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Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire

Alex Von Tunzelmann

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Fun, and well-written 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I enjoyed this book a lot. The writing style is excellent and the story is fascinating. I've read a few books about the amazing story of Indian independence. This one is focused on the personalities involved, particularly Dickie and Edwina Mountbatten and Nehru. As a book about people and personalities, it is more approachable than some of the history books; some of it is downright gossipy, although never in a lowbrow way. So it's very pleasurable and easy to read. Enjoy!

Editorial Review:

At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the British Empire withdrew from India, inviting in all the exhilaration and turmoil of a newly free society. In this vivid, atmospheric popular history, Alex von Tunzelmann chronicles these times through the most prominent figures: Dickie Mountbatten, Britain’s dashing, inept last viceroy; Dickie's savvy, glamorous wife, Edwina, who found the love of her life in Jawaharlal Nehru, India's new prime minister; Muslim leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and Mohandas Gandhi. Tunzelman's thrilling chronicle "removes the veil from the colorful personalities and events behind Inida's independence and partition with Pakistan" (The Washington Post).

God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (Vintage)

Walter Russell Mead

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Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Why Doesn't The World Understand Us? 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 11 people found this review helpful.

[Note; this Review appeared on the Claremont Institute website, on July 17, 2008]

In his new book, God and Gold, foreign affairs expert Walter Russell Mead argues that modern world history can be understood as the global application of a system of economics, religion, and culture developed and directed by the English-speaking peoples. From the time of Oliver Cromwell to the present, the British and the Americans, either individually or together, have won every major war, and have established a commercial and military dominance that remains the foundation of the modern world. "It is perhaps bad manners to say so," Mead acknowledges, "but that does not make it less true."

Mead addresses six questions which he believes can help us better understand and handle the problems and dangers that confront America today:

(1) What exactly is the agenda of the Anglo-Americans?
(2) Why have they been so consistently successful in their military and economic conflicts with other nations?
(3) How did they manage to build a global order?
(4) Why have they so frequently believed that their successes were about to give rise to a world of peace and prosperity?
(5) Why have they been wrong every single time?
(6) What is the meaning, significance, and future, of Anglo-American power?


As Mead confronts these questions, we find that the strengths of his book include his authoritative mastery of historical, political, and economic facts, which he uses liberally to support his argument, and his ability to weave together cultural, religious, economic, and political strands of history into a fascinating, coherent synthesis. Its weaknesses include a sometimes overbearing repetitiveness of key points and a rather unsatisfying response to the major contemporary criticisms of Anglo-American culture in the end. Nonetheless, the book is a very worthwhile read, both for its historical sweep and--most importantly--for Mead's lucid and useful suggestions regarding the future of American foreign policy.

* * *

The agenda itself is straightforward. There has long been an unwritten Anglo-American strategy for economic and military dominance. The aim has been to create a world-wide system of trade, investment, and military might, based on sea power. This maritime order meets Anglo-American economic and security needs.

But why has it been so successful? The British have typically had a smaller population and fewer resources than their continental enemies. Historically, however, they employed a unique approach to world politics that consistently led to greater success in world affairs than their rivals. Their basic formula combined an open society with world trade and world power.

First of all, success required a new kind of society, a free and open society, where growth, change, and endless innovation would be encouraged--i.e., a capitalist society. Like Max Weber, Mead believes that the reasons behind the success of capitalism in England can be found in religion. Catholicism, which remained dominant in continental Europe, devalued worldly goods and worldly success. But Protestantism (particularly Calvinism) considered worldly success a sign of God's Grace. At the same time, Calvinism emphasized thrift and sobriety; as a result, successful Calvinist communities "began to develop pools of capital available for investment--and diligent, trustworthy young men ready to make profitable use of the savings of others." The grim doctrines of John Calvin would fall into disfavor, but the habits of Calvinism would persist (they could still be seen, for instance, in the proverbs of Benjamin Franklin), and this heritage would "continue to drive societies into capitalism and wealth even after the initial religious impulse had faded."

But capitalism, Mead points out, is about more than just hard work and saving. "It is about risk taking, embracing change, tolerating setbacks, and accepting the sometimes amoral or even immoral consequences of the impact of markets on cherished social institutions and beliefs." Thus the ongoing success of capitalist values requires an open, dynamic culture that is ready to accept, and even willing to help advance, the waves of social change.

The key to this openness, Mead says, can be found in the biblical "call of Abraham," a story of major import for Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. There, God tells Abraham to leave his country and his kindred, and move on to a new land. God then promises to bless him, to curse those who cursed him, and to multiply greatly the number of his descendants. Abraham has complete faith in God, he believes His promises, so he leaves his home and moves on. Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans, stresses Abraham's faithful response to God's call as the basis for salvation. In light of this, Abraham became the key figure in the Protestant arguments for justifying salvation by faith alone, and not through good works or by purchasing indulgences from Catholic priests. As a result, a new sense of faith as a journey away from the familiar and into the unknown became a central idea of Protestantism. Change was no longer evil; it was encouraged by God. It was this new religious system that made Protestant England, and later the United States,

"a more and more suitable medium for capitalist development. To engage in the struggle for change and reform is not to oppose the religious instinct, but to give it its fullest expression. Whether they were struggling to build businesses, to change social institutions, or simply to accustom themselves to the accelerating juggernaut of change, millions of Anglo-Americans over the centuries...really did see something transcendent in their lives; they really did believe that they were struggling toward God."

By the mid-1700s, British Prime Minister William Pitt "understood how an open society and unfettered capitalist enterprise enabled a country and its citizens to succeed in global competition. He saw how this economic power could translate into military and political power." During its seemingly endless wars against the English, France was never able to concentrate all its resources on its navy: it was always being forced to deal with land enemies to its rear. Britain quickly realized that the key to world power was not supremacy on the battlefields of Europe. The key was to maintain a balance of power among its rivals so that none of them would be free to focus all its power against the British Isles. The strategy required letting the continental powers fight among themselves, making temporary alliances as needed to prevent any one nation from dominating the others, and meanwhile building England's economy while using unencumbered sea power to create a global economic system under her control.

Of course, through the centuries there have been various attempts to unify Europe, and the British, like the Americans, have seen their share of defeat. But time and again, they have been able to bankrupt their enemies by using their command of global commerce to deny resources and to create new coalitions. Napoleon conquered most of Europe, winning battle after battle, but British wealth enabled her to continue to prop up her weakened allies and carry on the war until, exhausted and impoverished, Napoleon surrendered.

Over the years, America developed a similar advantage. When Nazi Germany was starving and desperate for every ounce of fuel, a German general realized the war was lost when he saw that "Americans had enough food and enough shipping capacity to send birthday cakes across the ocean to ordinary soldiers." Bankrupting the enemy while crushing him was Ronald Reagan's strategy against the Soviet Union: placing economic sanctions against the Soviets and their satellites, sending military aid to their opponents in Central America and Afghanistan, and forcing them into an expensive high-tech arms race they could not win. Like the British economy in the time of Napoleon, the American economy became a decisive weapon of war, and the Soviet Union crumbled.

While their continental neighbors were busy draining their resources by fighting amongst themselves, the British would travel about the globe stealing their rivals' colonies and setting up more of their own, thus increasing their power and adding new trade routes. The drawback to all their empire-building was that the British had to conquer people and then keep them down. After World War II, their American heirs, who had always resented colonial empires, improved the game and increased the return: America supported independence movements in former colonies, and then encouraged the new states to enter the global economic system that the United States was building. But in both the British and American cases, there remained a constant: "When the wars are over and the other countries come back into world markets, they find the Anglo-Saxons better ensconced than ever.... It's a simple plan, but it works."

* * *

What has all this success been for? Where does it all lead? Anglo-American politicians and intellectuals "have frequently put forward the idea that the purpose of the Anglo-Saxon ascendancy is to usher in a peaceful, liberal, and prosperous world order"--from the League of Nations after World War I to the proclamation of a "New World Order" after the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet, "if the history of the last hundred years teaches one lesson it is that the Anglo-Americans consistently underestimate the difficulty of establishing the global democratic and capitalistic peace that they want." So why have utopian dreams continued to appear achievable and even imminent, despite so many discouragements, to an otherwise pragmatic and often ruthless people? Mead suggests that "The ever-recurring belief that the world is about to become a much better place...is closely related to the positive view of change that has made such great contributions to Anglo-American success." It all boils down to Progress. Anglo-Americans have come to see history as "the story of steady improvement based on the spread of rational, scientific thought."

Given the phenomenal success of their agenda, the Anglo-Americans have unsurprisingly concluded that God is on their side (or, for more secular temperaments, that all the forces of history and nature are on their side), and this obliges them to take the lead in bringing forth a utopian future--the completion of history. In line with this divine call, the Anglo-American world has seen an explosion of movements for social betterment. "Workers are protected and women emancipated. Capital punishment is abolished. European prisons of today provide better living conditions than medieval aristocrats enjoyed...." Movements to abolish war continue as well. And of course, to eliminate war we must eliminate the causes of war. Thus, poverty can no longer be accepted, so we need a prosperous global economy. Since free democratic states are less likely to fight wars (or so the Anglo-Americans firmly believe), democracy must be spread worldwide. "Those who try to thwart this progress are fighting God's will or blocking human nature from its right to fulfill its aspirations and achieve its justly deserved freedom--and that is the essence of evil."

* * *

But to the endless consternation of reformers and utopian dreamers, not everyone agrees. Not everyone is thrilled with the grand project. Millions of people throughout the world see capitalism as nothing more than a godless, criminal system of unbridled greed, theft, exploitation, and inhumanity. "Cruelty and greed in the service of an inflexible, absolute, and utterly inhuman will to power, made more formidable by an insolently arrogant hypocrisy and exuding irresistible but intolerable vulgarity: that is what our enemies since the seventeenth century have seen when they looked our way." Fear and hatred of the political, social, and economic basis of Anglo-American civilization is one of the most powerful forces shaping world history.

Not only does it represent greed, arrogance, and violence, the United States, like the old British Empire, is seen by many outsiders as "a horrifying mix of Puritanism and permissiveness, a ghastly blend of parsons and prostitutes." On the one hand, our enemies see the "stuffy hypocrisy of Victorian England." On the other hand, they cringe at "the fierceness of the American appetite." As Mead explains, the anti-American feeling reflects a profound cultural unease:

"It was the vulgar popular culture, already visible in British music halls, that would exemplify both the hideous depths to which the Anglo-Saxon world had fallen and the existential threat that world presented to everything good, true, and beautiful in Europe itself.... This hideous underculture, revolting but somehow dangerously seductive, puritanical yet salacious, has been horrifying foreigners for nearly two centuries."

Mass production and technology have magnified the impact of this vulgar low culture on the rest of the world. Ordinary people all over the planet go to the movies and see the American lifestyle for themselves: the uppity women, the young people ready to start lives of their own without deference to tradition or parents. Cultural products designed for the American mass market began to pour out in a steady stream, with unwelcome political and social consequences for elites and traditionalists everywhere.

For many people, accepting capitalism would be tantamount to accepting the supremacy of America and Protestant Christianity--a proposition which cannot help but offend their nationalistic and religious sentiments. It would also mean bowing to a culture of vulgar consumerism and obscenity. Perhaps most daunting of all is how "Industrial and social revolutions that took decades or even generations to unwind in the Anglo-American world suddenly appear in far less developed countries where the consequences of several revolutions must be digested at once." We tend to forget that capitalism and democracy took a long time to develop in England and America, and went through difficult and painful stages of development. The steam engine changed the marketplace in the eighteenth century. Railroads did not appear until a generation later. Radio and automobiles awaited the early twentieth century. Television and mass air travel came in the middle of the century, and the computer and the internet have been transforming our lives just since the end of the Cold War. All of this progress was slow and steady compared to what other peoples are now facing.

We complain, for example, when we see corruption in new governments that we are supporting. Yet, by modern standards, "eighteenth-century English governments were staggeringly incompetent and corrupt. High government officials considered bribery and theft part of the job.... Elections in nineteenth-century America were disorganized, dangerous, and notoriously corrupt." Population growth was another challenge that took a long time to cope with. Of the 3.4 million New Yorkers in 1900, for instance, "[m]ost of them lived in squalor."

The point is that capitalist development presented Britain and America with problems they could not easily solve. Over two centuries, in the two countries best suited to manage capitalist change, one challenge after another relentlessly overwhelmed authorities who could barely respond. "It is small wonder then," reflects Meads, "that so many countries today are having a hard time making the adjustments and improvements that the accelerating pace of global change demands."

The ability to compete successfully in the new global capitalistic world is the only modern route to wealth and power. But people who do not like the system to begin with, and people who are ill-equipped to play the game well, become poorer and less powerful, and then they become alienated and angry. "Far from satisfying the deepest desires of human beings, the present world system and world order frustrate and enrage many people." And so, for four hundred years, two world views have been taking shape. The Anglo-Americans

"have seen themselves as defending and sometimes advancing liberty, protecting the weak, providing opportunity to the poor, introducing the principles of morality and democracy into international life, and creating more egalitarian and more just societies at home and abroad. Their enemies have looked at the same set of facts and seen a ruthless assault on every kind of social and moral decency."

* * *

How is this to be reconciled? Mead, a Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, advocates an enlightened diplomacy based on a fresh understanding of our own history and acknowledgment of the legitimate concerns of our adversaries.

His first lesson is: if the plan works, stick to it. Maintain an open, dynamic society at home. Bring society's economic wealth out into world trade. Defend a balance of power in Asia and the Middle East, just as Britain did in Europe. Open the global system to others, including competitors, in times of peace. Use economic force as a weapon in times of war. Promote liberal democratic institutions and values around the world.

Yet it is just this last piece--promoting democracy abroad--that has to be reexamined.

On the one hand, the story of today's radical Islamic reformers is not so different from the story of Christian reformers, and this suggests that the outcomes of these stories may also be the same. The Puritans wished to return to the original, pure source of Christianity, just as contemporary Muslim reformers wish to return to the original, pure source of Islam. Both groups have sought to build a commonwealth based exclusively on the revealed word of God. Both groups have been intolerant of heresy. And both groups have been ready to defend and promote their religious views by war.

But looking back at history, we see that it was precisely out of the Protestant Reformation that today's modern dynamic society grew. It was the Puritan "failure to establish a permanent theocracy in Britain that enabled British society to take the next step forward." Similarly, Mead sees signs of the same thing occurring in Islam. "The reformers are unlikely to achieve their ambition to remake the entire religious landscape of the Islamic world." There are too many rival traditions, deeply rooted in the souls of many pious Muslims. Furthermore, against the reformers' drive for a more closed and narrow view of Islam, "the Internet is making the great works of Islamic scholarship available to tens of millions of Muslims, including women, who can and will be free to draw their own conclusions about what their faith means and how it should be lived. Theological diversity within Islam seems bound to increase."

On the other hand, it is imperative for Americans to acknowledge their role in the world, to fully grasp "the paradoxical relationship between the success of American society at home...and the level of global unhappiness with the American project and the American way." We need to address the profound differences that divide Islamic civilization from Anglo-American civilization. For three hundred years, Christian powers have been carving up the Islamic world; for many Arabs, the Crusades never really ended. Because "the maritime system and the European civilization from which it sprang lack legitimacy from nearly every point of view." Mead believes, "There is no way forward without a much deeper encounter between the United States and the Arab world, and this encounter cannot succeed unless [we] can learn to talk less and listen more."

In pursuit of this higher diplomacy, Mead turns for inspiration to the American philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr, "whose insight contributed so much to America's moral and political self-understanding during the Cold War." Niebuhr sought to balance effective global action with serious self-questioning. America's active struggle against communism was completely necessary, but the central problem for our national destiny "was whether the United States could maintain an appropriate humility before God and man even as it embarked on a life-and-death struggle with the Soviet Union." We know, Niebuhr noted, that the position of power we hold in the world is partly due "to factors and forces in the complex pattern of history that we did not create and from which we do not deserve to benefit. If we apprehend this religiously, the sense of destiny ceases to be a vehicle of pride and becomes the occasion for a new sense of responsibility." Niebuhr told Americans that we needed to combat Soviet influence around the world and remain conscious and critical of our own moral and political claims, not confusing our "own aspirations, however noble they appeared or however virtuous it felt to revel in them, with the good of all mankind." This approach, Mead believes, is even more necessary today than it was during the Cold War. To understand the terrorists, the United States "will have to come to terms with rage and frustration that is more deeply seated, more diffuse, and harder to reconcile" than anything we faced with the Soviet Union.

* * *

Finally, Mead challenges us by probing an uncomfortable question: what is the point of preserving Anglo-American power? He begins by reviewing the case against capitalist society. A society with no higher purpose than mere affluence becomes materially strong, but morally and intellectually weak.

"After all the fire and storm of the historical process, the struggles between good and evil, progress and reaction, the long and difficult climb from barbarism and slavery up into the light of civilization and finally of free civil society, at last and at length we struggle up to the peak of the mountain to encounter the culmination of generations of human striving: Homer Simpson.... The world turns into a big mall, and we all go shopping: forever.... Were all the heroism of the past, all the suffering, all the passionate faith, the sacrifice, the religious and political contests simply to build a shopper's paradise? Does liberal society really stand for nothing more that the accumulation of material possessions?"

This is precisely the empty, meaningless society that many people around the world see when they look to the West, and it is a criticism that needs to be taken very seriously. Unfortunately, Mead's response is predictable and unconvincing. "The best and I think decisive response to this critique...[is] that humanity has an instinct for growth and change." This may well be true, but humanity has many other instincts as well. It is one thing to say that openness to change creates an ideal milieu for the development of capitalism. It is quite another to say that this capitalistic drive suffices as the spiritual meaning of life. But Mead believes he sees the true "grandeur of the human race" in the Anglo-America "quest to fulfill the human instinct for change, arising out of a deep and apparently built-in human belief that through change we encounter the transcendent and the divine." This amounts to little more than saying that the Anglo-American way of life is good because the Anglo-American way of life is good. We would do well to seek a more convincing explanation.

Editorial Review:

A stunningly insightful account of the global political and economic system, sustained first by Britain and now by America, that has created the modern world.

The key to the two countries' predominance, Mead argues, lies in the individualistic ideology inherent in the Anglo-American religion. Over the years Britain and America's liberal democratic system has been repeatedly challeged—by Catholic Spain and Louis XIV, the Nazis, communists, and Al Qaeda—and for the most part, it has prevailed. But the current conflicts in the Middle East threaten to change that record unless we foster a deeper understanding of the conflicts between the liberal world system and its foes.

London: The Biography

Peter Ackroyd

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 51 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

alternately frustrating and interesting 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This book is at times very interesting. At times it is a chore to wade through the attempts to link places and times throughout history. The author really reaches for connections through history as if making them is the only point of the book. I wonder if he was just trying to find something to link the various subjects so that the book didn't feel completely disjointed. The organization by theme instead of chronology sometimes gives the book this feel. I personally liked that it was not a simple chronology, however.

Some of the other reviewers have mentioned the lack of maps. I can't stress enough the need to have some on hand while you are reading this book! If you are genuinely curious you will find it maddening not be able to see the streets and places so picturesquely described.

Having said all of that, I have certainly learned quite a bit. The poor are often not much recorded in history and there is a lot to be found about them in this book. Certainly, the poor are discussed far more than the wealthy, but their numbers and thus their impact was greater.

Ultimately, this book is like an impressionist painting. If you look at the details it doesn't always seem clear. But the whole is an intriguing image of a massive and ever changing subject.

Editorial Review:

Here are two thousand years of London’s history and folklore, its chroniclers and criminals and plain citizens, its food and drink and countless pleasures. Blackfriar’s and Charing Cross, Paddington and Bedlam. Westminster Abbey and St. Martin in the Fields. Cockneys and vagrants. Immigrants, peasants, and punks. The Plague, the Great Fire, the Blitz. London at all times of day and night, and in all kinds of weather. In well-chosen anecdotes, keen observations, and the words of hundreds of its citizens and visitors, Ackroyd reveals the ingenuity and grit and vitality of London. Through a unique thematic tour of the physical city and its inimitable soul, the city comes alive.

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

David Fromkin

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Total reviews: 126 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling account of how the modern Middle East came into being after World War I, and why it is in upheaval today

In our time the Middle East has proven a battleground of rival religions, ideologies, nationalisms, and dynasties. All of these conflicts, including the hostilities between Arabs and Israelis that have flared yet again, come down, in a sense, to the extent to which the Middle East will continue to live with its political inheritance: the arrangements, unities, and divisions imposed upon the region by the Allies after the First World War.

In A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin reveals how and why the Allies came to remake the geography and politics of the Middle East, drawing lines on an empty map that eventually became the new countries of Iraq, Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon. Focusing on the formative years of 1914 to 1922, when all-even an alliance between Arab nationalism and Zionism-seemed possible he raises questions about what might have been done differently, and answers questions about why things were done as they were. The current battle for a Palestinian homeland has its roots in these events of 85 years ago.

Four Queens: The Provencal Sisters Who Ruled Europe

Nancy Goldstone

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Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Four accomplished sisters who rose from near obscurity to become the most powerful women in Europe

Set against the backdrop of the turbulent thirteenth century, a time of chivalry and crusades, poetry, knights, and monarchs comes the story of the four beautiful daughters of the count of Provence whose brilliant marriages made them the queens of France, England, Germany, and Sicily.

From a cultured childhood in Provence, each sister was propelled into a world marked by shifting alliances, intrigue, and subterfuge. Marguerite, the eldest, whose resolution and spirit would be tested by the cold splendor of the Palais du Roi in Paris; Eleanor, whose soaring political aspirations would provoke her kingdom to civil war; Sanchia, the neglected wife of the richest man in England who bought himself the crown of Germany; and Beatrice, whose desire for sovereignty was so acute that she risked her life to earn her place at the royal table.

A compulsively readable narrative, Four Queens shatters the myth that women were helpless pawns in a society that celebrated physical prowess and masculine intellect. A riveting historical saga for fans of Alison Weir and Antonia Fraser.

Homage to Catalonia (Classic, 20th-Century, Audio)

George Orwell

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Total reviews: 93 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Homage, Take 2: what about Aragon? 4 out of 5 stars.
32 of 33 people found this review helpful.

After re-reading Catalonia, some 20 years after my first encounter, I am disappointed. I do not think that this is Orwell's best work. It has many of his strengths, mainly the elegant, efficient and straightforward prose that he developed so impressively, but there are some flaws. Main flaw in my view is the fact that the main political theme has become dead and irrelevant. Stalin died some decades ago, the Soviet Empire collapsed, we don't need to dig in the little details of their abominable strategies any longer. Of course we can't blame Orwell for the fact that his concerns are not ours any more. But it shows that the book was not timeless in the sense of surviving its immediate subject, as his other non-fiction did.
Second main weakness of the book: the narration of the Barcelona street fighting and the attempts at understanding them are rather boring.
On the strong side: the tales from the Aragon front are much more interesting. Orwell saw less fighting than he was keen to experience, but he describes the trench routine with the same livelyness that he brought to Wigan coalmines and Paris restaurants previously.
He did see enough fighting to get dangerously injured. People said to him that few men survive a shot through the neck, so he was lucky. He thinks he would have been luckier if he had not been shot at all.
Orwell published the book a few months after his adventure, and before the Spanish Civil War was over. Surprisingly the book was a commercial failure then, and equally surprisingly it has later been named as one of the best non-fiction books of the century.
Why was it ignored in the early time? Possibly because he told the world things that the world didn't want to know. He busted the myth that there was a confrontation of the good and the bad in Spain, that democracy fought fashism. Orwell shows us that there were at least 3 camps, not 2. The most vicious fighting that he experienced was among the 'good guys'. The government side was influenced strongly by the communist party who had secured the support from Russia. Since no other country provided weapons to the government side, that secured a lot of mileage.
Orwell was a hopeless romantic, who loved the feeling of working class rule that he got when he first arrived in Barcelona. That must be the reason for the otherwise incomprehensible book title. That basically socialist attitude must also have put quite a few potential readers off at the time of publication.
Orwell later saw the few months in Spain as his political training period. It put him off communism and Stalin for good, but confirmed his socialist attitude, which however never found a political home in a party, though he did support Labor in his remaining years, from the outside.

Editorial Review:

In 1936, Geroge Orwell went to Spain to report on the Civil War and instead joined the P.O.U.M. militia to fight against the Fascists. In this now famous account, he describes both the bleak and the comic aspects of trench warfare.

Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power

Niall Ferguson

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Total reviews: 76 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The British Empire was the largest in all history: the nearest thing to world domination ever achieved. By the eve of World War II, around a quarter of the world's land surface was under some form of British rule. Yet for today's generation, the British Empire seems a Victorian irrelevance. The time is ripe for a reappraisal, and in Empire, Niall Ferguson boldly recasts the British Empire as one of the world's greatest modernizing forces.An important new work of synthesis and revision, Empire argues that the world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain's Age of Empire. The spread of capitalism, the communications revolution, the notion of humanitarianism, and the institutions of parliamentary democracy-all these can be traced back to the extraordinary expansion of Britain's economy, population, and culture from the seventeenth century until the mid-twentieth. On a vast and vividly colored canvas, Empire shows how the British Empire acted as midwife to modernity.Displaying the originality and rigor that have made him the brightest light among British historians, Ferguson shows that the story of the Empire is pregnant with lessons for today-in particular for the United States as it stands on the brink of a new era of imperial power, based once again on economic and military supremacy. A dazzling tour de force, Empire is a remarkable reappraisal of the prizes and pitfalls of global empire.

Read My Heart: A Love Story in England's Age of Revolution

Jane Dunn

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Historical -> British -> General AAS
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Historical -> General

Editorial Review:

When Sir William Temple (1628–99) and Dorothy Osborne (1627–95) began their passionate love affair, civil war was raging in Britain, and their families—parliamentarians and royalists, respectively—did everything to keep them apart. Yet the couple went on to enjoy a marriage and a sophisticated partnership unique in its times. Surviving the political chaos of the era, the Black Plague, the Great Fire of London, and the deaths of all their nine children, William and Dorothy made a life together for more than forty years.

Drawing upon extensive research and the Temples’ own extraordinary writings—including Dorothy’s dazzling letters, hailed by Virginia Woolf as one of the glories of English literature—Jane Dunn gives us an utterly captivating dual biography, the first to examine Dorothy’s life as an intellectual equal to her diplomat husband. While she has been known to posterity as the very symbol of upper-class seventeenth-century domestic English life, Dunn makes clear that Dorothy was a woman of great complexity, of passion and brilliance, noteworthy far beyond her role as a wife and mother. The remarkable story of William and Dorothy’s life together—illuminated here by the author’s insight and her vivid sense of place and time—offers a rare glimpse into the heart and spirit of one of the most turbulent and intriguing eras in British history.

The Wit & Wisdom of Winston Churchill

James C. Humes, Richard M. Nixon

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Historical -> British -> General AAS
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Political

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Utterly Delightful 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

A compact book with more than 1,000 quotations and anecdotes you can enjoy at any time.

Here are just a few:

Violet Asquith, the irrepressible daughter of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, found a kindred spirit in Churchill, who served in her father's Cabinet.

Once, in a flight of philosophical gloom, she turned to her dinner partner and said, "Winston, in terms of infinity, we are cosmic dust - we are just worms."

"Perhaps, Violet", Churchill replied, "but I am a glowworm."

* * *

If "Franglais" has been only recently coined to describe the bastardizing of the French language by English words, Churchill may have been the sire of this hybrid argot. Sometimes his additions to the noble Gallic tongue were even more attrocious than his accent.

During some delicate negotions at Casablanca, the stubborn Charles de Gaulle denounced an Allied plan to fuse him and his rival, French general Henri Giraud. Churchill, glaring at the Gaulle, delivered this concoction: "Si vous m'obstaclerez, je vous liquiderai!" (If you obstacle me, I will liquidate you!) A bewildered de Gaulle backed off.

* * *

In 1900, the twenty-six-year-old Churchill, after just being elected to Parliament, made a speaking tour of America. In Washington, he was introduced to a majestically endowed woman from Richmond, Virginia, who prided herself upon her devotion to the "lost cause of the Confederacy." Her family were Democrats who had opposed the Repubican policy of Reconstruction.

Anxious that Churchill should know her sentiments, she remarked as she gave him her hand, "Mr. Churchill, you see before you a rebel who has not been Reconstructed."

"Madam," he replied with a deep bow that surveyed her decolletage, "reconstruction in your case would be blasphemous."

Editorial Review:

An enormously entertaining compendium of witticisms, anecdotes, and trivia about Winston Churchill by a former White House speechwriter.

Cochrane: The Real Master and Commander

David Cordingly

Amazon Price: $12.24 List Price: $18.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Bloomsbury USA Amazon Marketplace: 38 new & used starting at $9.69

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Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Historical -> British -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Historical -> British -> General AAS
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Historical -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Excellent Biography of an Extraordinary Man 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

I think I am correct in saying that I have read all of the biographies of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, published in the last few decades, and I would rate this volume as the being the best of all, giving good coverage of all phases of Cochrane's long naval and political careers. Unlike some authors, Cordingly is careful to match Cochrane's own accounts of his activities against other primary sources, and to give equal balance to Cochrane's activities in the wars for South American independence with those during the Napoleonic Wars.

Cochrane was an extraordinary man, his genuine history perhaps more amazing than any of the fiction inspired by his real-world activities, this is a biography that does him justice, lauding his good qualities and achievements without hiding his flaws and failures.

Editorial Review:

From the bestselling author of Under the Black Flag comes the definitive biography of Thomas Cochrane, the swashbuckling nineteenth-century maritime hero who “packed [in] enough drama and history to shame both Horatio Nelson and Sir Francis Drake” (Ken Rignle, Washington Post)

In this fascinating account of Thomas Cochrane’s extraordinary life, David Cordingly (Under the Black Flag and The Billy Ruffian) unearths startling new details about the real-life “Master and Commander”—from his heroic battles against the French navy to his role in the liberation of Chile, Peru, and Brazil, and the stock exchange scandal that forced him out of England and almost ended his naval career. Drawing on previously unpublished papers, his own travels, wide reading, and original research, Cordingly tells the rip-roaring story of the archetypal Romantic hero who conquered the seas and, in the process, defined his era.