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Japanese wartime diaries
It is often not felicitous when you are given books by friends, but this was an exception. Once I started reading these extracts and commentaries on diaries of Japanese writers during the Second World War, I was rapidly drawn in. It may have had extra resonance for me, due to my close personal connections with Japan, but I think it would widen and deepen anyone’s understanding of history.
Donald Keene, a renowned scholar of Japan, has read, edited and selected from the diaries of prominent Japanese writers, who recorded their thoughts and events during and immediately after the war. This is history as experienced first-hand by individuals, not from tendentious text books. The diaries reveal the raw thoughts and emotions of our (former) enemies – though admittedly not those who fought in the front line. But these men (mainly men) had experiences being bombed and working in some overseas territories. It occurred to me that all school children should read history written by our enemies, not those written by our own side, especially those blessed by our own governments.
The diarists from which Keene quotes were all novelists, poets or literary figures of some fame. They naturally experience the war differently and interpret events differently. They are swept along by the euphoria of success in 1941-42, and are scorched by the defeats and humiliations of 1943-47. It is sobering to see how the zeitgeist, public opinion, rumours, military lies and government propaganda have a large influence on their thinking. It is even more sobering to reflect that such large-scale influences impinged and still impinge on all of us – such as the way the USA and Britain were swept into war with Iraq.
I have to confess that there were not sufficient markers for me to distinguish between the different writers. Unfortunately they blended into one self-contradictory voice for me. Maybe symbols in the margins would help, as Pullman uses in ‘The subtle knife’?
We peep into the minds of these diarists through the choices that Donald Keene has made for us. So one may pause to wonder how representative they are. It is a question of trust, and I give him that trust. By inserting some personal information about his own war experiences, such as his interviewing of Japanese prisoners of war, and his landing on Okinawa, we can perceive that he is a sympathetic and balanced commentator. Anyway, his distillation of these various diaries are something I have read and enjoyed, whereas it is unlikely that I would ever have had the chance or inclination to read the whole of each of the diaries. Even with diaries, we often have to encounter them at one remove.
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Sunday, 30 January 2011
Birds without wings, by Louis de Bernieres
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‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’ is probably the author’s most famous work (assisted by being made into a film). The Financial Times reviewer described this book as “A more ambitious novel than ‘Captain Corelli’, and a better one.” Certainly it is more ambitious, covering a sweep of twenty year’s of Turkish history. However that leads de Bernieres into long passages that read merely like a history book. Hence it is difficult for me to say that it is a better novel than ‘Captain Corelli’, though it is certainly an excellent one.
The book employs the same formula of describing an idyllic village and then allowing evil and destruction to erupt into it. The peaceful co-existence of the Muslim Turks and the Christian Greeks and Armenians is beautifully described; touchingly described. The intertwining of their lives and cultures, ignorant of radical religion and nationalism, is particularly made flesh in the characters of Philothei, a beautiful young Christian girl, and the doting goatherd, Ibrahim.
There is much humour in the first half of the book, and I particularly liked the story of Rustem Bey bringing home a Circassian Mistress (though his treatment of his wife and her lover prefigures the violence to come). The happy village life has dangerous undercurrents, mainly based on ignorance, but they are controlled by the love and humanity of most of the inhabitants.
The book becomes progressively darker, as Turkey enters the First World War. The descriptions of the warfare in the trenches of Gallipoli (from the Turkish point of view) is especially vivid and gory. Things go from bad to worse, including the deportation of the Greeks and Armenians – though the historical lecturing makes clear that Turks also suffered from forced marches and other appalling cruelties. The cruelty of man bursts through the surface, and many are not brave or strong enough to prevent it. The machinations of foolish politicians at the top of the tree in Greece, Turkey, Britain and so on, are lacerated by the author. The horrors culminate in the burning of the (then) Greek city of Smyrna – now modern Izmir.
The 625-page book is epic in its size and scope. I think it would have benefited from the historical narrative being cut back, since the best parts are undoubtedly those describing the lives and deaths of the village inhabitants. This is a sad and informative book, well worth the time to read it. Now I understand better the deep mutual suspicion that still exists between Greece and Turkey.
‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’ is probably the author’s most famous work (assisted by being made into a film). The Financial Times reviewer described this book as “A more ambitious novel than ‘Captain Corelli’, and a better one.” Certainly it is more ambitious, covering a sweep of twenty year’s of Turkish history. However that leads de Bernieres into long passages that read merely like a history book. Hence it is difficult for me to say that it is a better novel than ‘Captain Corelli’, though it is certainly an excellent one.
The book employs the same formula of describing an idyllic village and then allowing evil and destruction to erupt into it. The peaceful co-existence of the Muslim Turks and the Christian Greeks and Armenians is beautifully described; touchingly described. The intertwining of their lives and cultures, ignorant of radical religion and nationalism, is particularly made flesh in the characters of Philothei, a beautiful young Christian girl, and the doting goatherd, Ibrahim.
There is much humour in the first half of the book, and I particularly liked the story of Rustem Bey bringing home a Circassian Mistress (though his treatment of his wife and her lover prefigures the violence to come). The happy village life has dangerous undercurrents, mainly based on ignorance, but they are controlled by the love and humanity of most of the inhabitants.
The book becomes progressively darker, as Turkey enters the First World War. The descriptions of the warfare in the trenches of Gallipoli (from the Turkish point of view) is especially vivid and gory. Things go from bad to worse, including the deportation of the Greeks and Armenians – though the historical lecturing makes clear that Turks also suffered from forced marches and other appalling cruelties. The cruelty of man bursts through the surface, and many are not brave or strong enough to prevent it. The machinations of foolish politicians at the top of the tree in Greece, Turkey, Britain and so on, are lacerated by the author. The horrors culminate in the burning of the (then) Greek city of Smyrna – now modern Izmir.
The 625-page book is epic in its size and scope. I think it would have benefited from the historical narrative being cut back, since the best parts are undoubtedly those describing the lives and deaths of the village inhabitants. This is a sad and informative book, well worth the time to read it. Now I understand better the deep mutual suspicion that still exists between Greece and Turkey.
State of Revolution, by Robert Bolt
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This is a serious historical play in two acts, first published and performed at the National Theatre in 1977. I went to see the original production, and admired the playwright’s skill in distilling history, and making it excellent theatre on the stage.
It is about the Russian Revolution, focusing on the central figures of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the other leading Bolsheviks. It teaches much about the characters and events of the revolution. The rise of Stalin is cleverly plotted. Personally, I think Bolt is much too sympathetic towards Lenin, who was clearly a nasty piece of work.
Worth reading and seeing on the stage, if ever anyone chooses to produce it. I think it is a better work than Buechner’s ‘Danton’s death’ which I saw recently at the National.
This is a serious historical play in two acts, first published and performed at the National Theatre in 1977. I went to see the original production, and admired the playwright’s skill in distilling history, and making it excellent theatre on the stage.
It is about the Russian Revolution, focusing on the central figures of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the other leading Bolsheviks. It teaches much about the characters and events of the revolution. The rise of Stalin is cleverly plotted. Personally, I think Bolt is much too sympathetic towards Lenin, who was clearly a nasty piece of work.
Worth reading and seeing on the stage, if ever anyone chooses to produce it. I think it is a better work than Buechner’s ‘Danton’s death’ which I saw recently at the National.
Wednesday, 29 December 2010
The rest is noise, by Alex Ross
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If you want to know more about Twentieth Century classical music, read ‘The rest is noise’. This book has already won widespread plaudits, including being the winner of the Guardian First Book award 2008. It is a chunky tome – you need strong wrists to read in bed! The main text ends on page 591, to be followed by about 100 pages of notes, recommended listening and a good index.
Ross has an astonishing breadth of knowledge, conveyed with clarity, so his is a very educational book. The classical music of the last century contains many streams and reputedly difficult pieces that make us wary. This fractured, controversial and confusing musical landscape needs a guide, a Virgil to lead us through hell, and Ross is that man. He is a likeable, positive and enthusiastic companion, and will surely lead you to listen to more of the music he recommends, as I have done under his influence.
Ross does not treat music in isolation, but sets it in a vivid context of the history of the times. Politics, war, literature, philosophy and so forth influence music, just as music influences other spheres of our society. He is most enlightening on the birth of modernism before the first world war, the negative impact of the Nazis, the terror under Stalin, the cultural battles of the cold war and so on. By reading this book, you should have a better overview of many themes of 20th century history.
The definition of ‘classical’ music is deeply difficult in the 20th Century, but the author has a clear idea of what is the serious music that he wants to tell us about. He is catholic and eclectic in his tastes, with no trace of snobbery. He acknowledges and enthuses about the influences of music hall, jazz, blues, folk music, bebop, rock, electronic music and so on, as well as explaining how serious music influenced and informed them, in turn. As he wisely says in his epilogue: “Music history is too often treated as a kind of Mercator projection of the globe, a flat image representing a landscape that is in reality borderless and continuous”.
The story opens with the dramatic and distinct impacts of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, while showing their connections back to Wagner and Debussy and so on. He explicates the revolutionary newness of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and their followers. The galvanic effect of the rule-breaking dissonances, atonality, rhythms and other innovations of that era can be appreciated from his narrative. However, none of us in this age can participate in the shock to audiences at, for instance, ‘Salome’ in 1906 or ‘The rite of spring’ in 1913, because our ears are already so attuned to the full range of modern styles and techniques. The audiences of a hundred years ago would have been purely soaked in what you could call the (first) Viennese school of classical music, and so more easily shocked.
Excitement to the ear comes from when the composer violates the established rules, gives us what we had not predicted. This is nothing new – Mozart famously wrote a ‘dissonnance’ quartet and revolutionised the subject matter of Opera with ‘Figaro’. Artists like Schoenberg could enjoy the fight to break through conventions, and achieve fame / notoriety within intellectual circles. The musical history of the twentieth century could be (simplistically) described as successive waves of breaking convention, even insulting the audience, until you reach the extreme techniques of Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, Birtwhistle et al. However, the problem is a reductio ad boredom. When all the rules are broken, or there are no rules, then the excitement of breaking the rules disappears, leaving a sort of nothingness.
I reflected that the exciting iconoclasm occurring in music was mirrored in parallel events in painting (think of Picasso), poetry (for example Thomas Eliot), architecture (such as Frank Lloyd Wright) or even science (obviously, Einstein). There is an astonishing sense of the zeitgeist flowing in the same direction. Ross does not stray off his own patch; these are my own observations. Here again, free form poetry can be seen to tend towards boredom, compared with the admirable felicity of expressions within tight conventions, such as Alexander Pope.
Ironically, composers were just as much seeking to tie themselves within new rules, such as ‘12 tone’ or ‘total serialism’ or matrix compositions. Ross is not dogmatic or disparaging of many of these movements – he seems to find merit and interest in nearly everything. Naturally, with so much to choose from, he concentrates his writing on what he personally likes. He admits that he cannot cover all composers in any depth, and makes bold selections. For instance, he devotes many pages to Benjamin Britten, asking us to enjoy the analysis of the one British artist as representative of many other worthy artists from the same country.
One can argue about who you would like to see included in this tome – and each special plea would make the book longer and heavier. Clearly Ross had to draw the line somewhere. Well, I personally would have liked more coverage of Alexander Scriabin, Edward Elgar and Nicholas Maw. Possibly they do not fit the themes or the chapter headings, but they produced individual works that must surely rank as supreme achievements of the century, namely and respectively ‘The poem of Ecstasy’, ‘Cello concerto’ and ‘Odyssey’.
I like the way Ross pauses from the broad narrative to describe individual pieces in detail, such as Strauss’s ‘Salome’, Shostakovich’s ‘Fifth symphony’, Ellington’s ‘Black, brown and beige’, Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the end of time’ or ‘ Berg’s ‘Lulu’. These are high quality sleeve notes and engender a hunger to listen to the music. I responded by buying CDs of some of the pieces, and made enjoyable discoveries. Illustrating the point I made earlier about the modern ear being already attuned to the revolutionary techniques, I found Schoenberg’s ‘5 pieces for orchestra’ and Webern’s ‘6 pieces for orchestra’ very worthwhile – not shocking. Certainly one should not treat this music as background music – it deserves attention – but that applies to all serious music.
He has many arresting turns of phrase and witty thoughts; for example: “Cocteau and Poulenc were enjoying a one-night stand with a dark-skinned form, and they had no intention of striking up a conversation with it the following day.” He comes up with connections, facts and interpretations that are enlightening, whether it is pointing out the high proportion of gay artists, the influences of Jazz (and the influences on Jazz) or the brilliant description of minimalist music (Reich etc) being like driving along the interstate highways of America.
Read this book for education, enjoyment and elevation. If you have patches of knowledge of Twentieth Century music (as I do), Ross will tie them together for you, give them more resonance and encourage you to listen to more. He would be someone I would like to join for a fortnight’s journey on the trans-Siberian express (with an ipod to listen to the music samples as we went along). I feel a long and rewarding journey has been completed by reading this book through.
Thanks to my brother, who gave ‘The rest is noise’ to me as a birthday present, and who is way ahead of me in his knowledge of music.
If you want to know more about Twentieth Century classical music, read ‘The rest is noise’. This book has already won widespread plaudits, including being the winner of the Guardian First Book award 2008. It is a chunky tome – you need strong wrists to read in bed! The main text ends on page 591, to be followed by about 100 pages of notes, recommended listening and a good index.
Ross has an astonishing breadth of knowledge, conveyed with clarity, so his is a very educational book. The classical music of the last century contains many streams and reputedly difficult pieces that make us wary. This fractured, controversial and confusing musical landscape needs a guide, a Virgil to lead us through hell, and Ross is that man. He is a likeable, positive and enthusiastic companion, and will surely lead you to listen to more of the music he recommends, as I have done under his influence.
Ross does not treat music in isolation, but sets it in a vivid context of the history of the times. Politics, war, literature, philosophy and so forth influence music, just as music influences other spheres of our society. He is most enlightening on the birth of modernism before the first world war, the negative impact of the Nazis, the terror under Stalin, the cultural battles of the cold war and so on. By reading this book, you should have a better overview of many themes of 20th century history.
The definition of ‘classical’ music is deeply difficult in the 20th Century, but the author has a clear idea of what is the serious music that he wants to tell us about. He is catholic and eclectic in his tastes, with no trace of snobbery. He acknowledges and enthuses about the influences of music hall, jazz, blues, folk music, bebop, rock, electronic music and so on, as well as explaining how serious music influenced and informed them, in turn. As he wisely says in his epilogue: “Music history is too often treated as a kind of Mercator projection of the globe, a flat image representing a landscape that is in reality borderless and continuous”.
The story opens with the dramatic and distinct impacts of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, while showing their connections back to Wagner and Debussy and so on. He explicates the revolutionary newness of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and their followers. The galvanic effect of the rule-breaking dissonances, atonality, rhythms and other innovations of that era can be appreciated from his narrative. However, none of us in this age can participate in the shock to audiences at, for instance, ‘Salome’ in 1906 or ‘The rite of spring’ in 1913, because our ears are already so attuned to the full range of modern styles and techniques. The audiences of a hundred years ago would have been purely soaked in what you could call the (first) Viennese school of classical music, and so more easily shocked.
Excitement to the ear comes from when the composer violates the established rules, gives us what we had not predicted. This is nothing new – Mozart famously wrote a ‘dissonnance’ quartet and revolutionised the subject matter of Opera with ‘Figaro’. Artists like Schoenberg could enjoy the fight to break through conventions, and achieve fame / notoriety within intellectual circles. The musical history of the twentieth century could be (simplistically) described as successive waves of breaking convention, even insulting the audience, until you reach the extreme techniques of Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, Birtwhistle et al. However, the problem is a reductio ad boredom. When all the rules are broken, or there are no rules, then the excitement of breaking the rules disappears, leaving a sort of nothingness.
I reflected that the exciting iconoclasm occurring in music was mirrored in parallel events in painting (think of Picasso), poetry (for example Thomas Eliot), architecture (such as Frank Lloyd Wright) or even science (obviously, Einstein). There is an astonishing sense of the zeitgeist flowing in the same direction. Ross does not stray off his own patch; these are my own observations. Here again, free form poetry can be seen to tend towards boredom, compared with the admirable felicity of expressions within tight conventions, such as Alexander Pope.
Ironically, composers were just as much seeking to tie themselves within new rules, such as ‘12 tone’ or ‘total serialism’ or matrix compositions. Ross is not dogmatic or disparaging of many of these movements – he seems to find merit and interest in nearly everything. Naturally, with so much to choose from, he concentrates his writing on what he personally likes. He admits that he cannot cover all composers in any depth, and makes bold selections. For instance, he devotes many pages to Benjamin Britten, asking us to enjoy the analysis of the one British artist as representative of many other worthy artists from the same country.
One can argue about who you would like to see included in this tome – and each special plea would make the book longer and heavier. Clearly Ross had to draw the line somewhere. Well, I personally would have liked more coverage of Alexander Scriabin, Edward Elgar and Nicholas Maw. Possibly they do not fit the themes or the chapter headings, but they produced individual works that must surely rank as supreme achievements of the century, namely and respectively ‘The poem of Ecstasy’, ‘Cello concerto’ and ‘Odyssey’.
I like the way Ross pauses from the broad narrative to describe individual pieces in detail, such as Strauss’s ‘Salome’, Shostakovich’s ‘Fifth symphony’, Ellington’s ‘Black, brown and beige’, Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the end of time’ or ‘ Berg’s ‘Lulu’. These are high quality sleeve notes and engender a hunger to listen to the music. I responded by buying CDs of some of the pieces, and made enjoyable discoveries. Illustrating the point I made earlier about the modern ear being already attuned to the revolutionary techniques, I found Schoenberg’s ‘5 pieces for orchestra’ and Webern’s ‘6 pieces for orchestra’ very worthwhile – not shocking. Certainly one should not treat this music as background music – it deserves attention – but that applies to all serious music.
He has many arresting turns of phrase and witty thoughts; for example: “Cocteau and Poulenc were enjoying a one-night stand with a dark-skinned form, and they had no intention of striking up a conversation with it the following day.” He comes up with connections, facts and interpretations that are enlightening, whether it is pointing out the high proportion of gay artists, the influences of Jazz (and the influences on Jazz) or the brilliant description of minimalist music (Reich etc) being like driving along the interstate highways of America.
Read this book for education, enjoyment and elevation. If you have patches of knowledge of Twentieth Century music (as I do), Ross will tie them together for you, give them more resonance and encourage you to listen to more. He would be someone I would like to join for a fortnight’s journey on the trans-Siberian express (with an ipod to listen to the music samples as we went along). I feel a long and rewarding journey has been completed by reading this book through.
Thanks to my brother, who gave ‘The rest is noise’ to me as a birthday present, and who is way ahead of me in his knowledge of music.
Azincourt, by Bernard Cornwell
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Cornwell has used a tried-and-tested formula for many of his books, which I have previously encountered in his ‘Sharpe’ books. He chooses a common man as his hero (in this case Nick Hook), has him fight heroically and victoriously in every major battle in his time (Harfleur and Agincourt), makes him a master of his weapons (principally his longbow, but also handy with his poleaxe), gives him a beautiful love interest (Melisande), sets up a strong, arrogant enemy (the French noble Lanferelle, who also happens to be Melisande’s father – such subtle plotting!) and adds extra spice in having enemies on his own side (the wicked Perrill brothers and Sir Martin).
It is a successful formula, tugging the reader on to turn the pages, at the expense of important household chores. However the transparent artifice, and the inherently unlikely nature of all the events that happen to one man dented my opinion of this book. It is as if Hook, the archer, has his own special angel hovering over him – the author, who miraculously makes every strike against the hero a slap or glancing blow, and nearly every strike of the hero a bulls-eye with arrow or poleaxe.
You have to admire Cornwell’s ingenuity of side-stepping and overcoming the massive reputation of Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V’ (which incidentally does not mention the English archers once). He subtly incorporates all the Shakespearean highlights, such as the attack on the breach at Harfleur, the ‘Saint Crispin’ speech and the King’s midnight fraternising with the troops on the eve of the battle.
This is a gory book. The author goes out of his way to emphasise the horror of war more than any other of his books I have read. There are numerous descriptions of brains splattering, blood gurgling, guts slithering, eyes being pierced and so forth. He lays it on thick, garnished with some very choice earthy language. I guess it has to be done, to convey the reality of Medieval Warfare and the massacre of the remarkable battle of Agincourt.
His hatred of priests in the hierarchy of power is evident. Most priests (but not all) are portrayed as lustful, power-mad, gluttonous, sadistic and hypocritical in this book. Cornwell raises the intellectual level of the book by pondering on the contradictions and confusions of religion, with both sides praying and believing that God is on their side. Their’s is a harsh and vengeful God, wanting heretics to be burned at the stake and mass slaughter to take place to support a King’s rightful claim to a throne.
Cornwall uses the narrative device of the hero hearing the voices of Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian in his head. This lets us glimpse a slightly deeper psychological depth and complexity, but not much more. Don’t pick up this book for subtle or complex insights into human nature.
Cornwell has used a tried-and-tested formula for many of his books, which I have previously encountered in his ‘Sharpe’ books. He chooses a common man as his hero (in this case Nick Hook), has him fight heroically and victoriously in every major battle in his time (Harfleur and Agincourt), makes him a master of his weapons (principally his longbow, but also handy with his poleaxe), gives him a beautiful love interest (Melisande), sets up a strong, arrogant enemy (the French noble Lanferelle, who also happens to be Melisande’s father – such subtle plotting!) and adds extra spice in having enemies on his own side (the wicked Perrill brothers and Sir Martin).
It is a successful formula, tugging the reader on to turn the pages, at the expense of important household chores. However the transparent artifice, and the inherently unlikely nature of all the events that happen to one man dented my opinion of this book. It is as if Hook, the archer, has his own special angel hovering over him – the author, who miraculously makes every strike against the hero a slap or glancing blow, and nearly every strike of the hero a bulls-eye with arrow or poleaxe.
You have to admire Cornwell’s ingenuity of side-stepping and overcoming the massive reputation of Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V’ (which incidentally does not mention the English archers once). He subtly incorporates all the Shakespearean highlights, such as the attack on the breach at Harfleur, the ‘Saint Crispin’ speech and the King’s midnight fraternising with the troops on the eve of the battle.
This is a gory book. The author goes out of his way to emphasise the horror of war more than any other of his books I have read. There are numerous descriptions of brains splattering, blood gurgling, guts slithering, eyes being pierced and so forth. He lays it on thick, garnished with some very choice earthy language. I guess it has to be done, to convey the reality of Medieval Warfare and the massacre of the remarkable battle of Agincourt.
His hatred of priests in the hierarchy of power is evident. Most priests (but not all) are portrayed as lustful, power-mad, gluttonous, sadistic and hypocritical in this book. Cornwell raises the intellectual level of the book by pondering on the contradictions and confusions of religion, with both sides praying and believing that God is on their side. Their’s is a harsh and vengeful God, wanting heretics to be burned at the stake and mass slaughter to take place to support a King’s rightful claim to a throne.
Cornwall uses the narrative device of the hero hearing the voices of Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian in his head. This lets us glimpse a slightly deeper psychological depth and complexity, but not much more. Don’t pick up this book for subtle or complex insights into human nature.
The Penguin book of the Renaissance, by J.H. Plumb (ed.)
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£1.85 this paperback cost, when I purchased it in 1979, inspired by a trip to Italy. I wanted to learn more about the multi-faceted advances we now know at the Renaissance, having visited Florence, Venice, Milan and Padua. I then read several chapters of interest and found it was useful background to my degree studies. Later, in homage to this great era of learning, I ambitiously called my training company ‘Renaissance Training’.
This year, I picked it off the shelves again, having created the following thought experiment: I never buy another book in my life and rely solely on the existing contents of my bookshelves. I read all 17 chapters, and found it rewarding, since it brought together disparate and half-remembered bits of knowledge. I also had more experience of visiting Italy, seeing paintings and reading books about this era to build on.
Edited by the historian, Professor Plumb, it is a series of essays on different aspects, people and places in the Renaissance. The book is not a complete survey of the Renaissance – that would be impossible anyway – and it leaves certain aspects, such as the advance of mathematics, virtually untouched. However, the breadth of its coverage can be gathered from the titles of the essays:
• Introduction
• The dawn of the Renaissance
• The Prince and the state
• Machiavelli
• The arts
• The young Michelangelo
• Florence: Cradle of Humanism
• Lorenzo de Medici
• Milan: City of strife
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Rome: splendour and papacy
• Pope Pius II
• Venice: the golden years
• Doge Francesco Foscari
• The images of man (about Aretino and Castiglione)
• Federico da Montefeltro
• The spread of the Renaissance
Professor Plumb wrote ten of the essays himself, while the others came from famous writers such as Kenneth Clark, H.R. Trevor-Roper and J. Bronowski. He does an excellent job of tying together the potentially disparate essays into a whole; he must have given specific detailed guidance to the other writers, so good are the connections between the chapters. Profiling the four leading cities of the Renaissance is a highly successful move that forms a bonding cross-section across the other themes. As an introductory text for understanding the Renaissance and its achievements, this book is to be highly recommended.
From the riches of this book, I pick out the Bronowski chapter on Leonardo da Vinci for deeper comment. Leonardo was a failure. He was a man of immense, almost incomprehensible genius. Yet he completed so few of his projects. Admittedly, ‘The Mona Lisa’ remains as one of the most celebrated paintings in the world, yet the sum total of his completed works is pitiful compared with what he could have achieved, with more focus. Bronowski speculates that he was not put under enough commercial pressure to get things done, but was indulged for twenty years by the Duke of Milan, and his talents diverted into fripperies, such as ingenious displays for the frequent pageants the Duke liked to arrange.
When we think of Leonardo, we think of his sketches and notebooks, crammed with ideas and studies of endless variety. Leonardo had a burning curiosity, and he was given freedom of time and from monetary necessity by the Duke to follow every path that his polymathic genius led him, whether it was the flight mechanism of birds, the flow of water, the anatomy of man, engines of war, new painting techniques and so forth.
Late in his life, Leonardo apparently deeply regretted his dilettantism (if that is an appropriate word!) and lack of application. He once wrote: “O Time, thou that consumest all things! O envious age, thou destroyest all things and devourest all things with the hard teeth of the years, little by little, in slow death!”
However, Bronowski asserts Leonardo’s ultimate greatness and revolutionary thought by asserting three supreme achievements:
1) He pioneered modern scientific method through his “absorbed interest in the structure and mechanism of nature”, contrasting with the medieval “magical view” of casting spells and seeking miracles to get nature to “function in a way contrary to her own laws”. Leonardo perceived that, on the contrary, nature is only commanded when we understand her and enter into her processes.
2) He saw that the structure of nature reveals her processes. So he searched diligently for the strict mechanism by which living things move and act, instead of appealing in a lazy way to vital forces and spirits. In other words, he was empirical and scientific.
3) He understood that science is not a parade of grand theories of the kind that, say, Thomas Aquinas propounded, where the detail was not thought important, and discrepancies between theory and fact are shrugged off. Instead, he elevated the detail so that it became the crucial test of a scientific theory. By carrying out detailed studies, he was able to demonstrate how Aristotle, Galen, Aquinas etc were wrong.
Bronowski ascribes the last point to Leonardo’s training as a painter, for whom the precise shape of a flower or a waterfall is all important. This put him “at the opposite pole from the theorising scientists of his own age”. This interesting conjunction of art and science is a valuable nugget buried in this book, and Bronowski claims that Leonardo was the artist “who is the true pioneer of science as we practise it.”
£1.85 this paperback cost, when I purchased it in 1979, inspired by a trip to Italy. I wanted to learn more about the multi-faceted advances we now know at the Renaissance, having visited Florence, Venice, Milan and Padua. I then read several chapters of interest and found it was useful background to my degree studies. Later, in homage to this great era of learning, I ambitiously called my training company ‘Renaissance Training’.
This year, I picked it off the shelves again, having created the following thought experiment: I never buy another book in my life and rely solely on the existing contents of my bookshelves. I read all 17 chapters, and found it rewarding, since it brought together disparate and half-remembered bits of knowledge. I also had more experience of visiting Italy, seeing paintings and reading books about this era to build on.
Edited by the historian, Professor Plumb, it is a series of essays on different aspects, people and places in the Renaissance. The book is not a complete survey of the Renaissance – that would be impossible anyway – and it leaves certain aspects, such as the advance of mathematics, virtually untouched. However, the breadth of its coverage can be gathered from the titles of the essays:
• Introduction
• The dawn of the Renaissance
• The Prince and the state
• Machiavelli
• The arts
• The young Michelangelo
• Florence: Cradle of Humanism
• Lorenzo de Medici
• Milan: City of strife
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Rome: splendour and papacy
• Pope Pius II
• Venice: the golden years
• Doge Francesco Foscari
• The images of man (about Aretino and Castiglione)
• Federico da Montefeltro
• The spread of the Renaissance
Professor Plumb wrote ten of the essays himself, while the others came from famous writers such as Kenneth Clark, H.R. Trevor-Roper and J. Bronowski. He does an excellent job of tying together the potentially disparate essays into a whole; he must have given specific detailed guidance to the other writers, so good are the connections between the chapters. Profiling the four leading cities of the Renaissance is a highly successful move that forms a bonding cross-section across the other themes. As an introductory text for understanding the Renaissance and its achievements, this book is to be highly recommended.
From the riches of this book, I pick out the Bronowski chapter on Leonardo da Vinci for deeper comment. Leonardo was a failure. He was a man of immense, almost incomprehensible genius. Yet he completed so few of his projects. Admittedly, ‘The Mona Lisa’ remains as one of the most celebrated paintings in the world, yet the sum total of his completed works is pitiful compared with what he could have achieved, with more focus. Bronowski speculates that he was not put under enough commercial pressure to get things done, but was indulged for twenty years by the Duke of Milan, and his talents diverted into fripperies, such as ingenious displays for the frequent pageants the Duke liked to arrange.
When we think of Leonardo, we think of his sketches and notebooks, crammed with ideas and studies of endless variety. Leonardo had a burning curiosity, and he was given freedom of time and from monetary necessity by the Duke to follow every path that his polymathic genius led him, whether it was the flight mechanism of birds, the flow of water, the anatomy of man, engines of war, new painting techniques and so forth.
Late in his life, Leonardo apparently deeply regretted his dilettantism (if that is an appropriate word!) and lack of application. He once wrote: “O Time, thou that consumest all things! O envious age, thou destroyest all things and devourest all things with the hard teeth of the years, little by little, in slow death!”
However, Bronowski asserts Leonardo’s ultimate greatness and revolutionary thought by asserting three supreme achievements:
1) He pioneered modern scientific method through his “absorbed interest in the structure and mechanism of nature”, contrasting with the medieval “magical view” of casting spells and seeking miracles to get nature to “function in a way contrary to her own laws”. Leonardo perceived that, on the contrary, nature is only commanded when we understand her and enter into her processes.
2) He saw that the structure of nature reveals her processes. So he searched diligently for the strict mechanism by which living things move and act, instead of appealing in a lazy way to vital forces and spirits. In other words, he was empirical and scientific.
3) He understood that science is not a parade of grand theories of the kind that, say, Thomas Aquinas propounded, where the detail was not thought important, and discrepancies between theory and fact are shrugged off. Instead, he elevated the detail so that it became the crucial test of a scientific theory. By carrying out detailed studies, he was able to demonstrate how Aristotle, Galen, Aquinas etc were wrong.
Bronowski ascribes the last point to Leonardo’s training as a painter, for whom the precise shape of a flower or a waterfall is all important. This put him “at the opposite pole from the theorising scientists of his own age”. This interesting conjunction of art and science is a valuable nugget buried in this book, and Bronowski claims that Leonardo was the artist “who is the true pioneer of science as we practise it.”
The Age of Elegance, by Arthur Bryant
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This yellowing hardback belongs to my father, and I borrowed it from him. He owns a series of Arthur Bryant history books, who was a popular historian just after the Second World War. Arthur Bryant’s star has faded badly since, and questions have been raised about his scholarship and his personal political views. He was not an academic historian, unearthing facts from original documents, but he was a synthesiser of others works, relying on his own eloquence and interpretation to appeal to his readers. Indeed he is a good writer – clear and colourful, perhaps even florid. Some critics have accused him of plagiarism – at least in his books on Pepys.
In this book he covers the period 1812 – 1822. This seemingly limited time span covers some important events, crucial to the history of this nation, including the invasion of France by Wellington’s army, the peace-making conferences, the battle of Waterloo, the industrial revolution and the political battles between George IV and his wife Caroline. This decade saw the United Kingdom become the undisputed leading world power. Bryant’s expositions of the Peninsular War battles and Waterloo are excellent.
Apart from the war narrative, he devotes some limited space to analysing the social and economic developments of the United Kingdom, but not in enough depth. He likes to spend pages eulogising how wonderful our country was, especially compared with the war-ravaged Continental countries. England (mainly) is full of well-fed happy honest yeomen, whereas places like France are full of down-trodden hungry peasants and bad inns. Bryant lays this on thick, with eulogistic patriotic prose that is too sickly at times. This, frankly, was the appeal of Bryant in the war and post-war years, when patriotic films and books were encouraged by the government, and the British people basked in self-congratulation as a result of being on the winning side. The descriptions of tables groaning with luscious English food must have been an attractive fantasy for those still on rations in 1950, when this book was published.
To support his case, Bryant cites many authors in his notes and bibliography, which gives it a scholarly aura, but careful tracking of his sources shows he relies on a limited stack of books for his evidence, particularly ‘Romany Rye’ by George Borrow, and a travel journal of a Frenchman called Louis Simond; (this latter book has been digitised and can be viewed on Google.co.uk). Simond’s account is most interesting, and coming from a foreigner adds weight to Bryant’s portrait. But there is something tendentious and distorted about what Bryant is saying. Was our country such a paradise at that time? This goes against much of modern, self-abnegating histories that focus on the miseries of the industrial revolution.
To be fair, Bryant balances his account of a prosperous England with criticisms of the selfishness of mill-owners, the economic plight of mill workers, the vicious economic swings from boom to bust, the cruel laissez-faire philosophy of the ruling classes, the self-indulgence of the dandies of the aristocracy and so on. He writes from the viewpoint of 1950, when the state was expanding its economic and welfare role, and he apparently wishes that the governments of 1812 – 1822 were doing the same.
I wonder if Bryant has a point, though. He is a useful antidote to the self-abnegating histories that have dominated in recent decades. He argues that for considerable sections of society this was indeed a (brief) golden age, before the wheel of industrialisation swept across the whole fabric of society in the 19th Century. Britain was undoubtedly the richest and most prosperous country in Europe at that time. It won the Napoleonic wars by financing every army that fought against France. It produced the steel, the guns, the buttons, the uniforms and so on for most of the allied armies. It also had the most advanced agricultural techniques, born of a century of innovation with stock, seeds and methods. It had nearly all the world’s steam engines. It had the best roads and the fastest coaches.
I compared his account of the huge political squabble between George IV and his estranged Queen Caroline with the account of the same affair in Paul Johnson’s ‘A history of the English people’. This illustrates how Bryant’s approach is the lesser of the two. Johnson is far more provocative, critical and objective, as he teases out much more fundamental theories about English history.
This yellowing hardback belongs to my father, and I borrowed it from him. He owns a series of Arthur Bryant history books, who was a popular historian just after the Second World War. Arthur Bryant’s star has faded badly since, and questions have been raised about his scholarship and his personal political views. He was not an academic historian, unearthing facts from original documents, but he was a synthesiser of others works, relying on his own eloquence and interpretation to appeal to his readers. Indeed he is a good writer – clear and colourful, perhaps even florid. Some critics have accused him of plagiarism – at least in his books on Pepys.
In this book he covers the period 1812 – 1822. This seemingly limited time span covers some important events, crucial to the history of this nation, including the invasion of France by Wellington’s army, the peace-making conferences, the battle of Waterloo, the industrial revolution and the political battles between George IV and his wife Caroline. This decade saw the United Kingdom become the undisputed leading world power. Bryant’s expositions of the Peninsular War battles and Waterloo are excellent.
Apart from the war narrative, he devotes some limited space to analysing the social and economic developments of the United Kingdom, but not in enough depth. He likes to spend pages eulogising how wonderful our country was, especially compared with the war-ravaged Continental countries. England (mainly) is full of well-fed happy honest yeomen, whereas places like France are full of down-trodden hungry peasants and bad inns. Bryant lays this on thick, with eulogistic patriotic prose that is too sickly at times. This, frankly, was the appeal of Bryant in the war and post-war years, when patriotic films and books were encouraged by the government, and the British people basked in self-congratulation as a result of being on the winning side. The descriptions of tables groaning with luscious English food must have been an attractive fantasy for those still on rations in 1950, when this book was published.
To support his case, Bryant cites many authors in his notes and bibliography, which gives it a scholarly aura, but careful tracking of his sources shows he relies on a limited stack of books for his evidence, particularly ‘Romany Rye’ by George Borrow, and a travel journal of a Frenchman called Louis Simond; (this latter book has been digitised and can be viewed on Google.co.uk). Simond’s account is most interesting, and coming from a foreigner adds weight to Bryant’s portrait. But there is something tendentious and distorted about what Bryant is saying. Was our country such a paradise at that time? This goes against much of modern, self-abnegating histories that focus on the miseries of the industrial revolution.
To be fair, Bryant balances his account of a prosperous England with criticisms of the selfishness of mill-owners, the economic plight of mill workers, the vicious economic swings from boom to bust, the cruel laissez-faire philosophy of the ruling classes, the self-indulgence of the dandies of the aristocracy and so on. He writes from the viewpoint of 1950, when the state was expanding its economic and welfare role, and he apparently wishes that the governments of 1812 – 1822 were doing the same.
I wonder if Bryant has a point, though. He is a useful antidote to the self-abnegating histories that have dominated in recent decades. He argues that for considerable sections of society this was indeed a (brief) golden age, before the wheel of industrialisation swept across the whole fabric of society in the 19th Century. Britain was undoubtedly the richest and most prosperous country in Europe at that time. It won the Napoleonic wars by financing every army that fought against France. It produced the steel, the guns, the buttons, the uniforms and so on for most of the allied armies. It also had the most advanced agricultural techniques, born of a century of innovation with stock, seeds and methods. It had nearly all the world’s steam engines. It had the best roads and the fastest coaches.
I compared his account of the huge political squabble between George IV and his estranged Queen Caroline with the account of the same affair in Paul Johnson’s ‘A history of the English people’. This illustrates how Bryant’s approach is the lesser of the two. Johnson is far more provocative, critical and objective, as he teases out much more fundamental theories about English history.
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