Anzac Day

Anzac Day has some significance for our family even though we live on the other side of the globe. 

My wife’s grandfather Percy Kempster DSM served in the Royal Australian Navy and sadly did not survive the war. His daughter, who remembered him as a kind father, died a few years ago at the age of 98. 

Australians and New Zealanders came in very large numbers to help defend Britain in two world wars, and one of my heroes was the Australian General Sir John Monash, whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Prussia. He commanded a brigade at Gallipoli attempting to preserve the life of his men, and rose to become commander the Australian Imperial Forces during the last decisive campaigns of 1918.

The great sacrifices made by these countries with such small populations was brought home to me  some time ago when I was searching online for the cemetery in France where my uncle was buried. I came across a small cemetery where there were only 46 soldiers buried….. 2 British and 44 New Zealanders.

Thank you brave ANZACs for your service.   

[reposted from 2014 but it is worth repeating in my opinion]

OT: The Summit: Ed Conway

From the back cover: The idea of world leaders gathering in the midst of economic crisis has become all too familiar. But the meeting at Bretton Woods in 1944 was the only time countries from around the world have agreed to overhaul the structure of the international monetary system. And, what’s more they were successful-it was the closest to perfection the world’s economy has ever been. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished accounts, diaries and oral histories, this gripping book describes the conference in stunning colour and clarity.

Author Ed Conway is the economics editor of Sky News, and was previously economics editor of the Daily Telegraph. He has written a fine book that is in fact more than an account of the Bretton Woods Conference, it is an economic history of Europe between the end of the Great War to our current situation. I did not understand most of the economics in the book as I am a believer in the simple Wilkins Micawber school of fiscal responsibility. 

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

I sometimes think that many British Chancellors of the Exchequer hope that David Copperfield, the magician, will conjure some money for them rather than obeying Dicken’s mantra. 

The history and economics are interesting, but it is the larger than life characters in the book that make this book so gripping. The two dominant economists at Bretton Woods were the British John Maynard Keynes and the American Harry Dexter White. Two very different people Keynes, from an early age outshone his intellectual parents, father a Cambridge lecturer, mother a social reformer and politician, was educated at Eton and Cambridge. A member of the Bloomsbury set he was a conscientious objector. White, a First Lieutenant during the war, was the son of a Boston Hardware merchant, who had changed his name from Weit, after arriving in America from Lithuania. It is the contrast in backgrounds between the main protagonists that is part of the fascination of the story of Bretton Woods.

The book is full of historical vignettes about the period and the characters, some not flattering to the Bloomsbury set as they partied while men died in the trenches, and some vital to understand the very different standards of the period. The Bretton Woods conference was held in the slightly run down Mount Washington Hotel, one reason being that its owner Bostonian David Stoneman was Jewish. Both Henry Morgenthau Jr, US Treasury Secretary and Harry White, the US chief negotiator, had been turned away from other New England hotels in the past because they were Jewish. 

But some things never change:

Among the latter category was the Greek delegate Varvaressos, who seemed, to judge from his interjections, not to have absorbed the fact that the Fund was to be used only in emergencies rather than providing a steady stream of cash for his country……..He is a decorative creature and an entertaining companion, but I am convinced that, despite the high esteem in which he is held by the Treasury, he is fundamentally a bit of a fraud.

And in recent times we have seen a leftist finance minister with a millionaire lifestyle represent Greece, and achieve more self publicity than concrete help for the Greek people, who I might say deserved far better.  

We shouldn’t be too hard on any of the people of that time after all only twenty one years after the end of the Great War the world had been plunged into another catastrophe of mind blowing proportions.

one in five of the entire Polish population was killed; one in eleven of the Russian population; one in fourteen Greeks; one in fifteen Germans; one in seventy-seven French; one in 125 Britons. In those countries occupied by the Nazis, the fatalities were disproportionately among the educated population.

The Summit was one of the best non fiction books I have read for some time, highly recommended.  

 

OT: Bridge Over Troubled Water

There is a story in this part of Devon that the bridge referred to in Simon and Garfunkel’s iconic song Bridge Over Troubled Water is that over the River Exe at Bickleigh. Paul Simon spent some time in England in the 1960s staying in the village, and perhaps the beauty of the setting inspired him to write the song. We had lunch there on Saturday with friends, who emigrated to the USA in 1981. The Heron in the river certainly didn’t mind the troubled waters, and we had a great time talking about old times.  

 

My varied reading: January 2015

As I commented earlier as I am reading some hefty non-crime fiction books alongside my usual crime fiction diet I will only be making the briefest comments on the books I read, unless there is something particularly interesting to note.

Since my last review I have read:

Entry Island: Peter May:- Neither of the two plot strands in this long book were particularly original, but the descriptive writing was excellent. The historical back story set in 19th century Scotland was exceptionally good, and a little bit superior to the modern day story set on Entry Island off the coast of Canada. 

Duet in Beirut: Mishka Ben-David translated from the Hebrew by Evan Fallenberg:- After a failed mission in Beirut agent Ronen is dismissed from Mossad, and when his former commander Gadi discovers he has gone to Beirut to redeem himself he follows to prevent another disaster. There is some discussion about the morality of targeted assassinations that inevitably lead to tit-for-tat killings, and a lot about the interpersonal relationships between the characters, a situation that is complicated by Ronen’s wife having been Gadi’s lover in the past. A good read with much more about planning an operation rather than the actual action.

The Golden Egg: Donna Leon:- The Guido Brunetti books are usually enjoyable, and his close family life with Paola and the children make such a interesting contrast to that of so many other detectives. But this was such a miserable slow paced story that even a devoted Donna Leon fan was struggling at times. 

From Eden To Exile: Eric H. Cline:- The author discusses the archaeological evidence that might explain some biblical mysteries. An interesting read although no easy answers were found.

This Dark Road To Mercy: Wiley Cash:- A gripping story told from several perspectives set mostly in the author’s home state of North Carolina. This book deservedly won the 2014 CWA Gold Dagger.

A Mad Catastrophe: Geoffrey Wawro:- One of many books published in 2014 on the centenary  of the outbreak of the Great War. This long book deals with the disastrous conduct of the war by Austria-Hungary in 1914 on both the Serbian and Russian Fronts. Full of unpleasant details of ludicrous offensives that lead to horrendous losses, and the ultimate fall of the Hapsburg and Romanov dynasties. With a few exceptions most Great War Generals seem to have been out horse riding, playing polo, or chasing women when their military schools covered the tactical lessons of the American Civil War, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, and the Russo-Japanese War. The Great War was a dreadful tragedy that cast a long dark shadow over the last century, and we are still living with the results today.

I also tackled two very different spy thrillers A Most Wanted Man by John le Carre, and A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming [winner of the 2012 CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger] which was my favourite read in January. The contrast between these books was fascinating, and in some ways surprising as the veteran was surpassed by the comparative newcomer.

I haven’t read John le Carre since The Looking Glass War [1964] back in 2010, a novel nowhere near as good as the Karla trilogy, or The Constant Gardener. Since then I have re-watched the TV version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and seen the 2011 movie with Gary Oldman, and am now watching the TV version of Smiley’s People with the brilliant Alec Guinness. The amusing thing about The Looking Glass War was that the three sections were introduced by quotations from Rudyard Kipling, John Buchan and Rupert Brooke,  a choice hardly representative of  le Carre’s political stance today.

The problem with A Wanted Man is that the narrative is so turgid, and lacks the subtlety of the Karla trilogy and many of the earlier books. I read a ranking of le Carre’s novels somewhere on the internet that puts A Most Wanted Man at 20 out of 22.

I think this book could have been so much better. The author hints that the “most wanted man” Issa Karpov, a Chechen who has been tortured by the Russians,  might not be everything he seems, and there might be a clever twist to the story; but unfortunately there isn’t and the ending is both predictable, and abrupt. What was most disappointing was that most of the characters seemed more like walking political statements than real human beings. I will be extremely interested to see what the movie starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as German intelligence agent Gunther Bachman makes of the book. 

Charles Cumming’s A Foreign Country also begins slowly, but it has plenty of trade craft and action as it follows disgraced agent Thomas Kell as he attempts to track down the missing newly appointed head of MI6, Amelia Levene. This is more nuanced novel with some intriguing little twists in the plot, and a very exciting ending. This was a book  that definitely deserved the award of the 2012 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. I enjoyed it so much that I am now reading the sequel A Colder War, which also features Thomas Kell.   

Iron Curtain: Anne Applebaum

My serious reading project needs a brief interlude because Anne Applebaum’s superb Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe contains so much detailed research, and so many accounts of tragic events that I do need a breather. You can only take so much evil and perhaps attempting to read Bloodlands and Iron Curtain back to back was not wise. I will return to Iron Curtain but felt I should say something about it now. 

I spent an hour today watching Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House of Commons. Maria Miller, the Minister for Culture  has resigned after repaying £5,800 of expenses claimed in error. What struck me was the way smug bank benchers from the government side sprang to their feet asking ludicrously sycophantic questions such as “Would the PM agree with me that we are all wonderful, and that the two apprenticeships created in my constituency are a sign that all the coalition’s policies are working, and we are entering a golden age of full employment?” Or some such nonsense. 

It was all a bit reminiscent of the show trials of Stalin described in Iron Curtain, in which lifelong communists, recent ministers of the interior and general secretaries of the communist party stood up and suddenly admitted they were CIA agents, working for the Americans, Tito and the Zionists.

Iron Curtain is full of stories, some horrifying , some worrying and some amusing. Surprisingly during that period many in Britain’s elite supported Stalin’s regime, by actively spying for the Soviets like Kim Philby and the notorious Cambridge spy ring, or by being fellow travellers and apologists for the excesses of the regime.

 Long after he had fled East Germany, Wolfgang Leonhard-by then Professor Leonhard- addressed the question [of the show trials of 1936-1938] in a famous annual lecture at Yale University, as part of his undergraduate course on Soviet History.

Among the possible explanations for the ‘Great Purge’, Leonhard listed Stalin’s insanity, Russia’s historic fear of foreign invasion-and an outbreak , in the 1930s, of highly active sunspots.

Anne Applebaum describes a post war Europe that was a terrible place to live with deportations and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale, even more terrible because the war was over, but the hatred remained.

The Czech people for instance were told to prepare for the final retribution of White Mountain for the return of the Czech lands to the Czech people. The Battle of White Mountain was fought in 1620 when Bohemia was defeated by the Holy Roman Empire and her German allies. This went on all over Eastern Europe.

Between 1945 and 1948, some 89,000 Hungarians were thus ‘persuaded’ to leave Slovakia for the Sudetenland, where they replaced the missing Germans, or else to cross the border into Hungary itself. Some 70,000 Slovaks arrived from Hungary in their place.

Not a word of protest was heard from outside the region. One Hungarian historian declared that this was because”the fate of the Hungarian minority did not interest anyone”.

But in truth, the fate of none of the minorities interested anyone……….By 1950, not much remained of multi-ethnic Eastern Europe. 

Although of course there was one multi-ethnic state left after all the forced population movements, Yugoslavia.    

Any Given Day

I have now finished reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale, and the book is in the words of Anne Applebaum “the definitive history of the mass killing of this period”.  I have read many books on twentieth century Polish, Russian and German history but this superbly researched book brought home better than most the utter horror of the period. In a mere twelve year period from 1933-1945 the Soviet and Nazi regimes murdered fourteen million people. Fourteen million individual lives. 

I think Bloodlands should be compulsory reading for anyone in the west who was ever a Communist fellow traveller or a party member in the 1940s and 1950s; for those people who exhibit concern about the Bombing of Dresden: for anyone who thinks about supporting an academic boycott of a tiny country in the Eastern Mediterranean; and above all for those teenagers taken on school trips to Auschwitz. Auschwitz was not the whole story and they need to learn about the Einsatzgruppen, the mass shootings and burnings, Babi Yar, Bikernieki Forest, Katyn Wood, Gulags, deportations, deliberate starvations, the Great Terror……..

I learned a lot.

Concerning Shmuel Zygielbojm, who was the representative of the Jewish Bund to the Polish government in exile in London.

In a careful suicide note of 12 May 1943, addressed to the Polish president and prime-minister but intended to be shared with other Allied leaders, he wrote ‘”Though the responsibility for the crime of the murder of the entire Jewish nation rests above all upon the perpetrators, indirect blame must be borne by humanity itself.” The next day he burned himself alive in front of the British parliament, joining in he wrote , the fate of his fellow Jews in Warsaw.

And that as many Poles were killed in the bombing of Warsaw in 1939 as Germans were killed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945.

And perhaps even more stunning…

On any given day in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews than had been killed by pogroms in the entire history of the Russian Empire.  

OT: Serious reading

My crime fiction reading has been put on hold for the moment as I am planning to read two outstanding prize winning history books. Bloodlands Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder, and Iron Curtain The Crushing of Eastern Europe by Anne Applebaum.

I am at present about a third of the way through Bloodlands, and in the words of Anthony Beevor [author of Stalingrad] it is “original, wonderful and horrifying”. The actions of political leaders are far more frightening than anything invented in a crime fiction novel.

I was inspired, if that is the appropriate word in the circumstances, to read these books by the apparent eagerness of  our current politicians to get involved in the Ukrainian-Russian dispute over Crimea. For much of my life politicians of the left in Great Britain viewed the Soviet Union as some kind of socialist utopia ignoring the horrendous crimes perpetrated by Stalin and his cohorts. While those on the right conveniently forgot that with a few outstanding exceptions their leaders were prepared to appease and support Hitler as a bulwark against Communism.

Now politicians from both left and right seem oblivious to the fact that financially challenged Great Britain is no longer a world power, or even a European one. Our main problem at present is not the referendum that allowed the secession of Crimea from Ukraine, but the referendum in September 2014 that may allow the secession of Scotland from the rest of the United Kingdom.

We would lose oil revenues, our nuclear submarine base, whisky, smoked salmon, Andy Murray, Sean Connery, and Alan Cumming; and as well as those disasters our entire political system will be thrown into chaos until the new elections in 2020.

Everything flows, everything changes.

You can’t board the same prison train twice…..Vasily Grossman  

Inspector De Luca, a policeman in Fascist Italy comes to BBC4

The quality of many of the sub-titled crime/political series that BBC4 have shown in their Saturday night slot has been very high. Spiral [France], The Killing [Denmark], The Bridge [Sweden/Denmark], Borgen [Denmark], Montalbano and Young Montalbano [Italy] have set a high standard not least for the amount of interesting and very attractive female characters.

The sub-titled series that has just finished on Saturday was called Salamander. It was Belgian and despite some good camera work showing Brussels and the countryside, it could never quite get over the handicap of being Belgian. Poor Hercule Poirot must be spinning in his grave to discover his birth country was being run by a sleazy clique, whose solid financial foundations were started by stealing money sent by the British to Brussels. But enough about the EU. Salamander had an identity problem as the plot didn’t quite know whether it was meant to be a police procedural or political thriller with a back story set during WWII. And I would suggest the average British village bobby takes more precautions going into a pub on a Friday night, than apparently the Brussels police do when dealing with murderous conspirators.

I am not one of those who thinks that translated crime fiction and  sub-titled TV is somehow superior. In fact I am concerned that the insistence on publishing both second level crime novels and any old TV series simply because they are foreign and trendy is a grave mistake. British home grown TV can come up with outstanding crime fiction series such as the currently running Line of Duty on BBC2, and last year’s Mayday [BBC], Southcliffe [Channel4] and Broadchurch [ITV].  

But the new BBC4 sub-titled series starting next weekend is Inspector De Luca and I am fairly sure that if this series is anything like the books written by Carlo Lucarelli it will be dramatic and educational TV. The De Luca books are set in the period around the end of WWII, beginning when Italy was occupied in the South by the Allies and in the North by the Germans and their Italian Fascist allies. Benito Mussolini briefly ruling a German puppet state called the Republic of Salo before meeting a just end at the hands of Italian partisans.

I understand the TV series starts earlier in 1938 when Italian Fascism was still a major force in European politics. Incidentally I have two books on my TBR pile from another series set in Italy during those Fascist years, the Commissario Ricciardi novels by Maurizio De Giovanni. [more on this series soon]

How do honest people police a country when the people who make the laws are bigger criminals than those who break the law? [I got that one from Bernie Gunther courtesy of his creator Philip Kerr]

The Great War was the most influential event of the 20th century because it lead to the fall of four defeated empires Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman, and also the grave weakening of the two victorious empires the British and French. But another victor country, Italy suffered a terrible fate and fell into a long dark age that lasted from 1922-1945. 

What happened to Italy after her “victory” in the Great War?

Italy in spite of signing the 1882 Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary had in 1915 joined the conflict in alliance with Britain and France. The Italian army attacked Austria in the Alps and along the Isonzo River, and was shattered by the terrible blood bath most of it caused by the sheer incompetence and cruelty of their commanders. But the war not only caused great loss of life it also discredited Italy’s democratic institutions and lead to their overthrow by Benito Mussolini, and the creation of the world’s first fascist state. For an account of the Italian campaign I can recommend The White War, Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919* by Mark Thompson; it won the prestigious Hessel-Tiltman Prize for History in 2009, and goes some way to explain why Mussolini was able to seize power. 

My reviews of the De Luca series: 

I reviewed Carte Blanche the first in the trilogy here. 

The second The Damned Season I reviewed here.

The last book in the trilogy, Via Del Oche.

*Some of the most iconic figures of the 20th century were involved in that Italian Campaign- ambulance driver Ernest Hemingway, stretcher-bearer Angelo Roncalli later Pope John XXIII, Erwin Rommel, Benito Mussolini, and poet Gabriele D’Annunzio.   

A Tale of Two Back Covers

They were the best of covers and the worst of covers……OK I am biased but comparing the US and UK back covers of Liza Marklund’s new thriller Lifetime I not surprisingly came to the conclusion that the US version is far superior. A nice photo of Liza and blurbs from experts.

The UK version has a blurb from the Daily Express comparing Annika Bengtzon with Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Feeling for Snow 1992, and Clarice Starling in the Thomas Harris novel The Silence of the Lambs 1988. It has been a very long time since I read those books,  they are over twenty years old, and I agree they do have determined female protagonists, but otherwise the Annika Bengtzon books are very different. 

Reading Non-Fiction October 2012

I love history therefore in October along with two crime fiction books I read two non fiction books, and also started a third. 

They may seem depressing alternative choices to dark Scandinavian crime fiction but in fact one of them, Into The Silence, The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis was an inspiring tribute to the men who survived the trenches to risk their lives climbing Everest in the 1920s. Into The Silence has been nominated for the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize and must be a strong contender as despite its length, 578 tightly packed pages, it is a wonderfully interesting read. Within its covers are an English social history of the Edwardian upper class, a demolition of the Great War generals, tales about the Raj, information on Tibetan culture, and an exciting story of mountaineering on the highest point on the planet.  

Europe’s Last Summer by David Fromkin goes into great detail about the path by which Europe went down the path to war in 1914 lead by leaders who did not really understand what they were doing. The Great War was the tragedy from which all the other tragedies over the last century have flowed. 

As late as 1926, as the nation mourned the death of nearly 1 million men, Haig would write on the future of war. ” I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity of the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse-the well bred horse-as you have ever done in the past.”     Into The Silence: Wade Davis    

[Update 13 November: Into The Silence by Wade Davis did win the Samuel Johnson Prize]