The ability to persuade us of ‘truth,’ ‘authenticity,’ and ‘sincerity’ never comes from the novel’s resemblance to or association with the real world we readers inhabit. It comes exclusively from the novel’s own being, from the words in which it is written and from the writer’s manipulation of space, time, and level of reality.

Mario Vargas Llosa

What is Art? First of all, Art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings and moods; Art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; Art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader ‘good feelings.’ Like science, Art cognises life. Both Art and science have the same subject: life reality. But science analyses, Art synthesises; science is abstract, Art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, Art to his sensual nature. Science cognises life with the help of concepts, Art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.

A.Voronsky-Art is the Cognition of Life

“Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.”

― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.”

― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right

Whether or not you agree with Noblelaureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s political outlook, his novel Harsh Times about the Coup in 1950s Guatemala is a cracking read. According to  Edward Docx, “It speaks to our times”. However, the general reader would do well to delve into the history books of this period, especially Guatemala’s history, to fully appreciate the novel’s power.

As Docx correctly states, “In many ways, he is the embodiment of what a great novelist should be: unafraid to write panoptic political novels about the fate of nations and the clash of political ideologies; intellectually capable of encompassing such scope; artistically skilful enough to suffuse it with resonance, torque and drama; and all of this without losing the immersive kinesis of individual stories taken from all points on the compass of the human character.”

Vargas Llosa stays very close to some facts, but not all of them. However, he manages to weave a path to the lives of real and fictional characters. Vargas is not a stranger to writing novels that include historical events in Latin America. His tendency to reduce the ideological battles of the Cold War to little more than a minor deviation of “a democratic ideal” is a dangerous simplification of complex historical processes and tends to downplay the role of U.S. imperialism in the tragic events in Guatemala. Perhaps more damaging is Vargas’s insistence that the novelist has no obligation to represent historical facts.

As Ivan Kenneally writes, “ In a lecture he delivered on his own, The Real Life of Alexandro Mayta, Vargas Llosa maintained that the novelist bears no responsibility to represent historical facts at all faithfully. The events as they truly transpired—to the extent that this can be objectively determined—furnish only the “raw materials” for the construction of a novel, the initial “point of departure,” a contention he emphatically espouses discussing another of his works, The War of the End of the World. The singular obligation of the novelist is to be persuasive, to imaginatively materialise a world that does not reproduce but rather negates the one normally inhabited by the reader, a substitution of such force it can induce joy, despair, and revelation. This “sleight of hand replacement of the concrete, objective world of life as it is lived with the subtle and ephemeral world of fiction” is the fulcrum of the novelistic enterprise. Its believability has nothing to do with a humble obeisance to fact. Still, it is a function of the “ponderous and complicated machinery that enables a fiction to create the illusion that it is true, to pretend to be alive”.

Llosa’s playing fast and loose with historical truth is dangerous and has political and historical consequences. His viewpoint is opposed by Kenneally who writes again “If the authoritative power of literature is disconnected from its relation to reality, then why write a historical novel at all? Why should the novelist not manumit himself from the “raw material” supplied by documented history? If the point is to enact the “illusion of autonomy,” the “impression of self-sufficiency, of being freed from real life,” why choose a genre that insistently invokes the irrepressibility of extra-literary existence?[1]

Like many of his generation Llosa began his early career somewhat sympathetic to the revolutionary left’s ideals. The glorification of revolutions such as the Cuban was not confined to a generation of Latin American intellectuals such as Llosa. Several petty-bourgeois radical groups, such as the Socialist Workers Party (U.K.) complemented them. Bert Deck writing in the International Socialist Review said  “The Cuban revolution has shattered the old structure of radical politics in Latin America by providing a new example to follow. New currents and tendencies are emerging. Two roads present themselves to the Latin American revolutionists: “The Guatemalan Way” or “The Cuban Way.” Fidelismo, a more revolutionary alternative to the Communist parties, already exists. The possibility of avoiding the trap of popular front politics has been improved immeasurably. In this new, open situation, the Marxists have an unprecedented opportunity to win support for a consistent revolutionary program. In the complex process of political realignment within the workers movement lies the hope of avoiding future Guatemalas – the hope for a Socialist United States of Latin America.”[2]

The British Trotskyists from the Socialist Labour League opposed this political line saying “Even if Castro and his cadre were “converted” would that make the revolution a proletarian revolution? … If the Bolsheviks could not lead the revolution without a conscious working class support, can Castro do this? Quite apart from this, we have to evaluate political tendencies on a class basis, on the way they develop in struggle in relation to the movement of classes over long periods. A proletarian party, let alone a proletarian revolution, will not be born in any backward country by the conversion of petit-bourgeois nationalists who stumble “naturally” or “accidentally” upon the importance of the workers and peasants. The dominant imperialist policy-makers both in the USA and Britain recognise full well that only by handing over political “independence” to leaders of this kind, or accepting their victory over feudal elements like Farouk and Nuries-Said, can the stakes of international capital and the strategic alliances be preserved in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.[3]

Over time, politically, Llosa began shifting further to the right. During the 1980s, he became a champion of free markets and political liberalism, standing as a centre-right presidential candidate in the Peruvian presidential election in 1990. More recently, his rightward drift has become more open. In 2014, he joined the Mont Pelerin Society, the organisation founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1947 that has become famous for neoliberalism.[4]

Llosa’s sharp shift to the right coloured his analysis of the early Cold War period. He lamented that the C.I.A.-sponsored Coup against Arbenz had caused too many young people in Latin America to turn towards communism and that the United States had crushed “the liberal democratic aspirations” of the people.

His book faithfully reconstructs the events in Guatemala that began with the 1944 October Revolution and ended with the Coup in 1954. The election of Jacob Arbenz. Welcomed by many left-leaning media outlets who hoped that the election of the liberal Arbenz would bring about a new “democratic spring,” Arbenz’s election was met with uncontrollable rage by American Imperialism.

Even the so-called “democratic spring” under J.J. Arévalo and his successor Jacobo Arbenz, who, unlike Bernardo, came to power based upon a program of democratic, agricultural and social reforms, proved most fundamentally that there is no peaceful or reformist road for the masses in Guatemala and other semi-colonial countries to secure their democratic and social rights.

In 1954, the United States carried out a coup d’état to remove Guatemala’s President Jacobo Arbenz from power, cancelling land reforms. The elected government of Arbenz  by introducing a limited agrarian reform that infringed upon the vast holdings of the politically influential United Fruit Company drew the wrath of U.S. Imperialism.

Dwight Eisenhower would later acknowledge, “We had to get rid of a Communist Government which had taken over.” Llosa, the book stops at the 1954 coup. The Coup led to decades of dictatorships, The subsequent Guatemalan elites murdered over 200,000 Guatemalans, most of whom came from the indigenous Mayans.

Eduardo Galeano characterised the decades of dictatorship that followed in his book Open Veins of Latin America: “The World Turned its Back while Guatemala underwent a long Saint Bartholomew’s night. [In 1967,] all the men of the village of Cajón del Rio were exterminated; those of Tituque had their intestines gouged out with knives; in Piedra Parada they were flayed alive; in Agua Blanca de Ipala they were burned alive after being shot in the legs. A rebellious peasant’s head was stuck on a pole in the centre of San Jorge’s plaza. In Cerro Gordo the eyes of Jaime Velázquez were filled with pins… In the cities, the doors of the doomed were marked with black crosses. Occupants were machine-gunned as they emerged, their bodies thrown into ravines.”

As Hegel said, “An idea is always a generalisation, and generalisation is a property of thinking. To generalise means to think”. Whatever its faults and many, Llosa’s new book certainly makes you think, and it does “ speak to our times”. It is perhaps an irony of history when the latest election occurred in Guatemala this year. Bernardo Arévalo, a candidate promoted by the pseudo-left and U.S. imperialism, won the election. Juan José Averalo’s son Arevalo was president after the 1944 October Revolution. There is absolutely no basis for describing Arévalo as a left, democratic or progressive alternative to the clientelism of Guatemala’s ruling elite, whose subordination to foreign capital and U.S. imperialism is the main cause of the rampant poverty, inequality, authoritarianism and corruption that characterise Guatemalan social life.

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[1]Mario Vargas Llosa: Harsh Times and the “Fantastical Repudiation of Reality”

March 10, 2022 Ivan Kenneally-https://openlettersreview.com/posts/mario-vargas-llosa-harsh-times-and-the-fantastical-repudiation-of-reality

[2] Guatemala 1954 – The Lesson Cuba Learned: International Socialist Review, Vol.22 No.2, Spring 1961, pp.53-56.

[3] Letter of the NEC of the Socialist Labour League to the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, May 8, 1961 – Trotskyism versus Revisionism, Volume 3.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society 

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”

― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.”

— Oscar Wilde From the Preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray

 “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.”

“ Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.”

Proverbs 26:4-5

This is a very bad book. It is both tedious and confusing, which takes some doing. Funder’s main aim seems to be to destroy the reputation of one of the greatest writers of the 20^th Century. The book is neither a biography nor a novel. Large swathes of the book are completely made up, and her conclusions are predicated on using just six letters written by Eileen O’Shaughnessy to a friend.

While stating Orwell was her “hero,” Funder uses him as a conduit for her attack on “the Patriarchy, ” which she does not define or offer any objective or scientific evaluation of the term. Far from “fixing sexual relations”, Funder and her allies in the #MeToo movement are out to destroy any progress made over the last 100 years and further muddle one of the most complex relationships among humans.

If this was not bad enough, the book has encouraged an avalanche of articles[1] that labelled Owell a sexual predator who preyed on vulnerable women, stole their ideas and used them to write books.

Despite the tedious and confusing nature of the book, Funder does, on a limited basis, rescue George Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, from the condescension of history. O’Shaughnessy was a highly intelligent and complex woman who has been largely airbrushed out of history. Her relationship with Orwell, both sexually and politically, was complicated. Their marriage was an “open “one, and both had affairs. According to Guardian journalist Rachel Cooke, “When she (O’Shaughnessy) followed him to Spain in 1937, where he was fighting the fascists during the civil war, she had a fling with his commander, George Kopp, while he was away at the front. Other affairs would follow.”[2]Funder has an unhealthy interest in the sex life of both Orwell and, to a lesser extent, O’Shaughnessy, much to the detriment of the complex political relationship between the two. It is no accident that Funder started her book in 2017, which was the beginning of the right-wing MeToo# movement. One of the primary roles of the book seems to be, in the words of Vladimir Lenin, “to shout down the truth,[3] to prevent a more objective account of Orwell’s work and his relationship with O’Shaughnessy from being heard. Funder and others drown the truth in a torrent of abuse and shouts to prevent an open elucidation of the facts.

As Rebecca Solnit points out, “Being a moralist is a particularly fun and easy pursuit when it comes to the past because pretty much everyone from the past comes up short when measured by present-day standards. Virtually no one in 1973, let alone 1923, had 2023 values about race, gender, sexuality and the rest, any more than they had search engines or Twitter accounts. It’s not our individual virtue, but our collective receipt of humane and egalitarian ideas worked out in recent decades that gives us our presumably splendid present-day beliefs.”[4]

It seems clear that Eileen shared a significant amount of Orwell’s political beliefs. Travelling to Spain with him as both wife and comrade took enormous courage and political agreement. In some respects, she seemed far more alert to the dangers of the Fascists and the Stalinists when it came to their attempts to kill them both.

One of the more outlandish accusations supported in the book and made by a few other writers is that Orwell “stole” the ideas for his two major works, Animal Farm and 1984, from Eileen O’Shaughnessy. Although you do not see this in the book, it would appear that Orwell had a dialectical relationship with his wife. Like all great writers, if someone has a better idea, you turn it into a piece of art or, in this case, two of the greatest books of the 20^th Century. If anything, Orwell’s 1984 was heavily influenced by the novel We, written by the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin in 1934, which Funder does not care to mention in case it interferes with her hatchet job on Orwell.

In other words, it has been standard practice for authors the “steal” from others. As Sir Isaac Newton said, If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Orwell saw further than O’Shaughnessy and, for that matter, Yevgeny Zamyatin

One of the more disturbing aspects of this slandering of Orwell is that it has gone largely unanswered. Oliver Lewis from St Catherine’s College, Oxford, is the only brave soul to stick his head above the parapet. Writing on the Times Literary Supplement’s (TLS) letter page, Lewis wrote, “Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s school poem about an authoritarian future may have been a contribution to the concepts in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it is not possible to argue that Orwell’s most significant work was simply the genius of others. I am concerned that, by assuming that the sum of Orwell’s work is ascribable to other people – who all happen, in the view of Eileen M. Hunt (August 11), to be women – some observers are depriving the author of the right to respect that he and his work deserve. Hunt makes a plea for “argument and significance” in newly published works about Orwell, but seemingly only when they comply with her theory-driven narrative of the world. This is clearly one based on gender, namely her belief in the “patriarchy” (of which, as a male, she accuses me of being a part, as the author of one of the books under review, The Orwell Tour: Travels through the life and work of George Orwell).[5]

Another disturbing aspect of this book is the absence of any analysis by Funder of any of Orwerll’s major works. Take, for instance, one of Orwell’s most important works, Homage Catalonia. Aside from Funder intimating that Orwell had homosexual tendencies, she says nothing of worth about this great book. As the Marxist writer Vicky Short points out, “ George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is an inspiring book by a gifted and honest writer committed to exposing the truth. Written in 1937, it is a moving account of the heroic revolutionary struggle of the Spanish people against fascism and Socialism. Above all, it provides irrefutable proof by an independent living witness to the crimes committed by the Stalinist bureaucracy in Spain and its betrayal of the Spanish Revolution. Orwell’s account was a vindication of the analysis that had been made by Leon Trotsky and the International Left Opposition to the Soviet bureaucracy, whose policies had by then become utterly counterrevolutionary on a world scale.”[6]

Reading this book left a bad taste in my mouth. Aside from it being both tedious and confusing, Funder’s main purpose seems to lead a right-wing attack on the work and character of George Orwell using the cover of a biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy. She has merely made a literary fool of herself and all those who have written glowing reviews of a very bad book.

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[1] See-The biography that destroys George Orwell: from thief of ideas to sexual predator www.tellerreport.com/life

[2] Eileen: The Making of George Orwell by Sylvia Topp – review- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/10/eileen-the-making-of-george-orwell-sylvia-topp-review

[3] A Partnership of Lies- http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/13c.htm

[4] George Orwell in an age of moralists- Should we stop measuring the great English writer by today’s standards?

[5] https://www.the-tls.co.uk/categories/regular-features/letters-to-the-editor/

[6] George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Stalinism and the Spanish revolution

April 11 2002

 

I firmly believe that Leon Trotsky remains a colossal figure in the history of revolutionary socialism in the twentieth century. It beholds anyone interested in this revolutionary giant to carefully study this collection of writings on the great man by David North.

North believes Trotsky’s greatest achievement was founding the Fourth International (FI) in 1938 after the Third International under Stalin facilitated the coming to power of Hitler in Germany without a fight by the multi-millioned working class.

Trotsky opposed Stalin’s “socialism in one country,” he wrote in the founding document of the FI that “the historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.”

North’s book covers forty years of revolutionary struggles. This collection of essays is designed to remind the older reader of Trotsky’s rich heritage and “bring the rich historical lessons to a new generation of workers and young people, to resolve the “historical crisis of mankind.”

My favourite essay is Leon Trotsky and the Development of Marxism, published in 1982. It was written during the months when the sick Stalinist leader Leonid Brezhnev passed power to Yuri Andropov, who died. Power was then transferred to  Konstantin Chernenko—who, within two years, joined their predecessor alongside the Kremlin Wall— and, finally, in March 1985, to Mikhail Gorbachev.

Reading that essay was one of the reasons for my joining the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1983. It had a profound effect on my political development. The essay is written as a tribute to Tom Henehan, who was assassinated on October 16, 1977. The four articles by David North, originally published in 1982 on the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Tom Henehan, provide a remarkably concise introduction to Trotskyism, the Marxism of today.

The essay “Trotsky’s Last Year” is extraordinarily good. Trotsky was at the height of his powers before a Stalinist Agent murdered him. It contains an appreciation of one of my favourite essays, “Trotsky’s Place in History,” by C.L.R. James, the Caribbean socialist intellectual and historian, who wrote:

“During his last decade he [Trotsky] was an exile, apparently powerless. During those same ten years, Stalin, his rival, assumed power like no man in Europe since Napoleon wielded. Hitler has shaken the world and bids fair to bestride it like a colossus while he lasts. Roosevelt is the most powerful president who has ever ruled in America, and America is the most powerful nation in the world. Yet the Marxist judgment of Trotsky is as confident as Engels’s judgment of Marx. Before his period of power, during it, and after his fall, Trotsky stood second only to Lenin among contemporary men, and after Lenin died was the greatest head of our times. That judgment we leave to history.”

Workers and youth should carefully study this book to prepare for future struggles. It is a vital guide and provides the strategy and tactics necessary for a successful fight against capitalism.

The historian David Motadel recently wrote an article for the BBC History Magazine called Should historians interpret the past through the prism of the present? His article somewhat tamely examined one of the fiercest and one-sided debates to explode last year.

The historical controversy arose over an essay entitled ‘Is History History? Written by James H Sweet, then president of the influential American Historical Association, it was printed in that organisation’s magazine in August 2022. Sweet’s article was intended to open up a discussion on the relationship between the present and the past. This is an important and complicated subject. It raises questions about both methods—the way sources are used and interpreted—and philosophy. Sweet raised legitimate concerns and should not have offered an apology or retraction when he was heavily critiqued.

Sweet said little new in the article that had not been written about over the last two decades. He noted that looking at history “through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism,” has diminished “the values and mores of people in their times”.

Historian Lynn Hunt made similar points as Sweet in 2002,[1] with little fuss being made about it. But today, Sweet’s article caused a “global social media backlash”. It was branded  “crap”, and he had a “smug condescension”. He was even called a “white supremacist,” and as a “white man,” he had no right to comment on black or African history. The New York Times called it “one of the confusing messes that pop up from time to time in the highest reaches of academia”, while The Washington Post called it “academia’s most recent pratfall”. The AHA was forced to take its Twitter account private.

Instead of challenging this witchhunt, Sweet issued a grovelling apology, saying, “My September Perspectives on History column has generated anger and dismay among many of our colleagues and members. I take full responsibility that it did not convey what I intended and for the harm that it has caused. I had hoped to open a conversation on how we “do” history in our current politically charged environment. Instead, I foreclosed this conversation for many members, causing harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association. A president’s monthly column, one of the privileges of the elected office, provides a megaphone to the membership and the discipline. The views and opinions expressed in that column are not those of the Association. If my ham-fisted attempt at provocation has proven anything, the AHA membership is as vocal and robust as ever. If anyone has criticisms that they have been reluctant or unable to post publicly, please feel free to contact me directly.”[2]

However, as the Marxist writer Tom Mackaman points out, “Sweet did not explain what it was, concretely, that had caused all the “damage” and “harm” he now confesses to have inflicted. If he were to explain, he would have to admit that his column hurt no one, that there was nothing offensive about it. Instead, he would have to say that his column violated the unspoken rules of censorship that hold sway over academia and circumscribe American intellectual life. Having stepped out of line—the president of the AHA, no less!—Sweet needed to be brought to heel, and it was no less essential that he flog himself before his censors. The problem for Sweet is that the embrace of identity politics, which is a religion of the phoney “progressive wing” of the Democratic Party (and also the main route to funding and career opportunities for many academics), must be totally—observed in public statements as well as private thought. He will remain suspect![3]

What was Sweet’s first sin? He made the cardinal error of attacking the current fixation with Presentism. As was said above, Sweet’s attack on Presentism was principled but not new. All Sweet did was repeat Hunt’s warning and attack “short-termism and identity politics defined by present concerns,” He asked, “Wouldn’t students be better served by taking degrees in sociology, political science, or ethnic studies instead? History suffuses everyday life in many places as Presentism; America is no exception. We suffer from an overabundance of history, not as a method or analysis, but as anachronistic data points for articulating competing politics. The consequences of this new history are everywhere.”

His second sin was to critique the New York Times 1619 project, albeit very mildly. He wrote, “When I first read the newspaper series that preceded the book, I thought of it as a synthesis of a tradition of Black nationalist historiography dating to the 19th century with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent call for reparations. The project spoke to the political moment, but I never thought of it primarily as a work of history. Ironically, it was professional historians’ engagement with the work that seemed to lend it historical legitimacy.

Then, the Pulitzer Center, in partnership with the Times, developed a secondary school curriculum around the project. Local school boards protested the characterisations of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison as unpatriotic owners of “forced labour camps.” Conservative lawmakers decided that if this was the history of slavery being taught in schools, the topic shouldn’t be taught. For them, challenging the Founders’ position as timeless tribunes of liberty was “racially divisive.” At each of these junctures, history was a zero-sum game of heroes and villains viewed through the prism of contemporary racial identity. It was not an analysis of people’s ideas in their own time, nor a process of change over time.”[4]

Sweet was not the only historian to attack the 1619 project. However, the Trotskyist movement, through the vehicle of the World Socialist Website, examined the true class nature of this falsification of history by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times. It said, “The 1619 Project,” published by the New York Times as a special 100-page edition of its Sunday magazine on August 19, presents and interprets American history through the prism of race and racial conflict.”

In a Major article published both on the website and in book form, The website wrote, “The methodology that underlies the 1619 Project is idealist (i.e., it derives social being from thought, rather than the other way around) and, in the most fundamental sense of the word, irrationalist. All of history is to be explained from the existence of a supra-historical emotional impulse. Slavery is viewed and analysed not as a specific economically rooted form of the exploitation of labour but, rather, as the manifestation of white racism. But where does this racism come from? It is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American “white people.”

Sweet’s capitulation before social media was not a pretty sight. There has been no precedent for such an act of public contrition by the president of the AHA, not even in 1950s America. But deeper forces are at play than Sweet’s abject surrender. The witchhunt of Sweet indicates the advanced level of censorship and decline in American intellectual life. As David North and Tom Mackaman wrote in a letter published in the April 2020 issue of the American Historical Review: “It is high time for an intense and critical examination of the politics and social interests underlying the contemporary fixation with the unscientific category of racial identity, and its use as a battering ram against genuine historical scholarship. The Sweet Affair reveals that the time for this critical examination is well past due.”

Further Reading

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[1] https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/may-2002/against-presentism

[2] Is history History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present

James H. Sweet | Aug 17, 2022

[3] American Historical Association president issues groveling apology after racialist social media attack-wsws.org

[4]   Is history History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present

James H. Sweet | Aug 17, 2022

Christopher Thompson

Every now and then, Google’s alert system turns up unexpected results. Yesterday was a case in point when I was made aware of Ed Simon’s review of Jonathan Healey’s relatively new work, The Blazing World: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972). Echoes of that seventeenth-century world in songs and poetry can still be heard according to Simon even though its theological disputes, puzzling political arrangements and problematic scientific theories remain difficult to explain to modern readers. Nonetheless, as Healey explained and Simon agreed, this world had been transformed by 1700 by the growth of trade and consumption, the development of political parties and the press, the appearance of coffee houses, concert halls and theatres. But it had its obverse side too in the spread of liberal scientific positivism and religious pluralism, in the growth of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade and the beginnings of a market view of the world that may yet prove apocalyptic as the record of the start of the industrial revolution powered by coal buried in the ice cores of the Antarctic shows. The period and the book thus have important implications for the world in which we now live.

 For support for these contentions, Simon appealed to Christopher Hill’s book, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, published in 1972. Hill’s study encompassed a range of groups like the Levellers and Diggers, the Ranters, the Seekers and Familists, who were participants in an alternative, abortive Revolution that never happened but with which Hill found sympathy. Even so, Hill was inclined to regard these groups as crypto-liberals disguised as religious sectaries whereas the truth was the other way round. But right now, the liberal underpinnings of the state, of the sovereignty of the individual and the need for the market are being seriously challenged from the left and the right in our time. The seventeenth century is over but it is not yet done with us if Ed Simon is correct. 

There is no doubt that Stuart England in 1700 was profoundly different from Tudor England in 1600. Its economy like its trading and colonial links had been transformed: it had reached constitutional and legal arrangements, political and religious settlements that transcended the quarrels of the mid-seventeenth century. Its public finances had been transformed and it had become a military and naval power comparable to any in Europe. It was recognisably a modern society on its way to becoming the most advanced country in the world for just over a century and a half. That the legacy of these developments are still apparent in the modern world is quite another matter altogether. 

Behind these disputable propositions, there is another, more serious issue at stake. There is no doubt either that the events of the 1640s, i.e. of the English Civil Wars or Revolution or, as more recent historiography has it, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, appeal particularly to people with radical political convictions. 

The idea of an older order being overthrown, of traditional forms of government and rule collapsing, of novel ideas about how states should be run or economies and societies organised , and the appearance of groups dedicated to these ends has had an enduring attraction. Sitting in great archive depositories and libraries – in the Huntington Library in San Marino or the Bodleian Library in Oxford or the British Library in London – it is all too easy to forget the immense suffering that followed from these ‘grands soulevements’: many lives, human and animal, were lost; many thousands of people were maimed; the destruction of property was on a huge scale; in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, old institutions were torn down; military power supported successive regimes from 1646 until the Restoration in 1660. 

A terrible price was paid for the political and religious speculations, the constitutional and legal quarrels of the 1640s and 1650s which ended not as Christopher Hill would have liked in rule by tiny groups of sectaries and radicals but in what turned out to be the victory of the Royalists. Blair Worden’s verdict on these conflicts was fundamentally right. Imputing responsibility to the issues that preoccupy modern societies and current thinkers to the outcome of struggles in seventeenth-century England is a fallacious argument. No such lessons can legitimately be drawn.

It is time to reflect as the dust settles on another Notting Hill Carnival. On Tuesday morning, the last of the two million-strong Carnival Occupation Army left for a destination unknown, leaving a trail of destruction that would not look out of place in a war zone.

The orgy of violence and staggering law-breaking is largely ignored by the powers that be. Carnival is glorified in their newspapers. Four of the leading bourgeoisie newspapers, including the Financial Times, had articles that were nothing more than glorified adverts for the Carnival. All had uncritical interviews with the Carnival leader, Matthew Phillips. Phillip is the CEO of the Carnival development agency Carnival Village Trust and Notting Hill Carnival Ltd, which manages the Notting Hill Carnival.

Loud calls have been made to ban the Carnival, It is surely a matter of time before a Hillsborough-type disaster occurs. One came close on Monday when police withdrew people from Portobello Rd after it became dangerously overcrowded. It will be interesting to find out in the coming weeks how many people caught the new strain of COVID-19 that would have been spread by over two million people in close proximity to each other.

But there is not a snowball’s chance in hell of it being stopped. Carnival is big business. It generates over £100m in revenue and has cultivated a layer of the black middle class that has done very well out of Carnival. One of its more greedy representatives now sits in jail after stealing nearly three-quarters of a million pounds from the Charity wing of the Carnival.

Happy 2024 Carnival.

Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Abraham Lincoln

“The Civil War mobilized human resources on a scale unmatched by any other event in American history except, perhaps, World War II. For actual combat duty the Civil War mustered a considerably larger proportion of American manpower than did World War II.”

James Macpherson

“There is a big idea which is at stake”–Corporal in the 105th Ohio, 1864

“Lincoln’s significance lies in his not hesitating before the most severe means, once they were found to be necessary, in achieving a great historic aim posed by the development of a young nation.”

― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours

Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way up from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance—an average person of goodwill, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organization, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 41 (New York: International Publishers, 1985),

Drawn With the Sword is an excellent work of historical study and contemplation. It is a book of the highest historical standard. It is not one continuous book but a collection of 15 essays on different topics. They examine various subjects ranging from the causes of the war to how the South almost won and why the war still resonates today. Fourteen of the essays were previously published but were revised for this edition. The only new article is “What’s The Matter With History?”

Throughout his career, McPherson has sought to explain complex historical issues in a way that the general reader can understand without dumbing down the history for his more academically minded readers. His essays in the book are a critical reexamination of issues that are still contentious today. For the majority of his career, Professor McPherson has argued that the American Civil War was a revolutionary struggle for equality and democracy and still to this day defends that viewpoint. Macpherson is a  serious historian who has played an objectively significant role in the social life of America and beyond and is the very embodiment of historical memory.

The Marxist writer David Walsh explains how Macpherson has maintained his historical principles. He writes, “How has he retained his principles in the intervening years when so many have not? This is also a complex matter. I think that in any serious figure, historian, artist or political leader, the principle is not simply a matter of certain intellectual formulations that rest on top, so to speak, of one’s personality. It is more a matter of the coming together of various powerful social and cultural currents at a critical moment in one’s life so that the most positive external influences and what is best in oneself are heated in a crucible, fuse and become one. One can retain principles across time and in the face of all sorts of opposition and setbacks because they are embedded in some part of consciousness that is not susceptible to shifts in the popular mood. One knows with one’s entire being certain things to be true, they are not up for debate, much less sale.”[1]

Perhaps the best essay of James M. McPherson’s Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War is entitled “Historians and Their Audiences,” McPherson poses the question, “What’s the matter with history?”

This chapter sums up concisely Macpherson’s historical philosophy. His purpose while writing scholarly books is to appeal to a wider reading audience while maintaining historical standards. This complex problem is not new. The prominent historian Allen Nevins[2] attacked the academics who wrote for themselves, “His touch is death. He destroys the public for historical work by convincing it that history is synonymous with heavy, stolid prosing. Indeed, he is responsible for today a host of intelligent and highly literate Americans who will open a history book only with reluctant dread. It is against this entrenched pedantry that the war of true history must be most determined and implacable.”

Macpherson addresses this theme of engaging the general public and raising their historical consciousness throughout the book. In the chapter entitled “The Glory Story.”  Thomas R Turner relates, “To many people, books are hopelessly irrelevant because far more Americans today get their history from watching movies than reading. However, suppose they receive their notions about African American soldiers and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment from the movie Glory. In that case, he believes they are receiving information from a credible source. He calls the combat footage in Glory the most realistic of any film dealing with the Civil War.”[3]

The legendary 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, led by abolitionist Robert Gould Shaw, was the second all-black regiment organized in the Civil War. Reactionary Protesters have objected that the 54th, famously depicted in the film Glory (1989), have a monument erected to Shaw and his regiment. Because it was commanded by a white officer, Shaw, Holland Cotter, the New York Times’s co-chief art critic, slandered the monument and labelled Shaw a “white supremacist”.

One of the more remarkable essays is “The War That Never Goes Away.” Macpherson correctly believes that the war, right or wrong has an “enduring fascination” with the American and world public.McPherson points to what he holds to be the reason for this fascination is that “Great issues were at stake, issues about which Americans were willing to fight and die; issues whose resolution profoundly transformed and redefined the United States but at the same time are still alive and contested today.”

Macpherson’s defence of Abraham Lincoln in the book is laudable. McPherson argues convincingly that Lincoln was the key figure in the struggle against slavery. Macpherson’s stance on Lincoln has come under sustained attack. One hundred fifty-five years after the first assassination, Lincoln is facing a second. Race-fixated protesters like Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington DC’s nonvoting delegate to Congress, have moved to introduce a bill to remove the famous Emancipation Monument from Lincoln Park in Washington, DC.

As David North writes, “Abraham Lincoln was an extraordinarily complex man, whose life and politics reflected the contradictions of his time. He could not, as he once stated, “escape history.” Determined to save the Union, he was driven by the logic of the bloody civil war to resort to revolutionary measures. During the brutal struggle, Lincoln expressed the revolutionary-democratic aspirations that inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight and sacrifice their lives for a “new birth of freedom.”[4]

In the chapter “Why Did the Confederacy Lose?” he examines the political and economic reasons behind the South’s devastating defeat. He writes, “Altogether nearly 4 per cent of the Southern people, black and white, civilians and soldiers, died due to the war. This percentage exceeded the human cost of any country in World War I and was outstripped only by the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II. The amount of property and resources destroyed in the Confederate States is almost incalculable. It has been estimated at two-thirds of all assessed wealth, including the market value of slaves.”[5]

As David Walsh points out, “To establish an accurate picture of the Civil War era, he (Macpherson) has been obliged to polemicize against various schools of historians. In Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, for example, he argues persuasively based on economic statistics that the conception of Louis Gerteis and others that the Civil War and Reconstruction produced “no fundamental changes” in the forms of economic and social organization in the South is wrong. In the same work, he also counters the arguments of historians such as James G. Randall and T. Harry Williams, who have asserted that Lincoln was essentially a political conservative and an enemy of social revolution.”[6]

Perhaps James Macpherson’s most important struggle has been to defend his historical principles against the method that looks at history through the prism of race. Macpherson opposes the “fashionable practice of condemning all whites as racists.”

To his eternal credit, Macpherson collaborated with the World Socialist Website(WSWS.ORG) attack on the falsification of history by the New York Times 1619 Project. In an interview with Macpherson, The WSWS asked him about his initial reaction to the 1619 Project.

He answered Well, I didn’t know anything about it until I got my Sunday paper, with the magazine section entirely devoted to the 1619 Project. Because this is a subject I’ve long been interested in, I sat down and started to read some of the essays. I’d say that, almost from the outset, I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery, which was clearly not an exclusively American institution but existed throughout history. And slavery in the United States was only a small part of a larger world process that unfolded over many centuries. And in the United States, too, there was not only slavery but also an antislavery movement. So I thought the account emphasized American racism—a major part of the history, no question about it—but it focused so narrowly on that part of the story that it left most of the history out.”

According to David North and Thomas Mackaman, The New York Times 1619 Project was a politically-motivated falsification of history and presented the origins of the United States entirely through the prism of racial conflict. They make this point in their book: “Despite the pretence of establishing the United States’ “true” foundation, the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history. Its aim is to create a historical narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on prioritizing personal “identities”—i.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race.”[7]

There is much to admire in the work of this outstanding Civil War historian. Macpherson writes engagingly and explains complex historical issues in a way that the general reader can take in, encouraging his readers to see history in a new light.

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[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/05/mcin-m18.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Nevins

[3] Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War, by James M. McPherson

Thomas R Turner Volume 18, Issue 2, Summer 1997, pp. 47-54

[4] Racial-communalist politics and the second assassination of Abraham Lincoln- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/25/pers-j24.html

[5] Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War

By James M. McPherson

[6] An exchange with a Civil War historian- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/05/mcp2-m19.html

[7] The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/06/1619-s06.html

“David Unger has created an unforgettable female protagonist. Olivia is shy but strong: unattractive but sensual; she feels guilty but angry at her family for abandoning her. She wants to love and be loved, made of flesh and blood; we identify with her through the author’s natural, fluid prose, which also has some startling images.”

– Monica Lavin, El Universal, Mexico City

David Unger’s latest book in English is a beautifully and intelligently crafted coming-of-age novel about an Indigenous Guatemalan woman. After three previous publications in Spanish as Para mi, eres divina (Random House Mondadori, Mexico, 2012, Editorial Cultura, Guatemala, 2014, & Storytel audio, 2018, In My Eyes You Are Beautiful is finally published in English.

In a recent interview with the author, I asked him why it has taken so long he replied. “ Para mi, eres divina has been published three times in Spanish translation, but my agent couldn’t sell it to an English-language publisher. This begs the question of why. Either the novel wasn’t up to snuff, or U.S. editors felt uneasy publishing a novel about an indigenous Mayan girl written by a “Caucasian” man. Howard Aster, from Canada’s Mosaic Press, loved the novel and didn’t see a P.C. issue here. I am grateful to him for that, so after 12 years since I completed the novel, it has finally seen print. I hope that now that it is in English, it can be translated into other languages because I feel the story has personal and universal appeal.”

David Unger is one of the most widely published and well-known authors of fiction, short stories, articles, translations, and children’s books in Spanish and English. In 2014 he was honoured with Guatemala’s Miguel Angel Asturias’ National Literature Prize for Lifetime Achievement. He is one of the few internationally recognised authors who critically examines the huge social inequality in his home country, Guatemala. His clarity of thought regarding the problems facing the Guatemalan indigenous and working-class people is second to none. His hostility to the Guatemalan ruling elites and their Yankee capitalist backers is admirably portrayed in his novels. He “explores the tensions, character and texture of Central America as few other writers have done.”

The last few years have been a busy time for Unger. Just recently, Penguin published a new and splendid English translation of the dictator novel “El Señor Presidente” —“Mr President” with an introduction by Gerald Martin. The new translation has been met with much praise.

In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful is a coming-of-age novel that narrates the life of a young indigenous woman. I asked David Unger if the main character was real or based on someone he knew. He says, “Olivia Padilla Xuc was inspired by someone who isn’t Guatemalan or indigenous. Most of my novels have had male protagonists from a privileged class. In this novel, I wanted to write about the indigenous population who, for the most part, have been either ignored, romanticised or mistreated by those in power. During the Ubico dictatorship of the 30s and 40s, the Maya were forced into labour because tending to their families and crops meant they were idle. This was a crime! Olivia believes in herself, and because of that, she can transform her life from one of servitude to one of independence and achievement. In many ways, she developed in unpredictable ways. At times, I felt I had been a kind of Geppetto and she a Pinocchio-like figure.”

Like most of Unger’s work, In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful takes place during a particular historical moment in Guatemala. It starts in 1970 and ends in 1990 while Olivia Padilla Xuc is still a young woman, which begs whether Unger is planning a sequel. The twenty-year period covered by the novel is one of Guatemala’s most brutal. The genocide carried out by the Guatemalan ruling elite and its army is well documented.

Guatemalan history has been dominated by the so-called “bonds” between Guatemala and Washington. Dating back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American capitalism, with help from its junior Guatemalan partners, carried out the brutal exploitation and bloody oppression of Guatemala’s population of workers, peasants and indigenous peoples. The First Banana Republic.  The country’s economy was run by the  United Fruit Company and other U.S. banks and corporations, whose interests were defended by military dictatorships that regularly massacred and executed workers who dared to strike or protest.

The bloody period covered by Unger’s book is a by-product of the 1954 Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) led coup that overthrew the democratically elected president. Jacobo Árbenz, who was not a communist, initiated a limited land reform that included the appropriation, with compensation, of lands controlled but unused, by United Fruit.

The coup led to three decades of unparalleled brutality and murder on an industrial scale. The war claimed the lives of an estimated 200,000 people, most of them indigenous peasants wiped out in a genocidal campaign by a military that was trained and armed to the teeth by America.

According to Andrea Lobo, “ In a confidential memo drafted in the wake of the coup against Árbenz, the U.S. National Security Council stated that Washington’s aim in the region was to compel Latin American countries “to base their economies on a system of private enterprise, and, as essential to that, to create a political and economic climate conducive to private investment of both domestic and foreign capital.”[1]

If Unger does a sequel to this book, it will cover important political events from 1990 onwards. On December 4, 1996, a peace accord was signed. A top Guatemalan general and other government members joined guerrilla leaders in signing a “definite ceasefire” in Oslo, Norway. “With this agreement, the weapons will be silenced forever,” said Rolando Moran, a Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union commander, a coalition of three guerrilla movements.

“The “truth commission,” established as part of the peace process to investigate past human rights violations, was denounced by human rights activists as a travesty. The commission’s final report would not name any individuals who violated human rights, and its findings could not be used to bring anyone to trial. The commission had only six months to investigate the decades-long war. The agreement left Guatemala’s social structure, the fundamental cause of the bloodshed, untouched. Most of the population comprised poor peasants living in rural villages and labouring in highly exploitative agricultural labour. At the same time, a tiny elite of wealthy families ruled in Guatemala City and maintained its monopoly of the country’s economic and political life.”[2]

Whatever David Unger does next, his book is a significant landmark in the study of the lives of ordinary indigenous and working-class Guatemalans. His opposition to the Guatemalan and Yankee elites is to be commended. I wish him every success in his next adventure. It remains to be seen if Unger has another book in him. If not, I want to wish him a long-due retirement.

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[1] Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, The American Republics, Volume IV – Office of the Historian

[2] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/28/twih-n28.html

David Unger kindly interrupted his holiday to answer these questions. David’s splendid new book In My Eyes You Are Beautiful has just been published in English. It is available on Amazon.

Q. Given that there is no translator’s name on the book, I assume you translated this book into English. Did you incur any problems? Secondly, why did it take so long to appear in English?

A. Actually, In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful—like all my novels—was written in English. I left Guatemala when I was four, though I spent eight summers there living with my grandparents in downtown Guatemala City. Para mi, eres divina has been published three times in Spanish translation, but my agent wasn’t able to sell it to an English-language publisher. This begs the question of why. Either the novel wasn’t up to snuff, or U.S. editors felt uneasy publishing a novel about an indigenous Mayan girl written by a “Caucasian” man. Howard Aster, from Canada’s Mosaic Press, loved the novel and didn’t see a P.C. issue here. I am grateful to him for that, so after 12 years since I completed the novel, it has finally seen print. I hope that now that it is in English, perhaps it can be translated into other languages because I feel the story has both personal and universal appeal.

Q. As both a writer and translator, may I ask your opinion on the use of A.I.?

A. Oh my, Keith, that’s quite a question! Personally, I don’t think A.I. can capture the subtleties or nuances that transform good writing into great writing. I can’t see A.I. composing:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.

Coral is far more red than her lips red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

As for translation, again, I would say that the poetry and the humour would be lost. Last year, Penguin Classics published my re-translation of Miguel Angel Asturias’s Mr President, which is now in its 4th edition. I can’t imagine A.I. capturing the richness of this fantastic novel completed nearly 100 years ago!

Q. You have an extraordinary gift of combining Fiction with historical events. There seems to be a tradition among Latin American writers. Could you tell me your early influences?

A. That’s kind of you to say, Keith. All my novels have taken place during a particular historical moment in Guatemala, whether it be during the 1930s when a Fascist president sold the soul of the country to the United Fruit Company or during the armed conflict in Guatemala from the 70s to the 90’s. I can’t imagine writing a novel without a strong political backdrop. I think of The Mastermind, which has been translated into ten languages, as primarily a love story, but it is also a kind of cautionary tale which reveals that love, friendship and community are impossible when the political and economic system is corrupt and corrupted. My teachers were Rulfo and Vargas Llosa, but also Steinbeck, Austen and Joyce.

Q. As I said before, the book marries fictional characters with historical events. How much research do you have to do to make sure your work is historically accurate?

A. I did a lot of reading on history and economics in preparing to write The Price of Escape. I wanted the novel to be a personal story of an indecisive Jewish man arriving in the port city of Puerto Barrios, but again with the backdrop of the United Fruit Company and its monomaniacal stranglehold on Guatemala during the 1930s. The novel is a kind of “what if” story about my father, but with quite a lot of fabrication and transformation. My other novels grew out of what I already knew about my birth country—it was more of a question of figuring out how to tell the stories that I wanted to tell.

Q. Your characters in the book are extremely real and alive. Are they completely made up, or are they an amalgam of real people?

Q. Olivia Padilla Xuc was inspired by someone who isn’t Guatemalan or indigenous. Most of my novels have had male protagonists who were from a privileged class, and in this novel, I wanted to write about the indigenous population who, for the most part, have been either ignored, romanticized or mistreated by those in power. During the Ubico dictatorship of the 30s and 40s, the Maya were forced into labour because tending to their families and their crops meant they were idle. This was a crime! Olivia believes in herself, and because of that, she is able to transform her life from one of servitude to one of independence and achievement. In many ways, she developed in unpredictable ways. At times, I felt I had been a kind of Geppetto and she a Pinocchio-like figure.

Q. I saw on Facebook that you took the marvellous step of taking the book to schools in Guatemala. Could you briefly tell me the response of the children?

A. I participated in Guatemala’s FILGUA—its international book fair last month. F y G Editores published the Spanish version of Sleeping With the Lights On, and the publisher, Raul Figueroa, arranged for me to visit a public elementary school nearby. The school had no library, and the fifth and sixth graders had never seen a writer. They were thrilled to meet me, but to be honest, I received so much more from them: I was so grateful for their curiosity, enthusiasm and comments about my little chapter book.

Q. What has been the media response to the book? Has the right-wing press in Guatemala attacked the book?

A. The novel was first published in Mexico by a PRH imprint in 2011 and then published in Guatemala in 2014 to coincide with my receiving Guatemala’s Miguel Angel Asturias’s Literature Prize for lifetime achievement. The novel has been out of print now for about three years, and Denise Phe-Funchal, who translated Sleeping With the Lights On, is preparing a new translation. On several occasions, indigenous Guatemalan women came up to me and thanked me for telling “their story.” Well, it’s really just one story, but something touched them and that meant the world to me. I don’t expect the same reaction to the English edition, but I do hope that the book gets some coverage. Quien sabe? Maybe a good handful of readers will find that the novel touched them deeply.

Guatemalan-born David Unger is an award-winning translator and author. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies and literary journals in the United States and abroad.

He has translated thirteen books, among them works by Teresa Cárdenas, Rigoberta Menchú, Ana Maria Machado, Silvia Molina Elena Garro, Bárbara Jacobs and Nicanor Parra’s. He teaches Translation at City College of New York’s graduate M.A. Program and is the U.S. rep of the Guadalajara International Book Fair. He lives in Brooklyn.

My day has a pretty fixed routine. When I get up, I normally check my incoming e-mail and then go on to look at my google alerts to see what has been post online since the preceding day. There are some blogs dealing with early modern history that I normally look at as well.

In recent years, I have developed a database covering the local history societies in my native county and letting the officers of those societies have information about the activities  – lectures, meetings and trips – being organised elsewhere. Most but not all such local history societies have websites but some do not give full details of their events or their locations. I have been surprised to discover that a few people do not wish to receive such information and ask to be struck off  my list of contacts. One such request reached me this morning from the son of one of the officers of a nearby society to which I have spoken in the past: no reason was given. More cheerfully, I met the chairman of my own village history society in the local chemist’s premises this morning.

I was pleased too to see on Sandy Solomon’s Facebook page a picture of two of my friends, Richard Cust and Peter Lake, on a visit to Canons Ashby, a house built by Erasmus Dryden, in Northamptonshire. I first met them both in the former Public Record Office in Chancery Lane, London in about 1980. Peter had by then completed his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Cambridge and taken a lecturing post at Bedford College, in the University of London. Richard, to the best of my recollection, was engaged in his research into the Forced Loan of 1626-1628. They were both highly interesting to talk to and engaging companions in the tea/coffee room of the P.R.O. I should add that the tea or coffee on sale there was pretty horrible. Ann Hughes was also about at that time.

The rest of my morning was spent looking for a piece by Penelope Corfield that I saw a couple of days ago but can no longer find. I remember her from the time when she beat me to a lecturing job at what was then Bedford College in the University of London.

I was more successful in reading a piece by Lorina P. Repina, a Russian historian, on the academic.edu site. She is based in the Institute of World History in the Russian Academy of Sciences and considered the ‘Writing practices in the space of intercultural interaction’. I am sorry to say that I did not find it particularly enlightening but, in general terms, I am interested in the historiographical products of eastern European countries, especially when they touch upon the history of the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 

It is a mistake to underestimate the intelligence of historians working there or their ingenuity in re-working the conclusions of scholars able to access the major documentary repositories here or in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Baltic states and Spain. Partly because of an apparent lack of personal contact with historians in these countries or in North America, there seems in some cases to be a time lag with a consequent reliance on figures like Tawney, Hill, Stone and others as if their works still commanded the fields they were interested in. One can find historians in south America – in Brazil, for example, where Christopher Hill enjoys a kind of cult following – who share their concerns but who are much better acquainted with more recent studies. I am not sure what can be done about this situation but it does make reading the works of eastern European historians challenging, interesting and often puzzling.