct the external policy of a nation as powerful as Germany, though it must not be forgotten that the advance of the Russian frontiers has already put a check to German capacity for future aggression. But we ought to make it plain that by "Hitlerism" we mean Hitler's fatal method of conducting foreign affairs, and not the right of the German people to choose their own governors."

"[L]ike most of my countrymen I loathe injustice and cruelty, and unlike them I happen to have had some recent experience in Spain. And after reading the pages that follow, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the people of this country have been misled by those who form its public opinion into condoning, in the name of an abstract theory, cruelty and injustice of a particularly horrible kind. There doubtless have been many harsh acts committed by the Spanish Nationalists: men do not wage civil war with gloved hands. But they do not include the wholesale rape, murder, and mutilation of non-combatant women and children, such as the Communist leaders in Spain will have to answer for... Over here the intellectuals—our foolish wise—have mislead us into thinking of such men as democrats, and of the Spanish Civil War as a fight between a properly constituted Liberal-cum-Socialist government and a gang of Fascist saboteurs. But no university lecturer or anonymous BBC commentator has told the just and compassionate people of England about the women of San Martin de Valdeiglesias."

"During the last four centuries, the most important things that had happened were the extension of the Anglo-Saxon race into every corner of the world and the growth of the American Republic and the view of life it stood for... That ideal was born four centuries ago when a few bold persons believed it would be possible to find on the other side of the Atlantic a land in which they could make for themselves a new home, with a freer and better life than they had hitherto enjoyed. Hence gradually developed the founding of small English colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America."

"I believe that the British unilateral guarantee of Poland's independence—though not necessarily, as you wisely point out, the integrity of her present Versailles frontiers in perpetuity—constitutes the first real chance for the Prime Minister's policy of appeasement to obtain the unanimous support of his countrymen. The latter are so constituted that they will never accede permanently to what is demanded of them by force. Something stubborn and undefeatable has always risen in the English consciousness at the sound of a threat. And the Germans, like ourselves a strong race, are so constituted that they can never respect arguments that seem based on fear or weakness. The Prime Minister has now placed our relationships on a new and realist footing. A realization in both countries of what will inevitability produce war, coupled with a readiness to seek an adjustment of existing differences by every other means, is now attainable. It offers a fresh possibility of an Anglo-German understanding—not now, perhaps, but in the future. It is worth trying, for the alternative is the almost certain destruction of our common civilization."

"The key to a nation's future is in her past. A nation that loses it has no future. For men's deepest desires—the instrument by which a continuing society moulds its destiny—spring from their own inherited experience. We cannot recreate the past, but we cannot escape it. It is in our blood and bone. To understand the temperament of a people, a statesman has first to know its history."

"Loving private liberty, yet finding that it could not exist without public order, the English devoted themselves to making the two compatible. Freedom within a framework of discipline became their ideal. They achieved it through the sovereignty of the law. "All our struggles for liberty," wrote Disraeli, "smack of law." And by law the English meant an enforceable compact between themselves and their rulers, deriving not from unilaterally imposed force, but from assent freely given. Both they and their American descendants constituted such law, rather than the Executive, their ultimate sovereign."

"Compromise, give-and-take, live-and-let-live, became a national habit. The freedom of the Press—a forebearance unnatural in any Government—was an English invention; so was the secret ballot which enabled a man to record an unpopular vote without danger to himself. The English, as self-opinionated as any people, mastered the lesson that they could only possess liberty by allowing it to others, enjoy the propagation of their own views by listening patiently to their neighbours'."

"He was the most popular historian of his time — and above all an emotional, even a sentimental, one... He was always alive and had a good sense of humour, a wonderful feeling for landscape and country life... His best qualities were his passion for the English past, and his gift for giving expression to it, calling back above all its life."

"The... glimpses we have...of Hindus slain for disputing with Muhammadans , of general prohibitions against processions, worship and ablutions and of other intolerant measures, of idols mutilated, of temples razed, of forcible conversions and marriages, of proscriptions and confiscations, of murders and massacres, and of the sensibility and drunkenness of the tyrants who enjoined them, show us that this picture is not overcharged."

"… nearly all Emily Brontë’s biographers and scholars over the past century have been women. If you do spot a man in the mix, chances are that he has been shuffled off to the side, rather like , though hopefully without the urge to get drunk and set fire to himself. The only other author who has become the object of such an intense female pash in the last 200 years is Sylvia Plath, who happens to be buried less than 10 miles away from at . The parallels are uncanny. Separated by a century, both Brontë and Plath were poets who remain most famous for writing a single intensely autobiographical novel. There’s even a pleasing bit of intertextuality in the way that in 1956 Sylvia Plath actually managed to marry in the form of her own glowering man-of-the-moors, . Together the newlyweds tramped up to and wrote poems about it, an event that Hughes was still mulling over 40 years later in his valedictory '. Both Plath and Brontë died at the age of 30 and then only gradually started to attract the cult-like devotion of female fans, who responded rapturously to their heroines’ status as exiles from the twin kingdoms of heteronormative happiness and literary fame."

"In the last week of June 1824 Thomas Carlyle, on the cusp of a brilliant literary career, bounced up to meet one of the country's reigning men of letters. You might assume that the twenty-eight-year-old had lots to talk about with the veteran poet and critic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge was Britain's chief exponent of German Idealism, a tradition in which young Carlyle was himself fluent: his first book, published the following year, would be a biography of the philosopher Schiller. Yet far from a meeting of minds, this encounter between the literary generations might best be described as a repulsion of bodies. Carlyle was barely able to contain his shock at the ruin of the man who shuffled forward to greet him at 3, . Coleridge, he reported to his brother in an appalled post-mortem the next day, was a 'fat flabby incurvated personage, at once short, rotund and relaxed, with a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange brown timid yet earnest looking eyes'."

"In 1925 a man called Dan Rider was inspecting the pauper wards of in . He was a volunteer visitor, a member of the public charged with checking on the welfare of those unhappy souls who had been deemed insane and sent to what was still known colloquially as the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum. During his tour Rider 'noticed a quiet little man drawing cats': 'Good Lord, man, you draw like .' 'I am Louis Wain,' replied the patient. 'You're not, you know,' I exclaimed. 'But I am,' said the artist, and he was."

"I was looking for a subject for my next book and failing to find one. My agent told me that during a recent lunch an editor had mentioned that he thought that the time was right for a new biography of George Eliot. The moment I started writing a biography I realised that the was made for me – or perhaps, more modestly, that I was made for the genre. Biography involves detailed with the ability to tell a jolly good story. And those are the two things I like best in the world."

"By representing "home" — the place we go to be loved, nurtured and fed — has become a kind of symbolic mother to us all. She is also, of course, the symbolic mother that we feel we ought to be. Right through the last century, brides were given a "Mrs Beeton" on their wedding day as a to help them become the kind of woman that everyone, but especially their own mothers, expected. Young women setting off for married life in India, Australia or Canada were similarly presented with a "Mrs Beeton" by which it was hoped they would carry the mother culture far into places where previously only chaos and savagery — in other words, un-Englishness — had reigned. So there is a kind of pleasing logic to the fact that the original Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management of 1861 was written to plug a gap where existing maternal relations had broken down. In the mid-19th century, middle-class women were, for the first time in history, more likely than not to be living at some distance from their native communities. Rapid urbanisation and the arrival of the railways meant that married life now involved setting up home sometimes hundreds of miles from the house where you were born. Where once you had been able to pop next door to ask mother's advice on a baby's cough or the best way to stone currants, now there was no one to consult. It was to fill this blind spot that a 21-year-old newly married woman, Isabella Beeton, decided to compile an encyclopaedia of domestic know-how, creating a paper and print version of Mother."

"It's a cliché, but I think it's an absolutely true one, that the Victorians were obsessed with class. They were obsessed with placing people in particular social categories."

"My grandmother was a cat lady. She actually bred s. She also had a lot of books around. So I grew up with that. And the thing is that I found them a bit frightening. ... there is always something slightly odd about Louis Wain's world. ... tensions in people society through cat society ..."

"The figure of the must be one of the most familiar and abiding images in nineteenth-century literature. We know her best in the form of the scandalous of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, or as Charlotte Brontë's , the plain orphan who eventually marries her employer, the mysterious . In addition, she appears in scores of other novels from high literature to sensationalist shockers and from Emma to '. Yet it is one of the great ironies of that we know virtually nothing about the 25,000 women who actually worked as governesses during the middle years of the century. Indeed, it is the very power of these fictional representations which has blunted our curiosity about the practice of educating girls at home during the Victorian period."

"In the five centuries since Columbus discovered the New World, savagery has been part of American life. There has been the violence of conquest and resistance, the violence of racial difference, the violence of civil war, the violence of bandits and gangsters, the violence of lynch law, all set against the violence of the wilderness and the city."