Kurt Anderson's 'Fantasyland': A Noisy Rickshaw Ride With A Dogmatic Driver

To read the American historian David McCullough is akin to travelling in a Rolls Royce. The ride is quiet and smooth, details are precise, the view clear. At the end the reader is enriched.

In contrast, reading another American ‘historian’, Kurt Anderson, is rather like travelling in a rickshaw. The ride is bumpy and very noisy, the exhaust constantly spluttering. There are details, but they are like the dust and smells and random colours of a street in a bustling Asian city. And so quickly does all this heat and noise come at you it is not easy to know what you are meant to be looking at. There is no clear view. At the end of the journey the reader feels rather tired and unsure about the journey he has been on.

Most difficult of all is the driver. Unlike a true historian like David McCullough who lets his properly researched history tell its own story, Kurt Anderson is constantly shouting at you with his massive generalisations and dogmatic opinions.

And the tone is less than gracious.

Like a racist who assumes his readers will share his simplistic views about colour, Kurt Anderson assumes his reader will agree that science has proved that God does not exist and so – hey ho - all believers are fantasists.

And so he demeans them with his language. Christians are ‘berserk’; their beliefs ‘fantastical, terrifying’. The Christians who founded America were ‘a nutty religious cult’, ‘whacked out visionaries’. The respected theologian and philosopher Jonathan Edwards ‘was all about believing and feeling the magic’. What other historians refer to as a revival or an awakening, Anderson has to call a ‘delirium’. Billy Sunday does not preach against evolution, he ‘snarls’. And when it comes to Pentecostalism and speaking in tongues our ‘historian’ just has one cartoon word ‘gibberish’ to describe a movement made up of 279 million people: Such patronizing, juvenile and simplistic sniping at Christianity and her nearly two billion adherents is less than endearing.

The tone is not that of serious history; nor really is the substance. Anderson’s thesis is that American is a land where fantasy holds sway, not facts. And this is the result of the country’s history. The Puritans, the gold seekers, the cults, the conspiracy theories, the Christian fundamentalists, even the enlightenment, the Pentecostals, the gun lovers, all have played a part in this and the final result is President Trump.

As with a bumpy rickshaw ride, the smells and colours from the street have their own fascination, and Anderson’s tabloid style keeps you reading. And the dogmatic opinions, especially on how America relates to the enlightenment, are not without interest. But it’s all too simplistic with Anderson brazenly breaking the first two rules of serious discourse: don’t generalize (especially over the mind set of 316 million people) and define your terms (who exactly is a fantasist?)

So, long before you are even half-way you know – especially if you’re accustomed to reading historians like McCullough – that you are in the hands of an amateur. Or rather a professional journalist used to writing punchy articles to be thrown away the next week. Tied together into a bulky book, it’s not so impressive.

There is irony on the book’s cover. We are told it’s a 500 year history. Well, only in a very rough fashion. It’s more just a collection of stories from America’s past – especially the last fifty years – that support Anderson’s argument. And then at the top Walter Isaacson tells us that this is ‘The indispensable book for understanding America in the age of Trump’.

Indispensable? I don’t think so. That is why I have put it in the bin. 

So a man writing about ‘Fantasyland’ has allowed fantasy to appear on the front cover of his book.

The Lost History of Christianity by Philip Jenkins

Competent, spiky - and sometimes irritating

This is very competent coverage of the history of Christianity in the East: scholarly, but easy to read, full of detail, but the larger canvas is never lost.

It's also spiky, in that the author has opinions and gives them. He has many telling points. Here are three examples. The idea the church after Constantine suppressed controversial gospels is nonsense when one considers that the Eastern Church, with no obligation to Rome, likewise refused to give credibility to these alternative gospels. He contrasts the disappearance of the church in North Africa with the survival of the Coptic Church in Egypt and gives this sensible assessment: 'Egyptian Christianity became native; its African counterpart was colonial'. And in terms of which Christians survived and which perished the answer often came down to geography, the higher up a mountain you lived, the better your chances of survival.

Competent and spiky - but sometimes irritating. The most irritating was the constant referencing to the unproven assumption that most Christians were unaware of the history of the Eastern churches. Indeed that irritant is in the title, which is wrong. It's not a 'Lost History', it's been there for anyone who has wanted to find out. Given that most of the author's readers will have some interest in church history the assumption is unlikely. Many Christians are aware that there was a great church in the East. However, even if the assumption contains some truth, we the reader s have bought the book to be told the story - not to be reminded that there are people who don't know the story. The section at the end was brave, but it was over ambitious. The author knocked the idea that the suffering of the church in the East was God's punishment (though that is a biblical idea), but was unable to really follow this up except to say we need a 'theology of extinction'. That really means a way of understanding suffering. That is over ambitious, best left for the theologians.

And Islam. Full marks to the author for not treating Islam as some great organised force; full marks for underlining the political and ethnic aspects of how Muslims treated Christians; and full marks for levelling an appropriate amount of blame at the feet of Muslims for what happened to the Christians. This was spiky.

But there was an irritating aspect to the author's approach to Islam. First there was the general statement that there is nothing in the Muslim teachings that would make Muslims more violent than other religions. That is tosh. The teaching of the founder of Islam on violence, both in practice and action, is very different to that of the founder of Christianity. So, human nature being what it is, it is fair to say that there is less restraint in Islam than in Christianity. And then there was this attempt at the end of the book to try and see Islam as a part of God's divine plan. As with the author's attempt to give some theology to the fate of the Eastern churches, this was also over ambitious, and so irritating.

The author has done a fine job making the history of the Eastern churches more accessible. A suggestion if the book is revised: a more thorough look at the impact of modern Christian mission on the Muslim world. The usual story has been converts from Christianity to Islam, but the script is changing in our generation and deserves the attention of scholars such as Professor Jenkins.

Ataturk by Andrew Mango (And some connections with Erdogan)

Turkey works.

Transport operates like clock-work; there is law and order; health care is reasonable; and for the last ten years or so the economy has been thriving . Turkey's success stands in contrast to the chaos running riot in much of the Middle East.

The man mainly responsible for the success of modern Turkey is Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He deserves a thorough biography, and Andrew Mango delivers. We are taken to the details of Ataturk's life, but the author never loses sight of what was achieved for Turkey.

First and foremost Ataturk secured the independence of Turkey after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. This was a heroic and monumental achievement. In 1918 Turkey was anything but independent. The country was under the control of Britain and France, and then in 1919 the Greeks occupied the Izmir region. By 1923 Ataturk had driven out the Greeks and negotiated the withdrawal of the British and French.

Secondly Ataturk secured the stability of the new republic. He abolished the Sultanate and set up the shape of a parliamentary democracy. There was an assembly, an executive led by a prime-minister, and as president Ataturk was the head of state till his death in 1938. While there were opposition groups in parliament, Turkey was not really a democracy in Ataturk's life-time. However neither was the new government a tyranny. There was what Mango calls, 'measured terrorism'. So, after an attempt on Ataturk's life in 1926 there was a wide sweeping up of all opposition elements. Likewise there was a robust response to the Kurds in 1924 and a religious uprising in 1930. Innocent people suffered in this suppression of dissent. However stability was ensured and there was a smooth transition of power when Ataturk died. And later when his successor, Ismet Inonu was voted out, Inonu bowed to the ballot box.

Thirdly Ataturk ensured that Turkey largely became a homogeneous country. There is one dominant people, the Turks; one language, Turkish; one dominant religion, Sunni Islam. Ataturk is recorded as calling the 1915 pogrom against the Armenians 'a shameful act'. And it is well known that he was no friend of the 'Young Turks' who were responsible for that genocide. However Ataturk was a military man and a Turkish nationalist. The Christian minorities had welcomed the Greek invasion in 1919. They constituted a threat. Hence it was Ataturk's troops that oversaw the barbaric destruction of the Christian quarters of Smyrna (now Izmir) in 1922, and it was his diplomats who signed up for a transfer of all Greeks from Turkey to Greece under the terms of the 1923 Lausanne Agreement.  Ataturk's attitude towards the Kurds was also severe: their nationalism was crushed, their culture suppressed. The aim was that they be wholly assimilated into Turkey. This policy of course has failed: hence the conclusion that under Ataturk Turkey 'largely became a homogeneous country.'

Fourthly Ataturk modernized Turkey. Today wherever you look you see his hand. Indeed Mango stresses that this was Ataturk's great passion: to see Turkey take her place among the 'civilised' nations. For Ataturk this meant driving out superstition and ignorance which came with religion, and bringing in education and science. While he famously said that he sometimes wished that all religions were 'at the bottom of the sea', Ataturk was not a crusading atheist like a Lenin or Stalin, indeed he was quite content for people to express their faith in the mosque or at home. However he was fiercely hostile to mullahs having any say in the public sphere. So the Caliphate was abolished and legislation was enacted to keep religion strictly separated from the state. The new priests were to be the educators and scientists. Hence there was a massive expansion in education. And not just for boys. While at home it would seem Ataturk's attitude was more traditional, in public he was committed to giving more rights to women. To many it was a surprise that the world's first fighter pilot was from Turkey. This was Sabhia Gorken, one of Ataturk's adopted daughters.

In 1934 all Turks had to choose a surname as a part of the country's modernization programme, given what he achieved for his country it is fitting Mustafa Kemal chose 'Ataturk', father of the Turks. Nobody else was allowed to bear this name.

In the aftermath of the failed coup (July 2016) there has been talk that it represented some sort of mighty soul struggle between the spirit of the secularist Ataturk on the one hand, and the Islamist Erdogan on the other.

At best this is simplistic, at worse it is meddling nonsense.

Erdogan, like most other Turks, is not from an elite officer class like Ataturk, but from a conservative Muslim family. There is no doubt he respects Islam. Hence the ban on wearing the head-scarf has been lifted; Islamic schools have been allowed; alcohol cannot be sold near schools, nor between 10.00 p.m - 6.00 a.m.  But this does not make Erdgogan into a Turkish Ayatollah Khomeini crusading for the full implementation of Sharia law. Erdogan wears a suit and tie and during his over twenty years of being in public office there has been no talk of an all out ban on alcohol, or forcing women to cover up as is common in other Muslim states. Erdogan's record does not reveal a religious visionary, but a pragmatist: just like Ataturk.

For Ataturk in 1918 and Tayyip Erdogan in 2016 there was and is only one important question: what works for Turkey? Their answers are similar. Like Ataturk, Erdogan has put the security of the state first. And, just like Ataturk, this means using an assassination attempt, which he endured in July 2016, as a reason to cast a very wide net to deal with his opponents. Also just like Ataturk, Erdogan is not prepared to see an autonomous Kurdish region on his border. This is not about ruthlessness; it's about national security. Also just like Ataturk, Erdogan is focused on economic modernisation, hence the gleaming tramways, smooth motorways, and soon a new tunnel connecting Europe and Asia.

But what of Erdogan's sympathy for the Islamic voice? Surely this is out of line with Kemalism. Possibly not. It is also pragmatism. Ataturk lived at a time when nationalism was in its heyday, education and science were going to usher in a modern paradise. Hence Ataturk was able to marginalise religion. That is not the case today. For a raft of reasons the shine has faded on the 'civilised' nations and for at least thirty years or so there has been a growing hostility against modernism. It would not be pragmatic to ignore the voice of religion. Especially if you want to win political power through the ballot box.

And this brings us to the final connection between Ataturk and Erdogan. In over 600 pages Mango makes it very clear that Ataturk is not a blood thirsty tyrant. He was a man who had to steer the ship of state from the storm or war followed by the rocks of occupation to the choppy sea of independence. Ataturk hated being called a dictator, though he sometimes had to act like one to get to those waters. Genuinely Kemal wanted to see Turkey develop a modern parliamentary democracy. And despite now five military coups, Turkey still is a functioning democracy. Erdogan is in power because of votes. So the response to the recent coup is in essence a response to preserve the legacy he has been bequeathed, not by some religious visionary, but by the practical father of modern Turkey: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. 

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

Brilliant, but skewed

The brilliance of the book is its disarming simplicity in explaining why some continents and cultures advanced, and others lagged behind.

It's all about geography.

Growing crops and using animals can easily spread across continents where climates are similar (e.g. Middle East, Europe); it doesn't happen where there are severe climate differences, and grim physical boundaries (e.g. The Americas, Africa). A major spin off from animals is developing immunity form the diseases they carry. So when Europeans invaded the Americas those diseases defeated the natives more than war.

The success then of Europe and the West has got nothing to do with Europeans being more intelligent than aborigines or native Americans. And in this scheme forget Tawney and Weber and arguments about religion and the rise of capitalism, that's detail. When you dig back to the basics as to why it was Europeans who took over Australia and not the other way round, it's all about geography. Religion might explain why it was the northern Europeans who got richer than the southern ones, but in the big picture (Europeans taking over from native Americans or Australians) it's geography.

It's the same when it comes to politics. Why was China,with a longer history of civilisation, technological innovation and agriculture, overtaken by Europe in the 19^th C? Diamond's persuasive answer is that China's state was homogeneous due to geography. This meant the country was easily ruled by a dictator and one of them – foolishly in the 15^th C – stopped ship building. Europe, because of geography, was fragmented. There has never been one ruler of Europe, which meant that when Columbus was turned down by the French and the Portuguese, he could still turn to the Spanish.

It's a convincing paradigm and largely true; but still skewed. It is absurd to think, as many did a hundred years ago, that people are superior because of their race. But equally it is difficult to conclude that a civilisation has nothing to do with how human beings behave. So there is a difficulty with India, a country not looked at in detail by Diamond. Like China, India also has an ancient civilisation with a long history of agriculture, writing, and history. And here is a question for Diamond. Why is India, after all these centuries, still ravaged by poverty and injustice, while the United States, just a few hundred years old, is a place where immigrants flock to because they know if they work hard they can prosper under the rule of law? It's hard to see where geography plays a part. India has all that is needed for a prosperous economy but still enough fragmentation not to lend it naturally to be ruled by a dictator as with China. So why the chronic poverty and corruption? Is it racist to ask whether the different outcomes has something to do with human morality and that Hinduism with its cruel caste system has allowed the rich to ignore the poor and treat them as inferior before the law?

Perhaps there is a geographical answer to this question, but if this is true for India it is true for the rest of the world. It has not just been about geography; it has also been all about how human beings behave and some civilisations have come up with better ways of dealings with the evil that lurks within us than others.

So Diamond's paradigm is brilliant; but skewed because there the impact of human morality is largely ignored. 

The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 by William Dalrymple

There are many reviews up on Amazon explaining why this is a brilliant book on Delhi and the Indian Mutiny of 1857. It is unlikely to be bettered in our generation.

I enjoyed it a lot, but the bias against evangelical Christians in chapter two irked. This bias then reappeared in the author's conclusion. Dalrymple is a wonderful historian, and deserves much praise for what his scholarship has given us. However I felt his treatment of Victorian evangelicals was unwarranted. Some comment was necessary. 

Hence this review.

Brilliant narrative history, stained by a simplistic and offensive bias against evangelical Christians.

As all the other reviewers say, this is an absolutely brilliant book. But there's a stain on the painting: a simplistic and offensive bias against evangelical Christians.

The bias is obvious in Chapter Two, 'Believers and Infidels'. Here the evangelical Anglican vicar Rev. Jennings is depicted in hideous colours. According to Dalrymple he is a man of violence:

'Jennings' plan was to rip up what he regarded as the false faiths of India, by force, if necessary.'

Dalrynmple's sentence enforces the old cliché of the missionary holding the Bible in one hand, a machine gun in the other. However from Dalrymple's text all one can ascertain is that Jennings was hoping that the arrival of the British Empire in India would further the cause of Christianity. There's nothing about 'forced' conversions.

The character assassination of Jennings continues. We learn from Dalrymple of his 'brash and insensitive yet silky unctuous manner – strikingly similar to that of Obaidah Slope in Barchester Towers...' There is no foot note to support this. All we learn from the other people quoted is that Jennings was 'enthusiastic' and a 'bigot', which could simply mean he believed what most Christians have believed for the last two thousand years – that the Christian faith is exclusive.

A couple of pages on and the same bias gets to work on the bishop of Calcutta, Reginald Heber, who, not surprisingly, wanted to see the Christian faith spread. Dalrymple misinterprets one of Heber's hymn to argue that the bishop and others like him thought the Indians were vile. In verse two of a hymn that begins; From Greenland's icy mountains..., Heber pens these lines:

Though every prospect pleases,

And only man is vile

Any Christian with just the slightest knowledge of their faith would immediately recognise that here Heber is referring to all of humanity; every native of every nation is vile, contaminated with Adam's sin. But Dalrymple uses the hymn to try and get his readers to think that Heber only thinks the natives of India are 'vile'.

The bias is truly shocking a few pages on. Dalrymple is continuing to paint a picture of increasing religious tension as the background to the mutiny. While doing this he seems to condone 'Sati', the practice of a Hindu widow being burnt alive on her husband's funeral pyre, and appears to condemn the British for banning the practice in their determination to 'aggressively and insensitively promote Christianity.'

In this moral universe the good guys are those who see women being burnt alive and walk on the other side in the name of tolerance; the bad guys are missionaries like William Carey who campaigned to get the practice banned. They are 'aggressive' and 'insensitive'. 

This chapter ends with the author calling all Christians fundamentalists, which presumably means evangelicals, as people who inject 'venom' into the world. Writing about Islam and Christianity Dalryple says - '...the fundamentalists of both faiths have needed each other to reinforce each other's prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the other'.

The idea that a Christian only becomes an evangelical/fundamentalist because of an encounter with a fundamentalist of another faith is extremely simplistic – and fanciful. In the 19^th C thousands upon thousands in England and America were converted by the preaching of dogmatic, intolerant Bible believing Christians like Moody, Finney, Booth, Spurgeon and Simeon. These converts became evangelical. Like Jennings they believed in spreading the Gospel. Most of them probably had never met a fundamentalist Muslim or Hindu. They were dogmatic because of the Gospel, not because of another faith. It is disappointing that an author of Dalrymple's abilty should serve up this superior sounding simplistic liberal myth that one fundamentalism breeds another.

As for the use of the word 'venom' to describe the missionary endeavour of Victorian evangelicals in India, this is unfair. Most decent minded people believe that everyone of faith should have the right to seek the conversion of others. This is not a venomous activity, this is what freedom of conscience and religion is all about. The use of the word 'venom' is also offensive. Most Christian missionaries truly believe that lives improve when people follow Jesus Christ. They are dogmatic about this. That's why they sacrifice a lot to go and preach. Dalrymple here is implying that their impact is 'venomous' - poisonous, destructive. This is offensive to the character of missionaries, and to the millions who have benefited from their countless projects to help the poor.

The rest of the book is superb historical narrative. We are largely spared the bias. But then it appears again right at the end. As Dalyrimple concludes the tale he has told so well we have this odd contrast with Zafar, the last Mughal king who failed to take a stand either for or against the British during the mutiny. For Dalrymple Zafar is a 'strikingly liberal and likeable figure when compared to the Victorian Evangelicals whose insensitivity, arrogance, and blindness did much to bring the Uprising of 1857 down upon their own heads.'

As another reviewer has said, it is simplistic to see the Victorian Evangelicals as causing the mutiny. In fact it is very likely that if there had not been a single evangelical Christian in India in 1857 the army – which was not run by evangelicals - would still have wanted the sepoys of Bengal to use the new rifles with the unclean lubricants. So the sepoys, seething with all sorts of grievances, would still have thought the 'Christian' British were wanting to corrupt their faith and would have rebelled. The source of the initial violence of the mutiny was firmly with the sepoys. There is not a murderous evangelical in sight.

Simplistic – and offensive. Most Christians throughout history have wanted to spread the Gospel. It is in the DNA of the church. But Dalrymple smears such activity as being filled with 'insensitivity' and 'arrogance', and, worse, implies that if a Christian shares the Gospel of Jesus Christ seeking the conversion of a Hindu or Muslim, then the Muslim or Hindu has a moral right to react with appalling violence. It's a 'shut up or we'll kill you creed'.

As it has turned out the Victorian Evangelicals, and many other Christians, especially the Roman Catholics, went on to bring immense benefits to India. Jennings' vision, so loathed by this author, saw churches, schools, hospitals, orphanages, hospices, and much more built for the people of the sub-continent. Some are still in use.

And no young widows are being burnt alive.

William Dalrymple is rightly recognised as one of our generation's greatest writers and historians. It is hard to see how anyone will produce a better book on Delhi and the mutiny. It is brilliant history. All the more pity that he has allowed this stain of an unreasonable bias against evangelical Christians to spoil such a fine work. 

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes; Life and Language in the Amazonian jungle by Daniel Everett

Fascinating, but what about speaking in tongues?

Learning about the life of an obscure tribe of about three hundred souls in the middle of the Amazonian jungle was a fascinating read; as was the section on the Piraha language and linguistics. Daniel Everett’s thesis is that it’s wrong to think of language being innate to humans but instead it is moulded by culture. This makes some sense. No doubt though the supporters of the time plus chance theory of the universe feel they have another nail to bang into the creator God’s coffin. And the nail is sharp because the author used to be an evangelical Christian missionary, but is now an atheist.

But I have a question for this evolutionary linguistics scheme of things: what about speaking in tongues, the prayer language spoken by millions of Christians? These prayer languages are adapting to no cultural need. There is absolutely no way they are a part of a time plus chance evolutionary process. They are a gift. And their purpose surely points to the purpose of all language: to worship God, the chief end of man.

The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran by Hooman Majd

No peering into Iran’s soul, but excellent travel writing
Somewhere near the start of the book the author said he wanted us to peer into Iran’s soul. That didn’t happen. There was no eureka moment. As there wasn’t really anything new here, apart from a few interviews with some senior figures in the Islamic establishment.

So no furniture in my mind shifted. But as first rate travel writing with plenty of background and gentle insight the author certainly polished the furniture. For example anyone who has had any interaction with Iranians know there is a huge amount of snobbery in the disdain the rich and middle classes have for the clerics and Ahmadinejad’s working class constituency. Hooman Majd underlines this, but gives us great background on the identity of the ‘laat’ (working class skin head type) and the jahel (skin head leader) who won the revolution for the clerics.

He is particularly good on how Shia Iran is, and during his description of the mourning for Hossein he tells us what the passion is all about: tribalism. ‘This was our cult’, he writes, ‘and screw the rest of the world, particularly the Arabs if they didn’t like it.’ This is refreshingly blunt.

There is no detailed political story here, but on these sort of big points you feel Majd has probably got it right: the MEK is rightly loathed by most Iranians; Iranians’ garden walls (the public/private divide) is still respected; the idea that the Diaspora Iranians will have any political influence is laughable; the Islamic Republic has massive and committed support, easily seen when Majd attended the revolution’s anniversary party; there is no appetite for another violent revolution; the young are more interested in social freedoms than politics, the old in economic security; and so as long as the rulers remember their ‘Shia sensibilities’, (the right of the righteous David to fight the oppressive Goliath) there will be no internal overthrow of the constitution Ayatollah Khomeini set up over thirty years ago.

So for me, there was no peering into Iran’s soul; but it was a pleasant journey with plenty of enjoyable sights. If you enjoy travel writing, and want to find out more about Iran from a sensible and knowledgeable guide, this is a good place to start. 

William Pitt The Younger by William Hague

This is the sort of book that becomes your friend. Such is Hague's comprehensive mastery of the details and the easy flow of his prose that we are drawn into the world of our hero, his friends and enemies and all the swirl of the political dramas. There are plenty. Probably best of all, superbly told by Hague, is right at the start when Pitt becomes the King's minister on his own terms and then uses all the crown's patronage to turn around a very hostile Commons. It's gripping stuff. As is the drama of the King's madness. Will the dissolute Fox and his prince sweep out the hard working Pitt from Number Ten? We all know the answer, but we still keep on turning the pages. 

Hague gives space to Pitt's private life - his concern for his mother, his loyalty to his friends (so his refusal to abandon Melville when he is accused of financial irregularity), the lack of romance in his life, his debts - but we are never far from the dispatch boxes and the politics, because Pitt wasn't. The pressure is relentless. The French Revolution, the ensuing war, Catholic Emancipation, riots, and slowly but surely you sense that Pitt has something heroic about him. He gets the big questions right - inflexible opposition to Jacobinism, security before freedom - and works himself to an early grave for his country. But there is also a touch of Shakespearean tragedy about it all too. When he died many of the causes dear to his heart were flickering in the wind. Napoleon was the undisputed master of Europe after Austerlitz, so there was no end in sight of the war Pitt had vowed to win; this meant more public debt, something he had vowed to reduce; Catholics were still restricted from entering public office, so endangering Ireland, something he had once resigned over; the slave trade which he loathed was still legal; and his command in the Commons was seriously threatened. It would seem events had swept away all that Pitt had stood for. But then our narrator comes onto the stage and shows us the future and we see he had not died in vain. For at least a quarter of a century Pitt's friends ruled Britain and all his causes eventually saw victory. The war was won at Waterloo; Catholics were freed; slavery was abolished; and Pitt's rigorous system in the Treasury became the foundation for Britain's great expansion in the 19th C. His legacy most certainly lived on, even today, as for Hague it is not Peel who is the founder of the Conservative party, but William Pitt The Younger. 

Sophie's World, Banal Compared To Christ's

'Sophie’s World' caught me because of the easy to read resume of the world’s philosophers. Full marks to the author for this. But the clarity of his resume made it clear that after so many years of philosophy, the outcome is really rather banal. Take the pretentious ‘Philosopher’s Garden Party’ towards the end where two fifteen year olds start to kiss at the table. An adult says, ‘Not at the table, children’, and our hero philosopher asks, ‘Why not?’ Justifying himself with, ‘It’s never wrong for a real philosopher to ask questions’. Is that what makes a philosopher ‘real’? Any fool can ask questions. It doesn’t make the philosopher real, just banal. Or take the chapter on the Big Bang, fascinating in its detail, but then we have to put up with this – ‘we are a spark from the big fire…that’s a beautiful thought too’. It’s not beautiful. It’s banal. And useless. How on earth does it help anyone it we all think of ourselves as ‘sparks from a fire’. It makes human life and morality meaningless. In fact this whole resume underlines that philosophy is largely useless. In its nearly 450 pages not once do our philosophers seriously address the issue of humans suffering. Instead most of their time is taken up with how we know that we know. They spend time with the question nobody is asking, but ignore the question that pierces most people’s lives. Useless. And of course when we get to the 19^th and 20^th century, the arrogance of the philosophers – especially Nietzsche, Freud, Marx and the followers of Darwin - makes the whole endeavour positively evil, as experienced by the poor Germans and Russians whose leaders ate the philosophers’ fare and come up with Nazism and the Soviet Union. Banal, useless, and evil – that’s what Sophie’s World resume confirms about philosophy. Compare that to Christ’s world. Two billion people find meaning for their lives and morality in His world view, they don’t see themselves as ‘sparks of a fire’, but as creatures made in the image of God put on earth to worship and serve Him. Nothing banal there.

Two billion are comforted by His answers to human suffering offered in his death and resurrection. No arm-chair banality there. And wherever his followers have gone, so too have the hospitals, the orphanages, the schools, and ‘good’ works. Nothing evil there. Thank you Justein Gaarder for making clear once again the answer to Tertullian’s famous question – ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ Nothing. 

Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End Of Empire In Kenya by Caroline Elkins

The Mau Maus clearly have a case, as Barbara Castle knew long before Caroline Elkins, and the criminals should be brought to court.

Despite the anti-imperialist mindset of the book, much mentioned by other reviewers, I was left in no doubt that the British have a case to answer regarding the treatment of the Kikuyus in the 1950’s. The book is full of the appalling suffering endured by the tribe at the hands of the colonial administration, and even if some of this is based only on interviews which cannot be substantiated, still we are left with a hard core of evidence that the Kikuyus were treated unjustly: the mass arrests in Nairobi; the crude methods used in the screening process; the creation of the pipeline; the use of prisoner labour in contravention of international agreements and the violence used to empty the camps, shown by the ‘Hola Massacre’. And it is not as if we just have Caroline Elkins’ interviews to rely on. The author also tells us of the involvement of Barbara Castle who while no friend of empire, would not have deliberately made up facts. She believed there was a case to answer long before Caroline Elkins did.

The Storm of War, Andrew Roberts History of the 2WW: Six killed every minute - it's the numbers, not the prose, that make this book important.

The prose is fine, but it is not as elegant as Jan Morris', nor as crisp as Paul Johnson's. There is too much use of the dash, and some sentences are simply too long, well over fifty words. One was nearly a hundred. But it's not the prose that makes this book important, it's the numbers.

Every major incident of the narrative is studded with statistics: one fifth of the pilots in the Battle of Britain were not British, `145 Poles, 126 New Zealanders, 97 Canadians' and the list goes on till we get to one Jamaican. 90,000 Germans surrender at Stalingrad, but only 9,626 returned home; at Kursk the Germans `shot 15,000 people, transported 30,000 for slave labour in Germany, destroyed 2,000 buildings...'; then at the battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, the Germans lost half a million men, `as well as 3,000 tanks, 1,000 guns, 5,000 motor vehicles and 1,400 planes; of 21,000 Japanese defending Iwo Jima only 212 were left when they finally surrendered to the Americans, who had landed 30,000 - and lost 6,891 in the battle. At the end Roberts does some sums for us. The numbers speaks more than a thousand words: over fifty million human beings were killed during the 2WW - six every minute.

Paradise Lost - The Torching of Smyrna

If Alice had started reading this history book, she would never have fallen down that hole. This is history at its best: vivid, gripping, and full of lessons. And with a carefully thought out dramatic plot. We are first taken into the charming cosmopolitan world of early 20th C, but as Veninzelos of Greece and the ever romantic Lloyd George play for a 'Greater' Greece in the break up of the Ottoman Empire, we know, as in any Shakespearean tragedy, that there is going to be a terrible reaping. The Greeks are routed by Attaturk's men and initially enter Smyrna in perfect discipline. We know the Lord of the Flies will break out.

God Is Back

When Adrian Wooldridge was an undergraduate at Oxford he was not well known for his sympathy towards Christianity, so it was a pleasure to learn so much about the faith from his pen.

Every page is worth reading, but the best part of the book was on Christianity in America. As the authors end their section on the decline of faith in Europe, we are introduced to a young American student in Oxford in the 1960's who `shared none of the careless atheism of his British contempories or Oxford students'. Indeed the future President Clinton, much maligned by the religious right, was a very genuine Christian. He shared none of the 1960's `careless atheism', because by and large, his country did not. While the authors rightly focused on the separation of religion from the state as providing the overall context for Christianity's success in the USA, they did not ignore the impact of the revivalists and preachers.

Vali Nasr's book on the rising Muslim middle class needed more facts

Vali Nasr is always worth reading. `The Shia Revival' was superb political analysis and there's plenty of that here as well, especially when Nasr gives a straightforward historical overview as he does on Iran at the start of the book, and Turkey and Pakistan at the end. He very helpfully explains how Arab governments assumed that modernity had to come via the state which has held back entrepreneurialism. This brings us to the heart of the book's thesis: encourage people to get involved in commerce and nasty religious extremism will wither away. Let the middle classes arise and the uneducated superstitious peasants will back off. It's a familiar thesis, but Vali Nasr did not convince me

Hidden Iran by Ray Takeyh

You need a sure guide when dealing with a place like Iran and I came to trust Ray Takeh in his opening chapter that he could explain the country to me, and with a very fine turn of phrase. I enjoyed both the analysis - and the prose. His assessment of Khomeini's legacy rang true. The Ayatollah had understood the national psyche much better than the Shah and built his revolution on the country's roots in its religion, Shia Islam and an abiding distrust of foreigners, not surprising after invasions of Greeks, Arabs, Moguls, Russians, and the British. For this reason Takeh rightly stresses that the regime is not going to disappear overnight. Moving on to the post Khomeini domestic era Takeh does a fine job describing Khamaeni and the conservatives, Rafsanjani and the pragmatists, Khatami and the Reformers, and he explains how these three groups are always around, and are always contending for influence. This is very helpful for understanding the present disputes. They have not come out of the blue. They are an ongoing part of the jostling for power within the wider context of the Islamic Republic. I found Takeh best on foreign policy. He does a brilliant job in explaining how despite all the revolutionary rhetoric there is plenty of rational politics at work in their foreign ministry. He shows how there are three circles - the Persian Gulf; the Arab East; and Eurasia, and how each area gets a different policy depending on Iran's national interest. So in Eurasia

Reaching For Power by Yitzhak Nakash

Great book on the Arab Shias

Till I read this book I have lazily summed up the religious and racial divide of the Middle East as Arabs-Sunnis versus Iranians-Shias. The whole focus of this excellent book is on the Arab Shias outside Iran, something I knew virtually nothing about in any detail. I don't think there's much out there on this. The author looks at the history of the Shias of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Iraq and their present position in the political landscape and a strong irony emerges as two contradictory elements in the story keep on surfacing. For these Arab Shias have faced constant discrimination and worse from Sunni Arabs: in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain Shias have not been allowed to join the police or the army; have been deliberately kept at the lower end of the job market, indeed there is a detailed section on how they were all thrown out of the lucrative Bahrain pearl industry; and of course in Iraq there was outright persecution against the Shias in the southern marshes. And yet, though treated as second class citizens in their own lands, these Shias have remained loyal Arabs, best seen when they took the brunt of the attacks of their co-religionists when Ayatollah Khomeini was trying to get to Jerusalem via Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war. At least this made clear that in times of war patriotism is stronger than religious affiliation, something Europe had already learned. But it has still left the Shias wanting a fair deal in the countries they were willing to fight for. The likely outcome is also clothed in irony. For the same US led invasion of Iraq in the name of democracy has already vastly improved the position of the Shias, but the same US supported regimes in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain is keeping their systems of religious apartheid seemingly in place, or at least there are no imminent signs of Shia and Sunni equality breaking out. I would warmly recommend this book to anyone who wants to deepen their understanding of the Middle East, even though for me it meant abandoning a rather simple way of looking at things.

First World War, Corrigan's Mud, Blood, and Poppycock gets the big picture right

This is a review I put up on Amazon about the book by Corrigan on the First World War that fairly comprehensivley dismantles what the 1970's schoolboys were taught to think about this conflict...

Who can forget `O What A Lovely War' with the officers sliding down the helter skelter to read out how many thousands have died to gain a few more millimetres of mud in Flanders? The play sums up what my generation have been taught to believe about the First World War: an unnecessary barbaric affair that killed a generation directed by behind the line upper class donkeys who made their soldiers live in rat infested trenches before ordering them to walk into no man's land to either be mown down by machine guns or strung up on barbed wire which they stupidly thought would have been cut by shrapnel. And if any soldier demurred, he was summarily shot at dawn after a kangaroo court.

This book is a robust and entirely refreshing rejection of this version of events, backed up by endless facts. The war was necessary as Britain had to have freedom of the channel and so could not have enemies controlling its ports; huge numbers were killed, but there was no lost generation; the trenches were challenging, but crucially no soldier spent more than a few days there and behind the lines great effort was made to lift morale; the officers were very much with their men, and the generals were constantly inspecting the front line. They made mistakes, but they learned from them, and despite constant meddling from amateur politicians, especially Lloyd George, they understood the main theatre was the Western Front and despite Britain not having a large land army at all, managed to mobilise the needed numbers to win there. There were no kangaroo courts, discipline procedures were thorough and in this author's opinion all the executions were fair.

Corrigan is very good dealing with the Somme, which claimed 20,000 English lives on the first day. Despite its appalling cost, this attack drew German troops away from Verdun and this literally saved the French army. On its own terms the Somme was a vital victory. There was one aspect of his account though that I felt was opaque, and this is why I have not given the book five stars. For there are videos of survivors explaining how they were told that on the first day of the attack there was no need to run to the enemy trenches as the constant bombing by the artillery would have destroyed everything there. It was to be a `stroll in the park'. But in fact it was a race between the attackers getting across no man's land, and the German machine gunners getting from their dug outs to their trenches. Speed was the essence. However Corrigan only says that the soldiers had to walk to keep order. I was hoping there would be a more vigorous defence regarding this, or a straightforward acceptance that this was a terrible mistake.

However it was a mistake the generals learned from and this is the big picture the author gets completely right: that in a completely new war situation, without enough men or arms, the army rose to the challenge and conducted a war that was forced on England in a thoroughly professional manner. And they won.

The Assassins - Bernard Lewis

Usually anything by Lewis on Islam is worth reading and this is no exception. It tells the story of the `Assassins', the original suicide killers, notorious in the Middle Ages for infiltrating and murdering the elite of their enemies. Based mainly in the north of Iran they were an off shoot of the Ismailis, who are themselves an off shoot from the Shias. It is solid serious history. But it has three other great things going for it as well. First there is the wonderful almost Tolkien like legends surrounding the sect's origins and reputation. They were started by `The Old Man Of The Mountain' who blocked off a valley in the north of Iran, and created a paradise of gardens and rivers of `wine, milk, honey, and water' and brought in beautiful women. His soldiers captured and drugged young men who would then wake up in his paradise and enjoy themselves. When the Old Man wanted one of these youths to murder his enemies he would have them drugged again and brought into his castle where they almost felt they were in the presence of a god. He would ask them where they have come from and they would reply, `Paradise'. He would give them a dagger, the assassination order, and then explain that once dead, angels would bring him back to the very same Paradise the youth had already tasted. Think of what today's suicide attackers have been missing out on! Such was the youth's readiness to die for the Old Man that he would even parade them on top of a wall for visiting guests and with a nod of his head they would dive to their deaths. Secondly there is the story of how this community veered from antinomianism when one of their leaders announced the end of the law - prayers were deliberately said away from Mecca; there was feasting in the middle of the fast; and lots of wine was drunk - and then back again to orthodoxy, or at least Shia orthodoxy. Whether there was law or no law, the punishment for not following the decree of the leader was the same: stoning. As Lewis says this sort of drastic re-inventing of the faith is typical of sects which are intellectual cul-de-sacs. This brings us to the third point: the fact that though this group were widely feared for a time for their spectacular successes, including a king of Crusader Jerusalem, ultimately their terrorism failed. They were completely crushed by the Mongols. Confronted by an army determined to root out any threat to their rule, they soon capitulated. Originally written in 1967, but re-issued with a new preface in 2003, Lewis no doubts wanted to pass comment for those contending with terrorism today

The Missionaries - Norman Lewis

The prose is wonderful: even, calm, almost detached, but full of all the colours and smells and characters of the author's journeys. It was some of the best travel writing I had ever come across. But the argument irritated: that missionary work in South America was at best detrimental to the natives' culture, and at worst an alliance with greedy entrepreneurs determined to get cheap labour. There is no thorough research, rather this author leaves us with impressions. So he always uses the word `sect' when referring to the missionaries, so conjuring up damaging fanaticism: but these missionaries do not belong to `sects'. The Summer Institute of Linguistics, one of the missions attacked, is a part of the Wycliffe Bible Translators, which is supported by all main line Christian denominations. Lewis is not attacking weird `sects', he is attacking all Christian mission activity, and that is an odd position to take. Before Christians came to parts of South America the Aztecs engaged in twenty four hour human sacrifice; the Hindus had `sati', widow burning; in other places there were cannibals. Another impression he gives is that missionaries are money minded people. Perhaps some are, but most people who have had any dealings with the Wycliffe Bible Translators will know they are not. And everyone can read `The Shadow of The Almighty' by Elizabeth Eliot largely made up of the diaries of her husband, Jim Eliot, who was killed by tribes people in Eucador in the 1950's. He was no lover of money. If you like travel writing, this is a must, but only enjoy the clothes, ignore the body of the argument.

The Writing On The Wall - Will Hutton

It's the Christian Enlightenment, Stupid

This is a superb book with a frustrating flaw. Its excellence is the clarity and informed analysis focused on the convincing thesis that the strength of the West, in contrast to China, lies in its public institutions. These are companies, judicial systems, parliaments, and the press which came into their own at the time of the enlightenment. The frustrating flaw is that Will Hutton refuses to acknowledge the context and people behind these enlightenment institutions: Christianity and Christians. He ably explains other factors such as trade which brought about enlightenment values, but strangely ignores the Christian faith. Yet the enlightenment happened in Christian countries, and her pioneer was not Hume or Diderot, but Luther who put individual conscience before the authority of the clergy. And those thinkers who were critical of Christianity, still operated in a Christian moral system. Enlightenment values did not descend from the sky, but grew out of soil soaked in the teachings of Jesus Christ. And it was Christians who usually made enlightenment values such as accountability and the rule of law a reality. So Victorian Britain's public institutions which fuelled so much of the West's success in the 19th C were often led by devout Christians. It is now more so in America where Christians have a massive influence on these public institutions. All of this does not exist for the author who then compounds this oversight by arguing that Evangelicals in the US are anti enlightenment. This is regrettable. The author himself says that the four pillars of enlightenment are accountability, representativeness, the rule of law, and free speech. Where do many Americans learn these values? In the church, so the Baptist pastor is only one church meeting away from losing his job. And this author is somehow implying he does not know about accountability! There is nothing anti enlightenment about evangelical Christianity especially in America. Indeed many would argue that America's success is rooted in the fusion of the enlightenment with Christianity. The author's odd refusal to seriously treat with Christianity also scars his analysis of China. Quite rightly he believes the way ahead for China and its relations with the world is for the country to develop enlightenment public institutions. But his tone is wishful pleading. If he had taken Christianity seriously he would have appreciated the fact that China now has the largest church in the world (estimates vary from 30 to 150 million) and these Christians have learned in the most painful environment of persecution the values of accountability and other `enlightenment' morals. The success of the West began to happen when thousands of Christians were freed from the intellectual claustrophobia of Roman Catholicism, the thesis of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism still has merit. The same can happen in China. Let the West campaign to free those millions of Christians from the claustrophobia of communism, let their meetings become the norm in the public sphere, and soon you would have flourishing enlightenment public institutions which would enrich both China and the West. There is much to learn from Will Hutton, but be warned that he has not taken into account the most fundamental aspect of the West's success: Christianity. He has one chapter entitled, `It's the Enlightenment, Stupid', but he is wrong: `It's the Christian Enlightenment, Stupid.'