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hawkwing_lbBooks 2010: 46-47
46. Anthony Price, Our Man in Camelot.
One of the sadly long out of print David Audley books. Published in the 1970s, with all the Cold War preconceptions, but very good. Price has a very British - very old-school British - sensibility, and an appreciation for the labyrinthine intrigues of the civil and intelligence services only matched by his sense of history. In Camelot it is Badon Hill which forms the historical focus, and despite the logic holes forming from the aforementioned labyrinthine intrigues, it's quite brilliant, although not on the same level as Other Paths to Glory, which is possibly Great Literature in its own right.
Unfortunately, Price's attitude to race is even more dated and distasteful than his attitude to women: 'negro' and 'n*****' as off-handed descriptors are pretty appalling, and I'm pretty sure I smelled a dash of anti-Semitism to boot. Without such things, I could like these books wholeheartedly, but as it stands, I have to find them somewhat problematic.
non-fiction
47. Adrian Tinniswood, By Permission of Heaven: the story of the Great Fire of London, London, 2003.
Exactly what it says on the tin. As popular - and when I say popular, of course, I mean written for a non-specialist audience (like in this instance, for example, me) - scholarship goes, it's definitely decent. There is solid context for London before the Fire, an attention to developments after the Fire, and a day by day breakdown, with maps, of the Fire itself.
Tinniswood makes use of eye-witness accounts, post-Fire literature, and government documents to reconstruct the London of the Great Fire and its immediate aftermath. It is... interesting, to consider how much effect the trauma of this event may or may not have had on the events of the remainder of the seventeenth century: twenty years later, more or less, sees the Orange Revolution, in which, I believe I recall, one of the key factors was the lack of support for James II in London - a London which is still not yet fully rebuilt.
It struck me today, after I finished the Tinniswood book, that I've read at least three works of English 17th-century history in the last year. I have a context for 17th-century England, to some extent, which is not matched by my context for 17th-century Ireland.
I read the English books because of their availability at bargain-basement prices. (Most of my non-ancient history comes from the bargain basement, after all: I can - just about, on occasion - justify spending nearly thirty euro on an ancient history book on the grounds that it represents a potential investment, but this is much less true outside my area of specialisation.) There is sufficient popular scholarship on various periods of English history that reasonably decent works are both widely available and relatively affordable. They do have the population edge, after all.
Contrariwise, very few works of Irish history end up in the bargain basement. I suspect as a consequence of smaller publication runs, a smaller market for popular scholarship, and - often enough - smaller academic presses. The selection on the shelves is also smaller, and generally both more specialised and more expensive: I've been making eyes at the A New History of Ireland series when I pass them on the shelves, but thirty-six quid for one volume of a six-volume comprehensive history just isn't all that affordable, you know?
I'm just bitching, I suppose, but there're a couple of things floating around in my head about culture and identity that this bitching falls in with, and the way in which popular perception, popular knowledge, shapes attitudes towards past, and thus present, identities.
Maybe sometime when I'm less sleepy I'll manage to articulate that particular argument. It's a thought I'm thinking on, anyway.
46. Anthony Price, Our Man in Camelot.
One of the sadly long out of print David Audley books. Published in the 1970s, with all the Cold War preconceptions, but very good. Price has a very British - very old-school British - sensibility, and an appreciation for the labyrinthine intrigues of the civil and intelligence services only matched by his sense of history. In Camelot it is Badon Hill which forms the historical focus, and despite the logic holes forming from the aforementioned labyrinthine intrigues, it's quite brilliant, although not on the same level as Other Paths to Glory, which is possibly Great Literature in its own right.
Unfortunately, Price's attitude to race is even more dated and distasteful than his attitude to women: 'negro' and 'n*****' as off-handed descriptors are pretty appalling, and I'm pretty sure I smelled a dash of anti-Semitism to boot. Without such things, I could like these books wholeheartedly, but as it stands, I have to find them somewhat problematic.
non-fiction
47. Adrian Tinniswood, By Permission of Heaven: the story of the Great Fire of London, London, 2003.
Exactly what it says on the tin. As popular - and when I say popular, of course, I mean written for a non-specialist audience (like in this instance, for example, me) - scholarship goes, it's definitely decent. There is solid context for London before the Fire, an attention to developments after the Fire, and a day by day breakdown, with maps, of the Fire itself.
Tinniswood makes use of eye-witness accounts, post-Fire literature, and government documents to reconstruct the London of the Great Fire and its immediate aftermath. It is... interesting, to consider how much effect the trauma of this event may or may not have had on the events of the remainder of the seventeenth century: twenty years later, more or less, sees the Orange Revolution, in which, I believe I recall, one of the key factors was the lack of support for James II in London - a London which is still not yet fully rebuilt.
It struck me today, after I finished the Tinniswood book, that I've read at least three works of English 17th-century history in the last year. I have a context for 17th-century England, to some extent, which is not matched by my context for 17th-century Ireland.
I read the English books because of their availability at bargain-basement prices. (Most of my non-ancient history comes from the bargain basement, after all: I can - just about, on occasion - justify spending nearly thirty euro on an ancient history book on the grounds that it represents a potential investment, but this is much less true outside my area of specialisation.) There is sufficient popular scholarship on various periods of English history that reasonably decent works are both widely available and relatively affordable. They do have the population edge, after all.
Contrariwise, very few works of Irish history end up in the bargain basement. I suspect as a consequence of smaller publication runs, a smaller market for popular scholarship, and - often enough - smaller academic presses. The selection on the shelves is also smaller, and generally both more specialised and more expensive: I've been making eyes at the A New History of Ireland series when I pass them on the shelves, but thirty-six quid for one volume of a six-volume comprehensive history just isn't all that affordable, you know?
I'm just bitching, I suppose, but there're a couple of things floating around in my head about culture and identity that this bitching falls in with, and the way in which popular perception, popular knowledge, shapes attitudes towards past, and thus present, identities.
Maybe sometime when I'm less sleepy I'll manage to articulate that particular argument. It's a thought I'm thinking on, anyway.
