This is my review of William Pitt the Younger: A Biography by William Hague.

"Apparently uninterested in sexual relationships…in music, art, society or modern languages and literature", Pitt the Younger does not prove a very engrossing subject for a near-600 page biography. The fascination lies in the late eighteenth century times though which he lived.

The stellar reputation of his father, "The Great Commoner" elevated to the title of the Earl of Chatham, and the hothouse classical education which honed his debating skills, gave Pitt the confidence and eloquence to take on the role of First Minister at the age of only twenty-four, although this was less remarkable at a time when the Commons was dominated by the sons of peers bent on advancing their fortunes and waiting to inherit titles.

One of Pitt's main talents was for prudent budget management and paying off national deficits, which chimes with present-day preoccupations. Sadly, the pressure of European wars and need to oppose the menace of Napoleon caused this to unravel into renewed debt and largescale borrowing, the invention of a form of income tax being one of Pitt's innovations.

Regarded as personally incorruptible "honest Billy", Pitt resorted from the outset to offering peerages as a way of getting supporters on side, on a scale which makes the recent MPs' expense scandal look like chicken feed. For a man with such an eye of administrative detail, the chaos of his personal finances is also surprising, but Hague explains this as the result of his workaholic obsession with the holding of power to serve his country. The excessive consumption of alcohol which contributed to his early death at forty-six may also have contributed to his negligence over personal affairs. This was not entirely his own fault, as from an early age he was encouraged to dose his frequent periods of ill-health with a daily bottle of port.

Although sociable within his circle of loyal friends, Pitt often seemed stiff and arrogant in public. It is tantalising that no explanation survives of the "decisive and insurmountable obstacles" which prevented him from marrying Eleanor Eden, the woman to whom he came closest to "courting".

Sadly, many of the Pitt's early causes – abolition of the slave trade, Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform – foundered, either because he accepted the need to be pragmatic or perhaps lost his youthful idealism. Some of his patchy success seems to have been the chance benefit of indecision or procrastination. Perhaps it was inevitable that the sheer length of time in office was accompanied by a decline in his reputation, the final hammer-blow being the defeat of his fickle Europeans allies at Ulm in 1805. It was interesting to note how much support depended on the British providing subsidies for the armies of other nations.

There is much more meat in Hague's description of a Parliament without clear parties as we know them (although they are currently in a state of flux) and a King George III still retaining a considerable degree of power to obstruct matters – refusing to accept the republican thorn in the flesh Charles Fox as a minister, or sabotaging Pitt's attempts to give Irish Catholics the right to hold office. Pitt's dependence for political survival on the sanity and survival of the king is all too clear.

The minute detail, inclusion of many friends' and politicians' names, before and after ennoblement, and extensive quotations from the convoluted prose favoured in the C18, make this a demanding read at times. I would have liked a little more background context, say on the evolution of the "Whigs" and embryonic Tories; more on the prevailing political situation in the rest of Europe and its colonies and a "glossary" of contemporary politicians would have been useful.

Overall, it is an impressively researched if at times somewhat dry biography.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Homage to Catalonia (Penguin Modern Classics) by George Orwell.

This vivid account of a few months spent fighting the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War reminded me that Orwell was a talented journalist as well as a writer of satirical fiction. He pulls no punches in describing the chaos and lack of resources in periods of mainly uncomfortable inaction punctuated with occasional hairy sorties.

My respect for his judgement was shaken a little by some of his observations – for instance, that he should find it “rather fun….in a boy-scoutish” kind of way to crawl about trying to take pot shots at the enemy without being hit himself, or the unconscious elitism of “Any public school OTC in England is far more like a modern army than we were.” He admits to longing for a powerful gun with which to pulverise the other side, but redeems himself with an admission of real fear when he has to expose himself to enemy fire. Similarly, his account of the experience of being wounded is interesting, together with such insights as the camaraderie between soldiers who know they would be shooting at each other in a different situation. His description of Barcelona as a briefly classless society in which there was no rank or status, and people treated each other as equals, is thought-provoking as regards “what might have been”, but clearly seemed too utopian to last, particularly since the bourgeoisie was simply lying low.

It is revealing that the chronic shortage of weapons may have been part of a deliberate government plan to prevent groups of anarchists or pro-revolutionary Marxists from gaining influence in the struggle. However, Orwell’s self-confessed lack of interest in the political side of the war is both surprising and disappointing, since it is clearly crucial to an understanding of what was going on in this complex struggle, and the outcome of events. Thus, the dramatic chapters on the counterproductive riots between anti-fascist groups in Barcelona – perhaps akin to fights between different revolutionary sects in modern-day Syria – are quite hard to understand. Orwell goes some way to redress this in the two Appendices, which were chapters integrated into the original text, but the result is needlessly disjointed and still somewhat unclear.

Although he produced this book in 1938, too early to judge the tragic outcome, at least Orwell had the prescience to predict that Franco would win, thus setting Spain back for decades.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France by Ruth Harris.

It is hard to identify a modern event which has had as much impact on society as the trials and imprisonment of Alfred Dreyfus on what we now believe to be a trumped up espionage charge of relative insignificance. Having read recently Piers Paul Read's very detailed yet clear and moving account of this, from the arrest of Dreyfus in 1894 to his pardon and reinstatement in the army in 1906, I turned to Ruth Harris for a wider analysis of Dreyfusards versus anti-Dreyfusards.

In the promising introduction, Harris emphasises how families were divided by the Dreyfus affair, with people on both sides often holding contradictory and conflicting views about everything except the innocence or guilt of the man at the heart of it all, or at least his right to a retrial or declaration of innocence. The author presents "two Frances" fighting "for the nation's soul": on one hand, the Dreyfusards, mainly republicans, Protestants, or socialists, upholding Truth and Justice in their demands for a retrial versus the anti-Dreyfusards, often Catholic, anti-semitic, with monarchist sympathies, champions of Tradition and Honour, either convinced of the guilt of Dreyfus or prepared to sacrifice him rather than overthrow the ruling of a military court when they were concerned to support and build up the army after the humiliation of defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

I do not mind that only brief sections of this book are devoted to Dreyfus himself. I admire the author's depth of research and evident deep knowledge, and perhaps, with 137 pages of notes and bibliography, this is not intended for a general reader. Much as I wanted to get absorbed, I found the reading of this excessively hard going. There is a surfeit of detail in an indigestible form, made worse by a fragmentation of information e.g. on the anti-Dreyfusard Maurice Barrès, and the inclusion of specialist terms with inadequate explanation for a non-expert e.g. page 137 (paperback version) references to revolutionary Blanquists and revanchists from the Ligue de la patrie française. In short, there is a failure to distinguish clear, major points from a morass of over-condensed detail on too many characters and attitudes.

I would like to find another book on this of period of French history, but was forced to the disappointed conclusion that it was not worth the expenditure of time to plough through this, referring to other sources for clarification on the way.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation by Oliver Balch.

Themed under the headings of Enterprise, Aspiration and Change, the ten chapters of interviews with a wide range of Indians can be picked and mixed in any order. With the stated “overarching goal..to gain a flavour of the place… the approach is unapologetically subjective” and anecdotal. In this, the author succeeds, but is it enough? I admire Balch’s enthusiasm and confidence, but found myself crying out for more context and analysis, as I searched for nuggets of information in the often banal padding and attempts to showcase Balch’s budding skills as a journalist.

Some of the least likely chapters are the best, as in “Actor Prepares” where the author tracks down Naval, the wannabee Bollywood director who has broken with tradition by giving up the course financed by his father, without telling him. In the process, Balch describes the urban tragedy of the hideous, jerry-built concrete housing blocks in unfinished suburbs where recent migrants to Mumbai are crammed without the money or knowhow to equip themselves adequately.

After visiting the artificial bubble of a western style shopping mall, which girls can only attend chaperoned or with friends, Bauch interviews the retail millionaire who feels that aspiration levels, even amongst the poor of India, are now too high to halt the growing tide of consumption: “material things are rewards for performance”. Can Gandhi’s opposing philosophy of the importance of inner peace and harmony survive against this? It is interesting to read how the ingenious poor of India are beginning to set about achieving their ends. There is the “microfinance” (controversial in view of the interest rates levied) which enables groups of women in the slums to borrow money for small-scale activities, guaranteeing repayments for each other as necessary. Similarly, in remote villages off the beaten track, it is again women who operate like “Avon ladies” selling small packets and jars of cleaning agents. When asked if she is happy with her purchases, an old lady gives the telling response, “Before, we washed our dishes with ash”.

On page 250, a rare piece of analysis asserts, “India is travelling at multiple speeds as in multiple directions. New India is a story of fits and starts, not linear progression.” And in the conclusion: “India is too diverse, too full of paradoxes, too confident ever to be homogenised” or swallowed up by global capitalism. But is this too simplistic? India is clearly in transition, with the poverty of the majority highlighted in the process: state-funded space research versus stagnant villages and mushrooming slums in filthy, lung-searing, gridlocked cities. Will the sheer scale of the economy create such pressures of pollution and instability that India plays a major part in the destruction of our global civilisation as we know it? “India Rising” never probes as deeply as this.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia by Angus Roxburgh.

More readable than many crime thrillers, this mixture of clear analysis with entertaining anecdotes has an authentic ring, Roxburgh being a former BBC Moscow correspondent and sometime PR advisor to Putin’s press secretary.

He acknowledges Putin’s initial success in restoring law and order, curtailing the power of the oligarchs who hijacked Russia’s rapid adoption of capitalism in the 1990s, stabilising the economy, reducing debt, achieving growth (admittedly with the aid of high Russian oil and gas prices) and even in supporting the Americans in their fight against Afghanistan – perhaps not in itself a good thing.

Roxburgh expands on the depressing recent turn of events as an increasingly authoritarian leader establishes the “vertical of power”, appoints cronies to senior positions in key industries, and turns a blind eye to, if not exactly ordering, the liquidation of anyone who dares to criticise corruption in such chilling cases as the shooting of the journalist Anna Politovskaya and the killing in prison of the young lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, “arrested by the very officials he had accused of fraud”.

Thought to have accumulated a vast personal fortune, Putin seeks to retain personal majority support as president partly by impressing people with his often stage-managed macho exploits, but also by resorting to ballot-rigging and laws to restrict the freedom of speech, conscience and mass media, “the fundamental elements of a civilised society” which he promised on first coming to power. Opposition is still too fragmented to bring him down, and he can dismiss the disaffected middle classes as the tools of western influence. Roxburgh is particularly interesting on the comparisons between Putin and his one-term presidential stooge, Medvedev, who seems more liberal and flexible, but unable to stand against him.

Roxburgh is fair-minded in showing how the West has repeatedly failed to see matters from the Russians’ perspective, to sense, for instance, how humiliated they felt to be excluded from NATO when former Eastern Bloc countries have been admitted, and to be regarded as the enemy against which NATO must protect itself. The author points out how the US has repeatedly tried to get Russia to give up nuclear weapons, without relinquishing its own one-sided plans for anti-missile defence. How can Putin be expected to take lessons over Chechnya from a government that went to war with Iraq on spurious grounds, without UN approval and which makes drone attacks on Pakistan?

After an almost naïve expectation of being welcomed by the West, it is sad to see Putin growing hardened and bitter in his sense of rejection borne of a mutual lack of understanding. It is no criticism of Roxburgh that he has no solutions to offer except, “the evidence of history suggest that pragmatic engagement is the only chance of success…..that in the end Russia will reform from within, not under outside pressure”.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

 

This is my review of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin by Ben Judah.

Aged barely three when the Soviet Union collapsed, how did Ben Judah manage to interview so many people, from oligarchs and former leading politicians to the destitute unemployed of the failed collective farms near the Chinese border? Clearly, he must have enormous energy and confidence, aided by fluency in Russian.

He covers quite effectively Putin’s sudden and unexpected rise to power. For years an unremarkable KGB official, Putin was in the “right place at the right time” when Russia needed a strong leader after the “Wild West” capitalism of the 1990s in which many people lost their secure jobs or savings to become destitute, law and order broke down and outlying republics began to revolt. “After ten years of total chaos….he brought social order and economic stability”, with a marked rise in living standards for many, aided by the rising revenue from oil exports.

The strongest section is the very topical information on how Russians have fallen out of love with their modern “Tsar”. The opposition slogan, “a party of crooks and thieves” has adhered firmly to Putin’s “United Russia”. Shocked by corruption and the inefficiency of the over-centralised “vertical” control of power from Moscow, with its lack of concern for peripheral regions treated like colonies, many people have become disgusted by Putin’s personal enrichment, his transparently devious moves to wangle a third term or more as President. They begin to see through the PR fantasies which portray him as an athletic sex symbol catching outsize pike and guiding flocks of geese to safety.

Judah does not try to conceal the flaws and divisions in the opposition. The charismatic Navalny sounds like a bigoted skinhead in his Islamophobia. He is bitterly attacked for his lack of interest in visiting neglected areas like Birobidzhan near the Chinese border. Demonstrators in Moscow are widely dismissed as privileged middle classes who feel more in common with Europe where they holiday frequently than with the rest of Russia. To show how “Moscow is not Russia,” Judah travels to some of the least developed areas like Siberian Tuva, where male life expectancy is lower than Gabon in Africa, and murder rates exceed those of Central America. “To stay in power Putin knows he must divide the nation, preventing the Moscow opposition from linking up with the discontent in the rest of the country”. Portraying Russia as one of history’s greatest failures, he makes fascinating comparisons with China which he sees as managing its economic transition more effectively.

Too young to be saddled with baggage from the Soviet era, Judah’s focus on the last two decades gives the book a sense of immediacy. However, there is a need for a bit more context, as regards explaining more clearly why communism collapsed with such apparent speed, the reasons for Gorbachev’s sudden demise, the policies of the main “opposition” parties and the names of their leaders. A glossary would have been useful.

The main and rather serious shortcoming of this book is the slapdash journalistic style. The lack of editing is revealed where some paragraphs are repeated verbatim, but it matters more where the meaning is obscured by dodgy syntax, non sequiturs and misuse of words. I’m sure Ben Judah has a great future but he could learn a thing or two from the style of “the old Russian hand”, Angus Roxburgh’s “The Strongman” to which I have now resorted to fill some of the gaps. We need more of the coherent analysis evident in Judah’s concluding chapter.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars