The Plantagenets - The Kings Who Made England by Dan Jones

Every generation has a historical period with which it closely identifies. Unfortunately for Great Britain in the early Twenty-First Century, it seems that the era over which we most obsess is the Tudor monarchy. A briefest Royal House spanning only one hundred and eighteen years and three generations of monarchs dominates the air-waves. It also fills the primary curriculum, so some unfortunate children are made to ‘do the Tudors’ several times over a school career at the expense of much more interesting periods of our history.

In clearer-cut and less sympathetic times, the Victorians relished the exploits of the Plantagenets. Here were real kings and queens, despots and heroes, and a definite sense of right and wrong. The dynasty suited the Victorian schoolroom, and matched well the Empire-building of the muscular Christians which was seen as a natural extension of England’s greatness.

Dan Jones has written the Plantagenet book for our times. He has created a broad sweep of historical writing that stretches from the glories of Henry II to the ignominy of Richard II. The book covers eight generations of monarchs (the longest unbroken dynasty in English history) and a period of close to three hundred years. It is very, very readable. He does not swamp the text with footnotes, and is precise when required. His main focus is kingship, and this is dealt with using a broad brush – it is obvious that the strong women of the realm are included, but also the pseudo-kings who ruled for extensive periods during the absence of the monarch are included. It fills in the bits that those long hours in the schoolroom left out. For anyone over forty, the history of kings involved learning lists that excluded King Louis (who invaded Thanet in 1216), Simon de Montfort (de facto ruler in 1263), Piers Gaveson (the power behind Edward II’s throne) and Eleanor of Aquitaine, who more or less ruled everything when her sons were absent from the kingdom.

When I picked up this book I feared that I would last about a hundred pages and then put it down. It was a well-chosen Christmas present from my wonderful wife, and I doubted my ability to persevere when the holiday ended. How wrong I was. For a book of history, it is actually a page-turner, which is a very rare thing. For all the skill of Antonia Fraser, I find her books dry and hard to get enthusiastic about. The style of Dan Jones is full of charm, and makes reading the next chapter a pleasure. It helps that he decided to write short chapters. There is nothing more dispiriting than having a half hour to read and not finishing a chapter. It was easy to read a little, do something else, and then return to the narrative. It made me more likely to stick with it.

A central plank to this book is the relationship between the king and the crown. To begin with the two were indivisible. As the centuries ticked on and the king and his household demanded more of the people, more was asked in return. It was no longer enough to rule absolutely and command complete loyalty. It is an interesting exercise to see just how far each Plantagenet could push it. Some were obviously more skilful than their predecessors in knowing how much to ask of the people. Some got it spectacularly wrong. Eventually, the king became a person separate from the idea of kingship. The real interest is in how each dealt with this realisation. Some were kings of action and aggression – martial kings. It is about these kings that the casual reader knows the most, because it is on their achievements that ‘traditional’ history usually dwells. Most readers know that Richard I was the ‘Lionheart’ and liked nothing more than cutting his way through the Near East in the name of his god and his pope. Fewer know about Henry III, a deeply spiritual king. It is perhaps the greatest success of this book that Dan Jones illuminates the long reign of Henry (fifty-six years) and his significant achievements.

It is an unashamedly English book. It is the story of England and its kings, because to weave a coherent history that included Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France and even Castile would mean running to thousands of pages. Jones has chosen his focus, and adds detail when necessary, but does not feel the need to explain the intricate nature of Welsh rule, to take one example.

In doing so the author returns to a simpler idea of Englishness, framed in the actions of kings and the reactions of the people. It is uncluttered by the centuries of complication and nationalism. It is an idea to which we can never return, but in learning a little more about it we are slightly wiser when presented with our current problems.

There is so much war that it is a wonder that anyone was left alive at all in 1399, when Richard II made his final, fatal errors. Because the light has shone so brightly on Henry VIII and his six wives, everything else is rather overlooked. If I was a commissioning producer for the BBC, or a Hollywood scriptwriter, I would be ignoring Anne Boleyn and asking Natalie Portman if her Occitan French was good enough to portray Eleanor of Aquitaine. And I would be asking Dan Jones for the details.

Stephen Fry - More Fool Me, A Memoir

‘More Fool Me’ is the third volume of recollections and anecdotes from Mr Stephen Fry; adored quiz person, writer, national treasure, General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett, KCB.

Much of the success of a memoir, I think, depends on interesting content, and the ability to follow when shorthand and nicknames are used. Unfortunately for dear Mr Fry, on this occasion both elements work against him. This book covers his life as a media darling, a time of great success and joy for him, but not very exciting for everyone else. His first two volumes tell the story of his childhood and university years, both of which are inherently interesting. However, his time in the eighties and early nineties is little more than a long list of name-checks and endless meals at the Groucho. It is so disappointing, as even Stephen Fry can not pull it off and make it a good read.

It starts well. He writes with warmth about his childhood again, and goes over all the ground covered in the two preceding volumes. He only actually gets down to business on page 69, when he lists all the major establishments in which he has snorted cocaine. Everything prior to this, he reassures the reader on several occasions, can be read in more detail elsewhere.

The next part of the book is a soul-searching analysis of a life maintained in the media whilst filled by a desire to consume large quantities of a Class A prohibited drug. He does this well, and some of his reflection is quite charming. However, he continues to make excuses to the reader that he is working hard not to sound like a luvvie. All that does is make him sound even more of a luvvie.

After another one hundred and fifty pages or more, the anecdotes begin to drift, and it seems like he ran out of time, because spliced on are the pages from his diary from 1993. The diary is a long list of nicknames, details of excessive evenings in London clubs, and stories about people who are only known to their friends in show business. There is a limit to how many ways a person can record evenings of cocaine and vodka and make them at all fun.

What is the reader looking for in book three of Mr Fry’s memoirs? Considering his life and the great successes, something in depth about the wonderful success of ‘Blackadder Goes Forth’ would not go amiss. It is only found here in the photographs. Alternatively, some insight into the making of ‘Peter’s Friends’ would also be welcomed, but is absent.

People also want to know about the birth of ‘QI’, but the timeline does not stretch that far. I think it will be testing even the most patient of readers if another volume appears that skates briefly over these successes in the way that this one has done.

Should Stephen Fry be blamed, or is it the fault of the pressure from publishers for a Christmas hit? It is a shame, as he remains the wonderful charming man that he has always been. The chance to record him at his most creative has pretty conclusively been missed – or skipped.

Why do we take photographs?

A few things have happened to me recently that have caused me to think about photographs and our motivation for taking pictures.

People take photographs for all kind of reasons.

The first, and most obvious, is to record a passing event. Photographs of people who have since died are powerful and valuable things – a window into a conclusively closed world. We treasure them, and with good reason. Obviously, video of the same is even more poignant. As technology has progressed, more of our lives are recorded and going through a handful of old photos is becoming a thing of the past. Many people have hundreds and hundreds of photos.

The fact was brought into focus for me recently when a friend died who steadfastly refused to have his photo taken. As a result, there was no great proliferation of his image on social media. I had to settle with my memories of him that were in the mind’s eye. I found that much more comforting. What I also found was that mutual friends told stories about him rather than showed pictures. I can contrast this to the death of a much-loved dog last week. Within a few hours there were dozens of photos of her on social media, many of which I was responsible for posting. It made me think about visual and non-visual memory, and I realised that people are becoming quite impoverished in terms of spoken memories if they do not have photos to rely on.

Digital media had made photos so cheap that they are no longer special. People have forgotten how to stand still and pose for a photo because they no longer have to – the photographer can always take ten more until he or she gets one that is just right. Twenty years ago each film had twenty-four or thirty-six shots, and if you got it wrong it cost money.

Add to that the absence of automatic focus and flash, and you remember the care with which photos were previously taken. This is something that I suspect previous generations might also have noticed, as photos changed from once in a lifetime events created in a studio to snaps taken on a cheap disposable analogue camera. I have my hunch though that without noticing we have entered a new age of photography. Photos are now so ubiquitous, cheap and easy to create that they are starting to lose their value.

My second rumination relates to the audience for our photographs. When I was a child, photographs reached only those who were shown the paper copy. Very rarely, two copies were made so that some could be shared with my grandparents. I realised when my last grandparent died that actually what happened more frequently was that a set of twenty-four photos was halved and shared. Going through photos after her death was a joy, because I saw the other half of the photos from my childhood for the first time.

The audience for photographs only ever widened if you were unfortunate enough to have a relative who had photographs made into slides. You were made to sit and view them in silence. The point about the 1970s slide show that is relevant to today was that the photos were still taken without a view to their audience, which is why it was so boring. The photographer was still taking photos with only himself in mind. Whilst snapping away at some Roman ruins, the boring uncle was not thinking of what would be interesting to a wider audience, only what interested him.

The obvious point here, of course, is the danger of freeing photographs from paper. We used to have complete control over who saw photographs. The recent Cloud debacle shows everyone how little control even the wealthy now have over their photographs. Nude photos were harder to come by when you had to take them to Boots the Chemist to be developed. I think that most people are still worried about this freeing of photography from a physical medium, and technology has outpaced our ability to set limits and social boundaries. I hope we all catch up soon.

Digital photography has caused an explosion of narcissism. If we want to take a thousand photographs of our haircuts, we can – and lots of people do. What is different is that everything can now be shared with a potentially limitless number of people. We can take twenty views of our new kitchen and show them to everybody we know, and many people that we have never met. As an audience, we don’t have to look, but most of us do.

I have now arrived at the Main Part Of The Rant. We have stopped taking photographs for ourselves. When all we had was analogue technology; photos were taken for us, and for our families. At the widest point of broadcast, a copy might be sent to a distant friend, but that was not in the mind of the photographer when the image was captured.

Many people now take photographs to impress contacts on social media. When we gaze through the frame, we are thinking how many people will like our picture, and how cool it will look, and how everyone will like us a little more because we take interesting pictures of cool places. There is a danger for many people that photos are becoming yet another method of impressing people, instead of capturing the passing of our lives.

It was really brought home to me recently when I passed the Tower Of London and saw how many people were taking photographs. I’m not saying they shouldn’t, as it was an impressive sight that deserves recording. But very few people were actually just standing and looking. Maybe I am being too cynical, and the majority were taking photos for themselves. But I suspect that many of the images were being created with a view to how many Facebook ‘likes’ could be garnered….

Whether that is right or wrong is a whole other issue. What I have realised is that I am going to take fewer photos, and think about why I am taking them, and make every one count.

Wallace Stegner: Crossing to Safety (1987)

The life of Wallace Stegner encompassed much of the Twentieth Century, the American Century. He was born in 1909 and so was part of a generation of writers whose work straddled the Second World War, but seemed peculiarly unaffected by the great trauma that war created. His work is either 1930s or 1950s in tone, strangely mid-century.

The novel Crossing to Safety tells the story of two couples whose lives are intertwined and for whom joint experience enriches all concerned. They are white, affluent, College types to differing degrees. They experience the Depression together, and the bounty of the United States. It is a story of open vistas, unspoiled woodland, ample food, large cars and New England privilege. The mastery of Wallace Stegner’s prose, however, is that it is also a story of struggle for academic excellence, illness, poverty and personal industry.

It is narrated by Larry Morgan, who begins life in the university world with no money, and only his wits. It describes his struggle, his love of his new wife Sally, her subsequent illness, and how they cope with it. The parallel lives of Sid and Charity Lang are one of privilege, New England money, generosity and contentment.

The novel follows the four lives until the special four-way friendship is broken by illness, ageing and eventual death. Stegner is superb at presenting snapshots of the characters in different situations and different times of life, all the reminiscence of Larry. It is not all apple pie and beers by the barbeque.

You end up knowing the characters well, and understanding their attitudes to life as it passes. Larry muses on ageing and is not bitter but frustrated at the limitations it puts in his way and in the way of his friends. I found myself wondering how much was based on the author’s own life experiences, and aside from some of the locations that he knew well, it seems that little is actually based on firm reality. It reveals that Stegner was a writer of many gifts, and the foremost among these was such attention to detail that you end up completely convinced by the characters.

Despite the many jumps between the 1930s and early 1970s, one thing that is inescapable is the full stop of death. Even in fiction, time waits for nobody. How Stegner handles this, and his reflection on terminal illness, whilst not the most cheerful reading, are masterful.

This is a book for people who ponder mortality, who are confused by the hand of cards that life deals for us all, and those who fear the end. It is apparent that Stegner did not.