Seventy five years later, Stalin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, is still trying to strangle independence, this time not Berlin’s but Ukraine’s. But alongside the reed beds and watery landscape of the Suffolk coast, the successors of Britten and Pears have been celebrating their own milestone, their own decades-long independence. It has been quite an improbable journey, one shadowed in its earlier years by the impact of the Cold War. This sadly has been the case this year too as a new Cold War far away to the east affects so many aspects of European cultural life including programme-making alongside the pebble beaches on the North Sea.

It is extraordinary that all those post-war years ago in an isolated part of the eastern extremities of England, a festival was conjured into existence. The wonder is that it happened at all. Of course, the quiet but determined magicians who pulled it off were Britten and Pears. The composer born in nearby Lowestoft and his singer friend from Surrey had been together since 1937. In 1947, they persuaded their local Suffolk neighbours and their wide circle of artistic contacts to give it a go. The challenges were considerable, not least finding suitable venues. This proved fortuitous as a pattern was set in which local halls and churches were used and later supplemented by the old Maltings in nearby Snape, which was converted into a concert hall in the late 1960s. With Britten as composer in residence, new productions followed year after year with him often also a performer alongside Pears. Never a parochial festival, international performers (including at the height of the Cold War the Russian cellist Rostropovich) and influences (from India via Japan to Indonesia) became staples.

From the start, the festival was refreshingly innovative, mixing song recitals with early music programmes, jazz and folk music (using several hundred local children on one occasion), as well as poetry readings, celebrity lectures (by the likes of the novelist E. M. Forster), live drama and exhibitions of paintings. Although, over time, music has come to predominate the annual summer festival – which concluded last Sunday – it has continued to offer a rich mix of contemporary arts. 

The organisers have never stood still and this year was no different under the leadership of Roger Wright (who was knighted in the King’s Birthday Honours last week). Four key artists – composers and performers respectively – were deployed across the festival’s two weeks. Judith Weir (the outgoing Master of the King’s Music) was principal guest composer and new pieces of her music flowed sinuously through a number of concerts. The distinguished German cellist, Alban Gerhardt, and the inspiring young British violinist, Daniel Pioro, gave brilliant solo recitals including of Bach and Britten alongside concertos (one by the Korean Unsuk Chin, another featured composer) with the visiting London Philharmonic and BBC Scottish Symphony orchestras. The orchestras delivered grandly themselves: Mahler’s 4th and Bruckner’s massive 7th symphony (both recorded live by the BBC). New productions of works by Britten were highlights, most notably his music drama “Curlew River” (filmed in and around Blythburgh Church for broadcast on BBC4 in the Autumn). 

As always, there was nothing parochial about the programme as instanced by Vox Lumines from Belgium singing Purcell’s “Fairy-Queen”, a performance of Kanze Motomasa’s Noh play and a cycle of songs by Messiaen. And no-one who attended it will forget the brio of a chamber music recital dominated by the Kanneh-Mason family last Friday evening.

The Aldeburgh Festival is thankfully still flying high 75 years on. It remains one of the glories of the British musical year. Unlike some other festivals (including Bath and Cheltenham) which reportedly have had to pull their horns in a bit for financial reasons, Aldeburgh is still offering programmes of the highest international quality but, even so, is not immune to today’s challenges. Some performers were perhaps lucky to have survived funding crises over the last twelve months: the BBC Singers faced the axe but were reprieved whilst the Britten Sinfonia lost vital support.  The arts need – and get – support from public funds (notably in Aldeburgh’s case from the Arts Council England) and private ones alike but both are increasingly uncertain. The role of the BBC cannot be underestimated: without its direct support (for orchestras and young musician programmes) and indirect support via broadcast concerts, classical music in Britain would be less rich and less accessible. And support is not all one-way: Aldeburgh and the Britten Pears Foundation, as well as gaining it themselves, also disburse it in the form of music education and regional outreach to schools.

But this year has seen a disturbing new challenge to the viability of public arts events in Britain. The effect of social media-based protests against the alleged investment priorities of Edinburgh-based Baillie Gifford has led to that firm’s withdrawal from sponsorship of key literary festivals across the country. In certain cases, they were the main sponsors and their decision to stand back will limit what the organisers can afford to do and may risk the survival of some. These developments show how fragile arts funding across Britain can be. Music festivals have not – as of yet – been affected significantly by similar protest initiatives but the warning signs are there. 

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In the European election in Italy, Meloni has helped to redefine the Italian centre-right. The left of centre Democratic Party won 24 per cent of the vote (up one per cent), the right of centre Brotherhood of Italy (Meloni’s party) 29 per cent (up 22 per cent) and the extreme right Lega party (led by Matteo Salvini) only nine per cent (down 25 per cent). Meloni has marginalised the most extreme right and helped establish a newly configured centre right.

And unlike a number of other leaders on the right elsewhere in Europe, she has remained robust in support for Ukraine. Overall, under Meloni, Italian politics has not only produced surprises but also shown greater resilience than foreign critics sometimes allow. But the party she leads, Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) or Brothers of Italy, didn’t come out of nowhere; it arrived with heavy political baggage stretching back to the early postwar period and the foundation of the Italian Republic. 

In the years since the Second World War, Italy has served as a byword for political instability, with jokes – often coined by Brits – about the country’s frequent changes of governments and prime ministers. For those of us from a country which has managed since 2016 to have four prime ministers only one of whom was appointed following a general election, we should perhaps be less patronising about the track record of Italian politicians and governments. Certainly we should not underestimate Meloni though neither should we ignore that political baggage. 

One of the particular strengths of Mark Gilbert’s deeply researched new book, “Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy”, is its detailed account of the signal success of the country’s transition from Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship into a well-founded democracy in less than a decade. The challenges were immense and success far from assured. A distressed Italy was divided between an industrial and comparatively prosperous north and an agricultural and impoverished south. It was riven by political differences under a contested monarchy and with Allied forces still operational and intent on influencing post-war developments. Gilbert delineates all these various factors and aspects with great skill. 

He recognises that the divisions among Italians didn’t readily heal and he doesn’t diminish the potential threat to the nascent republic’s survival from the extreme left. Nor does he disregard the “siren voices” of the remaining fascists in his analysis of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), the far-right party from which Meloni’s FdI takes its indirect descent and which carried the leftovers of Mussolini’s fascism from 1946 until as late as 1995. These origins stalk the FdI and Meloni to this day.

The key villain in Gilbert’s narrative is of course Benito Mussolini; but he was not alone. He and other political opportunists needed opportunities to draw upon and Italy’s disastrous involvement in the First World War provided the key one. So too did a floundering pre-war political elite and system of government and a temporising monarchy. An Italy that had unified itself only a few decades earlier in a Risorgimento, which attracted admiration and applause from liberal Europe, had produced a politically fragile new state which was unstable almost from its inception. 

The story of Mussolini’s Italy is well known. A weak political establishment led by King Victor Emmanuel legitimised Mussolini’s gangster politics with his appointment as prime minister in 1922. Thereafter supported by fawning acolytes, he developed a corporatist and authoritarian state, invented an ahistorical link between his bombastic regime and the glories of ancient Rome and implemented an imperial fantasy in north and east Africa and along the borders of the Adriatic.

Initially admired by Hitler as a fascist mentor, Mussolini joined the Axis powers and declared war. Then everything turned sour and tragic for the Italian people. Ill-equipped militarily, Mussolini overreached catastrophically. As a consequence, he slipped in Hitler’s estimation and became a dependent client of Nazism. After his dismissal from office by the King in 1943 and retreat behind German lines in the north of the country, he was forced by Hitler to head the infamous “Salo Republic” headquartered on Lake Como where he oversaw notoriously vicious efforts to destroy the Italian partisans assisting the Allied advance up the Italian peninsular. The partisans in turn showed no mercy and executed Mussolini and many of those who had supported him in the last two years of the war.

What Mussolini’s fascism left in its wake was a disabled and fractious Italy – economically, politically, externally. It is this post-fascist Italy and its achievements that is insufficiently known and which Gilbert seeks to correct. Mired in recrimination and poverty at home, and dependent on the triumphant Allies for the recovery of national independence (and resolution of territorial disputes in and around Trieste), an almost impossible set of recovery tasks fell on political parties themselves struggling and jockeying for primacy. On the left were the Communists, with leaders recently returned from exile in Moscow and deeply distrusted by the western Allies and the powerful Catholic Church, and alongside them a Socialist party which moved between assertive independence and opportunistic alignment. On the right, the emerging grouping of Christian Democrats grew to play a key, eventually, dominant role. Notwithstanding their differences, the leaders of these three parties, the Communist, Palmiro Togliatti, the Socialist, Pietro Nenni and the Christian Democrat, Alcide De Gasperi, are the heroes of Gilbert’s account and most especially the latter. De Gasperi, the key convenor of the Christian Democrats, was a shrewd and capable democrat whose values and integrity and support from the Vatican were crucial to the establishment of a democratic postwar Italy. 

Together, these very different politicians from strikingly different political perspectives co-operated as members of the Committee of National Liberation (CLN) from 1943 and were united on certain key points: in their resolute anti-fascism, their agreement on the need for a new democratic constitution (including for the first time votes for women) and, related to that, on the future of the monarchy which they put to a referendum which more narrowly than they had expected favoured a republican state. Via an “emergency government of national necessity” and a Constituent Assembly elected on party lines in 1946, these politicians of right and left fenced their way to a peace treaty with the Allies in 1947 and a new constitution under the First Republic.

What is striking in all this is how, immediately after the war, compromise was seen by the Communists as necessary if they were to be able to play a political role and by the Christian Democrats as necessary if they were eventually to win and retain power. The left held its ultras in check and the right realised that it had to avoid veering too far to the right in policy terms and too close to the Catholic Church. Each major party effectively – in the Communists’ case quite cynically – occupied a broad centre ground politically and the formation of the republic was facilitated by this. 

But it was the Christian Democrats who set the pattern after 1946 by breaking with the Communists and Socialists in early 1947 and decisively winning the 1948 general election under De Gasperi. As Gilbert observes, De Gasperi made two key political judgements at this time: that the Communists could not be trusted to adhere to true democracy given what was happening with the “Peoples Democracies” in central and Eastern Europe, and that Italy could not survive economically without American financial support and investment. 

These conclusions pointed him and the Christian Democrats towards engagement with an emerging European Community and a defensive NATO alliance. It is remarkable that in so few years Italy moved from fascism to founding member of NATO and the EU. It was a country transformed though there would be further political challenges ahead from left and right and from violent terrorism, too. The First Republic would give way to the Second in 1994 and to the right-leaning and corrupt influences of Berlusconi’s time in office as prime minister but the foundations of the post-war Italian Republic established in 1948 proved remarkably solid.

But Gilbert’s account doesn’t take us that far and effectively ends with De Gasperi’s death in 1954. He is not uncritical of his hero but is unstinting in his praise of what he achieved. And there is an implicit lesson from those earlier years which may not have been lost on Meloni. This is that pushing too hard to the right runs risks to stability. Meloni is a social conservative and a nationalist but she is showing how to expand the centre and push more extreme right-wingers to the margins. Whether that is her goal or not, it may prove to be her best route to securing domestic political support for her often controversial policies.

Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy by Mark Gilbert is published by Allen Lane (£35)

The past, that foreign country, haunts Borderlines in often surprising and unexpected ways. We explore quirky curiosities such as the towns overlapping the Belgian/Dutch border. The town of Baarle, for example, chooses the best national regulations for their local needs. It highlights boundaries as distinct local areas caught in aspic as in the cross-plying intersections of north-east France, south-west Germany and Switzerland around Basle or at the Italian/Swiss border around Lugano where gambling and tax evasion have left their marks.

But the further east Baston takes the reader, the less quirky the edges appear. Instead, they gradually become more serious and grave: “Old boundaries layer over each other like scar tissue”. For Putin, the postwar territorial order isn’t settled and is to be revisited and revoked in Ukraine and challenged elsewhere along the contours of Russia’s former Tsarist and Soviet empires. And even within the EU, Putin has some willing helpers opportunistically seeking possible territorial adjustments, most conspicuously in Hungary.

Baston has crafted a vivid, deeply researched and fascinating story but an unavoidably selective one. The oddities and curiosities in Western Europe aside, his account is largely focused on Central and Eastern Europe and especially on the borderlines of the countries of the ex-Soviet imperium. Given the profusion of ethnic and other divisions in the Balkans, which in the Nineties saw one of Europe’s most interesting and severe border changes in history with the breakup of Yugoslavia, it is somewhat odd that Baston has little to say about that region. 

What Borderlines has a lot to say about is the impact of the collapse of earlier empires in Europe and, especially, of Austria-Hungary. He shows many times that the unwinding of Austria-Hungary is still ongoing in Central and Eastern Europe and Baston’s analysis of these long, drawn-out effects from Slovakia via Hungary and Poland to Ukraine is at the heart of his book. He repeatedly shows how a world was lost after the disintegration of Austria-Hungary at the end of the First World War. In place of an empire notably tolerant of ethnic and religious diversity, the political leftovers fuelled nationalism and ethnic conflicts on which Nazism and Soviet communism built their deadly regimes.

I recall in 1992 visiting the Speaker of the Hungarian parliament in his offices in the splendid gothic building on the banks of the Danube and almost immediately having my attention drawn to a large map on the wall. This highlighted the contrast between the borders of Hungary past and present and drew attention to the numbers of Magyars or ethnic Hungarians displaced by interwar treaties and “required” to live in neighbouring countries beyond, as it were, the national pale. Then, as now, Hungary’s governing politicians perceived the rightful boundaries of their country to be defined by ethnicity rather than geography and civic rights. Others in Central Europe have taken a different path.

Baston draws this out well as he contrasts the irredentist tendencies of Orban’s Hungary with the sometimes uneasy but real reconciliations between others in the region affected by post-1945 territorial changes. Most conspicuously Germany and Poland have come to terms with major territorial adjustments forced upon them. So too and despite equally painful historical experiences have Poland and Ukraine. It is Hungary that nibbles still at the post-war order and gives comfort to Putin’s Russia and does so not just to protect cheap energy supplies but for its own underlying political goals. And although Hungary seeks only to nibble, Putin bites with bared teeth.

Whilst Baston’s journeyings across Central Europe frequently evoke nostalgia for happier times under Franz-Josef’s rule from Vienna, it is the EU that is cited many times as a kind of contemporary counterpoint. Many of those Baston meets across the eastern borderlines of the former Soviet Union aspire implicitly to a kind of re-worked Austria-Hungary, a pluralistic, international legal order with free movement of people. Even in Kaliningrad, that odd bit of Russia wedged between the Baltic, Lithuania and Poland, those living there who retain Lithuanian citizenship treasure it for the ability to access and travel through the Schengen area.

This raises the main curiosity of this book for a reader in the UK: its comparative silence on the effect of Brexit on the free movement of British citizens across Europe. There is some mention of the EU/UK border on the island of Ireland but there is little or no commentary on the impact of reimposed borders for travel across the Channel and North Sea between Britain and the European Union. Perhaps, Baston suggests, only an island state – and one uninvaded since the 11th century – could contemplate re-establishing in contemporary Europe a barrier to easy trade and communication. Borders may seem less arbitrary when geographically imposed by water and unchanged for millennia. Certainly, from the viewpoint of some people in non-EU countries on the peripheral borderlines of the continent who pine for free movement, it is a mystifying development. 

Borderlines: A History of Europe, Told From the Edges by Lewis Baston (Hodder & Stoughton, 336pp; £25)

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With the end of the Soviet Union and the “fall” of the communist ideology which underpinned it, a new global order beckoned; or so it was thought. Western banks and businesses were poised to grasp opportunities offered by financial deregulation, new communication technologies and shifting international politics. Those opportunities seemed ripe for the picking: politics and economic performance globally would be reshaped not by old-style ideologies and nationalisms but by new-style industries and trade. 

However, thirty years on, the Soviet empire is striving to resuscitate itself, state communism is alive and kicking strongly in China, nativist politics are on the rise – not least in India – and the global order is threatened more by military power relationships than by the promise of commercial ones.

Back in the 1990s western political and business elites expected Adam Smith’s invisible hand to work its magic internationally and cast the world anew to their advantage. That at least was the theory. For western “realists” and idealists alike a meld of free-booting international finance, manufacturing investment and enhanced trade offered the prospect of a win-win outcome across the globe. Globalisation was embraced as a transformative phenomenon that was going to be good for everyone. What could possibly go wrong? 

In a quiet aside Braw admits that she has written a one-sided account. Hers is the story of globalisation from a largely western and disillusioned perspective. The forty individual voices or interviewees she calls as witnesses to the past three decades are a varied but limited group. The majority are drawn from the US, Germany, the UK, Sweden (Braw is herself Swedish) and the Baltic states. Prominent among them are bankers who were keen to finance unconstrained investments overseas; ambitious employees of leading western manufacturers (such as Ericsson and VW) seeking new markets and economically efficient manufacturing locations and link-ups in wider Asia – especially China – and Latin America; and newly-minted young entrepreneurs from countries freed from the grip of the Soviet Union. Braw uses her witnesses cleverly to put human faces to a dramatic global shift that can too easily be lost behind shafts of statistical data.

But what is missing from Braw’s account is how the countries of the wider or non-western world saw the globalisation process and the risks and opportunities it posed for them. Many saw assertive and expanding western commercial reach as a novel form of imperialism with them as potential victims. It is not coincidental that countries of the Global South sought to re-order themselves. New groupings formed, most significantly Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa and China together known as BRICs. 

Partly protective economically, partly assertive politically, such groupings were works-in-progress. They were – and remain – far from unified in their views or goals but they represented a challenge to the established paramountcy of the US and its European allies. Furthermore, they were not ready to support a world order shaped and institutionalised by victorious powers after the Second World War. Globalisation didn’t “flatten” the world. Assertive nationalisms stirred most obviously and instrumentally in China and India. Western-style liberal democracy failed to take over the world as some had anticipated. Nor did all the old ideologies retire defeated and distinctly unliberal ones began to take shape even in parts of the western world. Soviet Communism had thrown in the towel but China certainly hadn’t and India started to generate its own Hindu-nationalist ideology and common to them all were authoritarian styles of government. 

What Braw shows well is how doing business across freshly accessible markets too often sidelined sensible analysis and good judgment on key issues, not least due protection of intellectual property rights. Large western companies were frequently not as savvy as they had thought they were and ignored their better instincts, allowing themselves to be robbed by copycat techniques, not least in China. But Braw is too inclined to assign dominant blame to an unscrupulous China whilst underestimating the shortsightedness or worse of representatives of western companies intent, above all, on short-term financial gain. 

Meanwhile back in the countries where the expanding western companies were headquartered, a different story gradually took shape. Braw’s witnesses to this are principally politicians and trade unionists who saw the effects back home in Europe and the US. The flip-side of globalisation’s commercial expansion story is the impact of new markets and new link-ups and manufacturing locations on those left behind in the likes of Detroit or Birmingham with hollowed-out workplaces and impoverished local communities. The seeds of resentment and populism in the western world were forming quickly as traditional industries and jobs were transplanted to cheaper locations overseas. Insufficient opportunities emerged to replace them. Assertive agendas in China and India and elsewhere were gradually encountering increasingly defensive political agendas in the US and Europe. And to complicate globalisation’s evolution and impact at home as well as in the wider world, conflicts still festered in the Middle East whilst others broke into full-scale war as in Ukraine and threatened to do so in Taiwan.  

Both parts of the title of Elizabeth Braw’s book are revealing and arguably misleading. Despite what she says we aren’t seeing an end to globalisation but rather a disquieting uncertainty as to its future evolution. The western countries initially intent on securing commercial advantage from new communication and related technologies married to liberated financial flows, have begun to face a kind of reverse globalisation in which the eastern part of the globe is pushing its own agenda which in turn may cost the western world dearly. 

Nor are we seeing the “return of a divided world” because globalisation never made such divisions go away anyway. In practice, globalisation has not unified the world and divisions haven’t disappeared. It was naive to expect otherwise. New or reconfigured political alliances and economic relationships and dependencies are in development, and nimble and thoughtful footwork will be needed if a western world increasingly disenchanted by globalisation is to continue to engage successfully both economically and politically. There is though no going back, even if we wanted to do so. 

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Three years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had brought the war against Japan to a juddering end, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East concluded its work in Tokyo and sentenced seven of the highest category of indicted Japanese offenders to death for war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

But the conflict between war and law which might have seemed so remote from our own times is tragically in play again as Russian aggression in Ukraine continues and the spiral of violence in Israel and Gaza which started with Hamas’s attacks on 7 October causes dreadful numbers of civilian deaths and casualties. Themes that were to the fore in Tokyo (and at Nuremberg before it) seventy-five years ago resonate once more across the decades: the nature of aggressive warfare, the right to self-defence, the obligation to limit civilian casualties and always to act in accordance with international humanitarian law. International courts are once again engaged in the tasks of upholding international legal norms and considering alleged offences against the laws of war.

Gary Bass’s “Judgement at Tokyo” is a monumental achievement. In a long, exhaustive and often painful account, he sets out the events that led to the trial, the controversies that attended its establishment and the proceedings and conclusions which followed. He casts his net wide and spins into life the geopolitical and colonial context before and during the war in East Asia. With careful but vivid prose he sets before the reader a rich cast of players in a drama which was controversial at the time and which still reverberates, not least in Japan and China.  

There was no common start to the drama. For the United States, the war in East Asia began with the surprise Japanese attack in December 1941 on Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. For Nationalist China, it began after incursions into the province of Manchuria in 1931 followed by Japan’s full advance militarily in 1937 with horrific atrocities visited upon the local populations, most notoriously in Nanjing (the Nationalist capital). For the Soviet Union, it took the form of a late and opportunistic breach in 1945 of its neutrality treaty with Japan and a land grab in Japanese-occupied Manchuria and of islands at the northern end of the Japanese archipelago. For the French, British and Dutch, it was the assaults on their colonial territories in the region in the first half of 1942 with the Philippines (which suffered some of the most brutal Japanese atrocities) and Burma attacked in the same year. Further, South Australia and New Zealand were drawn into the conflict by attachment to the UK and by the encroaching threat posed by Japan to their own territories. Threading through all the events is an imperialist story of threatened European (and American) colonial empires, of a newly imposed Japanese imperium, with racist attitudes and claims informing both.

It is a tribute to Bass’s skills as chronicler and analyst that all these geopolitical and related strands are drawn together in a notably coherent account. Equally accomplished are his portraits of the key players in the drama. Above all in his depiction of General Douglas MacArthur, the overbearing US military supremo who ruled with little constraint from Washington over a ravaged and broken Japan. The dramatic counterpoint to MacArthur was Emperor Hirohito of Japan whose role and responsibility for the war was controversial but whose authority was seen by MacArthur as critical to the stabilisation and “modernisation” of a non-belligerent post-war Japan. MacArthur never wanted an international military tribunal preferring quickly delivered judgements by US military courts (as had been the pattern hitherto), but on this he was forced into line by the Truman administration. Reluctantly and with griping complaints from him thereafter, he established the International Military Tribunal for the Far East under a charter similar to that applied at Nuremberg. 

But setting up the tribunal was only the beginning and many difficulties and complexities lay ahead. Agreeing on the judges – including Sir William Webb, the cantankerous presiding judge from Australia – and the team of prosecutors was not straightforward. At Nuremberg, they had all been drawn from the Allied countries who together had defeated Nazi Germany. At Tokyo, the character of the conflict and the geographical spread produced a more controversial pattern, not least as viewed from the colonial or ex-colonial territories in East Asia. There were thus no Malay or Indonesian judges to rule on atrocities committed against their populations but only British (and Commonwealth), Dutch and French judges alongside US and Soviet ones and two from the soon-to-be newly independent States of India and the Philippines and crucially one (a very influential one), Mei Ruao, from China. The tribunal was therefore predominantly a court constructed – like its predecessor at Nuremberg – in the image of the victors in the war, though not exclusively so.

From the start, the tribunal was mired in arguments about the source of its judicial authority and the scope of international law in 1945. Bass draws out well, and in terms understandable to a layman (or at least to this reviewer), arcane arguments about the applicability of the 1907 Hague and subsequent conventions on required standards of humanity in war. He also teases out the applicability or not of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 whose signatories renounced war as an instrument of national policy whilst still asserting claims to self-defence. Amazingly and largely held back by the presiding judge, the tribunal did not articulate the basis for its jurisdiction until its concluding sessions in 1948 when it opted to do what it could have done much earlier, namely to cite the charter under which the tribunal had been appointed by MacArthur in 1946.

Leaving to one side the jurisdictional question for nearly two years, the judges sought in the meantime to establish the extent to which the Japanese military figures and politicians in the dock were guilty in international law of the offences for which they had been arraigned. The Americans (prodded insistently by MacArthur behind the scenes) were focussed principally on nailing senior Japanese figures for the attack on Pearl Harbour, defined as a criminal act of aggression. Legally this was not as simple as it appeared, especially for those such as the Dutch judge, Röling, alongside his Indian counterpart, Pal, who maintained that no such international legal norm had existed when Pearl Harbour was attacked. Many other judges were focussed rather more on sentencing those directly or indirectly responsible for human atrocities in their own countries. And here there were great practical difficulties, especially given the paucity of deployable evidence – much of which had been destroyed by the Japanese in the final days of the war, notably in China – and uncertainty as to where individual responsibility lay, whether with individual service personnel alone or with their senior commanders up to and including their military chiefs and political masters.

So where ultimately did the buck stop? It is around his consideration of responsibility that Bass walks a delicate and sensitive path. It is hard not to conclude that he views Emperor Hirohito as complicit in, if not directly responsible, for war crimes. But all the evidence he assembles from certain key diaries as well as transcripts of the tribunal proceedings tends to show how determined MacArthur and senior Japanese in and outside the dock were to protect the Emperor. Even those facing the prospect of being hanged twisted in the winds of cross-examination to avoid any incrimination of Hirohito. The Emperor himself and his immediate advisors played a clever game in which he acted in ways appealing to MacArthur (and many in Washington too) and showing how he was ready to diminish his own authority constitutionally whilst encouraging political and economic modernisation. All of this was much more about politics than law.

Indeed, politics was never far away. The judges routinely reported on backchannels to their governments. Some did so more egregiously than others, notably the Soviet judge – with skills well tuned by experience of Stalinist trials – who though versed in international law would not allow its niceties to mess up the desired outcome. Others reported despairingly of the ineptitude of the lead US prosecutor (very much a political appointee) and the inept oscillations of the presiding judge. The British judge, Lord Patrick, as well as the New Zealander sought despairingly to escape from the increasingly thankless task. Of the others, Röling lamented (to the frustration of officials in The Hague) what he saw as the lack of legal authority for some of their discussions whilst Pal kept his own counsel and eventually wrote a long dissenting opinion that risked undermining the tribunal’s very purpose and alienated his own Prime Minister as a consequence. For some judges, Pal especially, and for many surviving Japanese civilians as well as those in the dock, the shocking and indiscriminate impact of the atomic bombs dropped in the last days of the war on Hiroshima and Nagasaki called out for judgment too. It is not accidental, as Bass points out, that Allied prosecutors hedged themselves to avoid direct criticism of aerial bombardment by the Japanese elsewhere in East Asia. Seemingly they did so to avoid any argument claiming that Allied “precision bombing” of Japanese cities as well as the atomic bombings might also be judged in contravention of the laws of war. 

In many ways as Bass subtly insinuates more than once, it is astonishing that the tribunal ever reached settled majority conclusions and judgements. But it did and by a relatively simple device, which was to align itself with the approach of the far less controversial proceedings and conclusions of the judgements at Nuremberg two years earlier. How far Tokyo was a tribunal led as much by considerations of politics as by established international law might be thought moot. Certainly the failure to achieve a unanimous final judgement and the dissenting opinion of the Indian judge in particular, left a trail along which Japanese nationalists over the years have sought to cast the Tokyo judgment as victors’ justice alone.   

Another writer of a very different book, Ian Buruma in “Wages of Guilt” published thirty years ago, contrasts the exemplary way Germans faced up to their country’s Nazi past with the more muted and less explicit acknowledgement by Japan of its own wartime record. He articulates a sense, partly fuelled perhaps by the limitations of the Tokyo trial, of Germans recognising guilt but of Japanese feeling shame. Of course those are very different things.

Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary J Bass is published by Picador (£30).

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Berlin is a moveable feast and always has been. It has been a city in flux over the centuries and has constantly – to pick up on the subtitle of John Kampfner’s excellent new book In Search of Berlin – reinvented itself and is doing so still. The “search” on which Kampfner invites the reader to accompany him is not one to be found in a conventional tourist guide (though any tourist would benefit from reading it before heading to the airport) nor in a conventional narrative history. It is more subtle and questioning than that. It is an attempt to discern what has made Berlin the city it is today.  

Everyone has their own Berlin and in his new book Kampfner has written a kind of love letter to his. He was living there when the Wall came down and has visited frequently in the decades since. His love is not uncritical but it is assured. He deftly and succinctly covers Berlin’s history from its improbable foundation on the northern plains of Europe eight centuries ago to its almost equally improbable evolution from twentieth-century tyranny to an emblem of freedom in our own time. He is especially adept at using walks across the now undivided city to sense the operation of the past on the present whether in his visits to its cemeteries or in his reflections on the built and re-built environment, the resonances of which explain so much about the political textures of the city. Kampfner cites a telling statistic when he notes that, of buildings fully standing in the city today, one third were constructed in only two decades from 1890-1910. The sheer scale of growth led to its tenfold territorial expansion in 1920 to gain the city boundaries that still apply. 

Berlin is, like Germany itself, a kind of geopolitical invention. Language and nation fused and Bismarck’s Prussia grabbed the reins of power in what became Germany after 1871 and ruled – spurring lasting resentment from older competitor cities to the west – from Berlin as its capital. Thereafter reinvention followed reinvention as German territory successively expanded to the east and then retracted westwards at the end of the Second World War. The Berlin which had been at the centre of Bismarck’s new Germany found itself after 1945 less than 300 miles from the new Polish border and isolated in a politically and economically divided and diminished Germany. 

The unpopular capital gave way to Bonn in the Federal Republic and to subservience to the Soviet Union in the East Berlin of the new German Democratic Republic. At war’s end, 800,000 Berliners were left homeless. A divided city formed itself anew and the pressures on Berlin grew with the trauma of the Berlin airlift in 1948/49, the crisis in 1958, and, finally, the attempted isolation of the Western Sector of the city in 1961 when the Wall was constructed. The movements of people into and through the city intensified as Germans to the east sought entry into West Berlin and beyond. Between 1949 and 1989 (though mainly before 1961) some four million East Germans fled to the West, most using West Berlin as gateway if not destination.

This post-war movement of people into and out of the city goes to the core of Kampfner’s book. His underlying and recurrent theme is of migration and its effects which, he implies, have more often been positive than negative. Berlin was formed and transformed by successive influxes of immigrants. Again and again, devastation wrought through war or economic collapse was followed by recovery on the back of new arrivals into the city. And, as Kampfner shows, the pattern was set well before the Second World War. When the Thirty Years War ended in 1648 the city’s population had been reduced to only 400 families with no houses left to accommodate them. The Great Elector of Brandenburg set about rebuilding and drawing in migrants selectively from German lands to the west and east and from Denmark and Poland, and, in 1671, he admitted fifty Jewish families by special dispensation. Huguenots escaping religious persecution in Louis XIV’s France followed and were offered respite and opportunity in Berlin.

The cosmopolitan mix that came to characterise the city was thus being formed even before the nineteenth century and accelerated thereafter. Napoleon’s destructive attacks on the city led to further arrivals and the city was to expand massively in the later nineteenth century. And along with the new arrivals came cultural changes which gave birth to a distinctively German Enlightenment and a prized educational system.  Altogether the city’s population by century’s end had expanded, Kampfner calculates, from 915,000 in 1800 to two million in 1890 and by 1914 to four million, to become the largest metropolis in Europe. 

In this increasingly crowded city, 60 per cent of Berliners had come from elsewhere and population density was 30,000 people per square kilometre (a higher concentration than Tokyo would achieve only in 2017). And with all these waves of immigration, a pattern was increasingly apparent. As Kampfner observes, “economic growth and social tension” grew alongside each other forming “a trend that has continued to this day”. Weimar Berlin was beset by tensions from its foundation after the First World War through economic collapse in the 1920s to its end with the advent of the Nazis in the 1930s. But while it lasted, Weimar was a place not only of economic and societal distress but also of a liberating outburst of cultural innovation in films, literature, music and the social sciences. New waves of people came to Berlin from other parts of Germany and from wider Europe, including escapees from Stalin’s Soviet Union.

And so the story continued after the Second World War. The city today is even more of a melting pot than previously. As Kampfner remarks: “The migrant story never stops.”  Economic recovery in the 1960s saw a major pull factor as Turkish migrants were drawn to the city and then stayed, notwithstanding being designated “guest-workers”.  Around the same time, young Germans were drawn to a West Berlin which allowed them to avoid conscription whilst in turn they helped to revitalise an ageing local community even if at the expense of an often unwelcome radicalisation. Sometimes patterns seen earlier in the century seemed to repeat themselves as Russians escaping Putin’s version of their country found refuge in a re-unified Berlin. And with the migration of Russians has come an expansion of the city’s Jewish population – four in five of the comparatively large Jewish community today are Russian speakers originally from Ukraine and Belarus as well as Russia. As indicators of the continued push of migration and of the generosity of Berliners and other Germans, witness the numbers of Syrians admitted in 2015 and of Ukrainians arriving in and since 2022.

Kampfner’s account or “search” for Berlin is especially strong because he has grasped and explored its essentially provisional character; a city constantly needing to adapt and reformulate itself with inward migration a key motor of change. The Berlin he loves is a city like no other, made so by its unique history.  But what of the Berlin of tomorrow? Kampfner senses a craving for the “normal” but uncertainty as to what that is or might be in future. The city’s government speaks in its “Strategy for 2030” of Berlin as “the freedom city”. A large claim and one which even though its historical evolution might be thought to justify it, prompts a lot of questions at a time of growing uncertainty across Europe.

Meanwhile, Berlin remains a wonderfully oddball place which Kampfner has captured well in a book all lovers of Berlin will enjoy. 

In Search of Berlin: The Story of a Reinvented City by John Kampfner, Atlantic Books, £22

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Nathan Thrall’s latest book is not a story about Gaza but it is about Palestine and specifically about an encircled enclave of the West Bank abutting the walls or fences of East Jerusalem and of a local tragedy affecting Abed Salama and his family. It is a study of Palestine in miniature from the ground up and resonates with the history of Arab-Israeli relations since 1948.

Thrall relates an extraordinary and often very moving story. His past work as an American journalist and director of the Arab-Israeli project at the International Crisis Group, makes him a notably experienced and informed observer. He lives in Jerusalem and the incident he relates occurred on the other side of the separation wall near his home. He provides a deeply granular depiction of a terrible traffic accident and its aftermath. His pen is always cool though his tone is sometimes bitter. He is rarely explicitly critical of the local Israeli and Palestinian authorities. But he doesn’t need to be: the reverberations of the traffic accident and of the fire which caused the death of Abed’s son require no amplification. Drawing on interviews with all the key players – with only a few names changed to protect certain individuals – Thrall crafts a deeply poignant account.

At its heart, “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” is precisely what the title says. The evening before the fateful day, Abed’s five-year-old son, Milad, is excited to be preparing for a day trip and picnic with the rest of his kindergarten class. Abed had taken his son to a local shop to buy treats to add to his lunchbox for the upcoming trip. In the morning his mother, Haifa, was worried by the grey skies and heavy rainfall, especially as the journey would take Milad and his kindergarten friends along a notoriously hazardous road, prone to flooding and with no lighting because of Israeli security concerns. Though the story opens out in later chapters to describe land disputes and seizures, arranged marriages and resultant new births, disputes between Fatah supporters and Islamists, and the impact of newly arrived Jewish settlers, the reader is drawn back inexorably to Milad’s traffic accident as the prism through which action and reflection is focussed. 

An articulated lorry driven by a careless and dangerous driver collided with an old and poorly maintained bus carrying Milad and his friends. A gasoline-fuelled fire rapidly engulfed the bus. The occupants of nearby vehicles got out to help. A doctor with an UNRWA medical team on the way north approached the bus and helped deal with the casualties as the fire on the bus took hold. One man showed great courage by smashing a window to gain access to the interior of the bus and repeatedly went back in to pull children out to safety. But many of the youngsters suffered terrible burns and some did not survive their injuries. Abed and other relatives struggled to reach the crash scene. Emergency responders were slow to arrive in part because of hold-ups at Israeli-policed crossing points from East Jerusalem; and the best emergency and specialist hospitals were on the ‘wrong’ side of the separation wall and difficult to access.

Melded skilfully into the story of the Salama family and the traffic accident are echoes from the First (1987-1993) and Second (2000-2005) Intifadas or Palestinian uprisings and the frustrations still felt at the perceived failures of outside efforts to resolve core Palestinian-Israeli disputes. It was the last and most ambitious of these efforts which resulted in the Oslo Accord in 1993. The Accord reflected principles on interim self-government agreed between the Israeli Prime Minister and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). It was intended to lead eventually to a two-state solution; but in Thralls’ view the agreement gradually gave way in practice to a new kind of status-quo, one which reinforced the lines of separation between Israelis and Palestinians. Indeed, on one occasion, the Deputy Israeli Defence Minister is reported to have told the US Ambassador privately that the transit routes denied to Palestinians were “apartheid roads”. 

Thrall makes the devising and geographical delineation of the separation line from 2002 onwards an important theme of his narrative. The increasingly embedded division of communities behind encircling fences and walls provides a constant reference point for the restrictions on the daily lives of the Palestinian families and individuals he portrays. And in Thrall’s account, it was precisely those various restrictions which contributed to the human impact of the traffic accident. His criticism extends not just to the Israeli authorities but also to the Palestinian Authority (PA) which as a result of the Oslo Accord had been given administrative responsibility for defined areas of the West Bank. The PA had not pressed for improved roads or better traffic regulation in the area travelled by the kindergarten buses; but, as Thrall acidly comments, when it came to photo opportunities at the hospital where the injured children were taken, PA leaders pushed themselves forward.

After agonising efforts to find Milad, Abed was told his horribly burned young son was in the hospital morgue. Only residual clothing and his backpack identified him. In the funeral which followed, Salama’s relatives and friends hustled around him to prevent him seeing Milad’s charred remains in his coffin.

Thrall’s signal achievement in “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” is to depict the stoic dignity of those affected by a local tragedy whilst using the same incident to quietly highlight failures of governance across Israel-Palestine and to underline the larger political tragedy of which they are a part.      

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall, Allen Lane, £25

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Stewart is a man who needed a mission and found a succession of them. He brought to each a craving urgency and a strong desire to be of public service. He is also a man of contradictions. Self-deprecating but also vain, a Tory who was also a Whig, a social liberal whilst also a flag-carrier for traditional values, an old Etonian almost too embarrassed to admit it. His personal journey from soldiering via jobs overseas to near-miss Prime Minister illustrates all these contradictions; but it is the contrasts which make him interesting and his memoir stimulating as well as enjoyable.

Disarmingly Stewart admits as much in the Author’s Note at the start of the memoir:

“I have tried to be honest about my own vanity, ambitions and failures. … If I may not always have recorded what is true, I have not written what I know to be false … my final sense is one of shame … and my regret is often not about my openness but about not being able to be more forceful in my condemnation.”

He needn’t have worried. What he has written is rarely other than forceful and often plain angry. Opinions and judgements appear on almost every page, especially so after his election as an MP and his eventual ascent to ministerial office. Leading Conservatives are not spared his wrath.

Stewart was a late entrant to politics. Unlike David Cameron or George Osborne and many others, he didn’t jump straight from university into a political role as a party researcher or special adviser to thereafter become an MP and later a minister. His route was very different. Son of a colonial civil servant – who himself had risen to one of the top jobs in the Secret Intelligence Service – between Eton and Oxford, Stewart had five months in the Black Watch regiment and after graduation joined the Foreign Office. By his mid-twenties he had served in Indonesia and Montenegro. Itchy feet was already a feature. He opted to take leave from the Foreign Office to walk across South Asia from Nepal to Afghanistan and subsequently wrote a best-selling book about it. Next he became a regional administrator in southern Iraq and wrote a book about that too. Then a tour as director of a foundation in Afghanistan fostering employment in traditional arts.

By 2008, Stewart was heading to a professorship in human rights at Harvard. Restless as ever this became a launch pad into op-eds in the US press and engagement with leading US politicians, including Hilary Clinton. In little over a decade he had gained international experience and a degree of expertise. But it sprang from quite thin soil; he never seemed to stick at much for very long. Ambition always beckoned onwards and upwards.

As he writes in “Politics on the Edge”, Stewart hesitated about leaving Harvard (after just two years) and, showing his characteristic blend of diffidence and self-confidence, tested the water by calling on his fellow old Etonian and then leader of the Conservative party, David Cameron, who in 2010 was on the threshold of becoming Prime Minister. Though Cameron didn’t take to him then or later (and subsequent references to Cameron in the book are usually sour-toned) the stars were aligned in Stewart’s favour for his entry into parliament as MP for Penrith and The Border later that year. The man who had told his father he had wanted to leave academia and to “do something”, now had his chance.

Stewart clearly enjoyed his constituency work and threw himself into it. But the itchy feet searched out stepping stones to office via chairmanships of parliamentary committees obtained by playing on his overseas experience. A ministerial job was not however gained easily or quickly. It took him five years of backbench tedium before he made it. Again luck was on his side. The end of the coalition government in 2015 and resultant departure of LibDem ministers opened up new slots to be filled. Stewart was eager and ready even though the prize was on the lowest ministerial rank and in the environment ministry under an unsympathetic and poorly regarded – by him – Liz Truss. But he was in the ministerial door and he didn’t look back.

Stewart had variable success as a minister. Once again he hardly drew breath as job followed job – five in six years at my count. Revealingly only when he joined the Cabinet as international development secretary in 2019 did he seem to fully grasp how to be an effective minister. Before that he craved executive responsibility and felt constrained by civil servants who thought that execution was their job. He resented time spent in parliament and at the despatch box as a distraction which kept him from ‘doing things’. Curiously given that his expertise was in foreign affairs, he seems most proud of his time as prisons minister where his “ten prison project” delivered measurable results.

His relationships with his ministerial bosses and counterparts were mixed, too. Neither Boris Johnson or Liz Truss passed the ‘seriousness’ test; indeed both showed what was wrong with the contemporary Conservative party and parliamentary government in Britain. But David Gauke (who subsequently backed his bid to be Prime Minister) comes through in bright colours: a listener, a ‘doer’, a decent and courageous person. 

And so to Brexit and its fall-out both personal and national. Stewart was a remainer who recognised a need to move on, though not at any cost. He supported Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement (and had respect for her in the process) and opposed a ’no deal’ outcome. He saw Johnson as an irresponsible and devious power-grabber. His detestation of Johnson led him in the absence of any other One Nation parliamentary colleague stepping forward to throw his hat into the ring to become Prime Minister after May resigned. Using social media cleverly, he rapidly built support in the general population and did better in opinion polling than anyone could have expected. By his account though too many Conservative MPs put their career expectations first and whether reluctantly or not backed Johnson as a likely election winner. 

Stewart’s departure from parliament in 2019 – forced out by Boris Johnson’s withdrawal of the whip from him and twenty others – deprived our political life of someone who was a serious political figure. The end of his political career is recorded in pages dripping with disillusionment as well as frustration. Fortunately he is not lost from public life as he finds other ways to contribute including via a lively and popular podcast (hosted with Alastair Campbell) and engagement once more in charitable work overseas. His unusually reflective memoir is well worth a read.

Politics On the Edge by Rory Stewart, published by Jonathan Cape, £22

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What Kundera thought of Russia is captured well when – drawing on the reflections of the renowned nineteenth-century Czech historian Frantisek Palacky – he writes:

“Central Europe longed to be a condensed version of Europe made up of nations conceived according to one rule: the greatest variety within the smallest space. How could Central Europe not be horrified facing a Russia founded on the opposite principle: the smallest variety within the greatest space?”

The war in Ukraine is rekindling old divisions all too familiar to Kundera’s generation and which many had thought definitively left behind at the start of the 1990s. What is different now is that, whereas the Soviet Union sought power through communist ideology, Putin’s Russia – at home and abroad – seeks power for its own sake and to sustain an assertive nationalism, an expansionist uniformity. Truly a case of the empire strikes back.

In Cold Peace, Michael Doyle suggests there is an alternative vista and that a new Cold War is not inevitable. He makes a sophisticated case but his book’s sub-title – “Avoiding a new Cold War” – suggests that without novel approaches another Cold War may be unavoidable. Of course some readers may well think that following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine we are already caught up in a new Cold War and not just with Russia but with China as well. What Doyle shows especially well is that avoidable or not a new Cold War won’t be like the old one; too much has changed.

However, Doyle begins with criticism of what he considers a lost opportunity, one whose effects are with us still. Thirty years on it is a jolt to be reminded of what Mikhail Gorbachev called a “common European home”, one that stretched east to include the former Soviet Union. Was the West too hesitant and too lacking in geopolitical ambition to grasp an opportunity to reshape European security by incorporating Russia into a newly expanded NATO or substituting a Europe-wide new alliance? Mirage or missed chance, the moment passed all too quickly; what might in 1991 have been thought possible had effectively slipped from view by 2004. Whether Doyle is right in his criticism or not his optimistic perspective was not shared at the time by Eastern Europeans who had only just escaped from Soviet Russia’s talons. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and later the Baltic states and others sought security in NATO rather than in hopes of a European “home” which incorporated a Russia they saw no reason to trust. 

The real strength though of Doyle’s book is to be found more in his analysis of the changes on the international chessboard than in his proposed ways to avoid – or at least mitigate – the impact of a new Cold War. What he calls the “sources of conflict” did not of course arise only in 2022 and are as much transnational as national. It is not just that corporatist business monopolies have been servicing autocratic governments with nationalist agendas, most notably – but far from exclusively – in Russia and China; but that global challenges, not least climate change and cyber technologies, are taking form in an increasingly dysfunctional international system. 

Patterns of interaction shaped at the end of the Second World War and during the Cold War are now subject to strain as US and wider Western dominance of the international system is weakening. Democratic processes in the so-called liberal democracies of North America and Europe are suffering a loss of confidence in their own mission, in part because globalisation is generating unexpected challenges from newly assertive players in South and East Asia. But one of the more resonant contentions in “Cold Peace” is that today’s autocrats should be viewed by the US and its allies not as enemies but as adversaries. This is not mere wordplay. The distinction Doyle argues has implications for domestic as well as international politics:

 “… while the democracies will differ from … [the autocracies] …on human rights, promote different rules of market competition, and support alliances with like-minded states, the democracies will also need to find common ground with them on climate change and arms control.” 

He is clear also that old approaches or expectations are no longer realisable whether they take the form of efforts to turn Russia and China into liberal democracies through economic engagement; to contain China’s military power; or to isolate those states unwilling to share Western values. Once dominant powers resent a diminishing ability to impose their approaches and goals on others, but that doesn’t or shouldn’t turn their adversaries into enemies.  

So what is to be done? If the old ways haven’t worked and differences internationally are hardening rather than easing and global threats are ever more pressing can “bridges” be built across some of the divides? Doyle thinks they can. He focuses on four: climate change amelioration through cooperation with China; a negotiated “solution” to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; a detente with China over Taiwan; and a kind of “cyber peace” or detent. None of these are modest objectives and there is as much hope as expectation in Doyle’s arguments and proposed ways forward. But though far from starry-eyed about the prospects, he is emphatic in his core conclusion: better a constrained and compromising “Cold Peace” than an unrestrained new “Cold War”. 

Nonetheless, the odds against some of Doyle’s proposed “bridging” scenarios are stacked high. Take the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the impact of which is where this review began. Doyle assumes the most likely scenario on the battlefield will be a stalemate and that a negotiated conclusion of some sort will be required thereafter. The elements in his “bridging” initiative would involve painful territorial concessions – validated by internationally supervised referendums – by Ukraine over Crimea (justified by a simple majority of Russians living there) and by Russia in the Donbas (where Russians are a distinct minority) with pledges from the EU and NATO to support such outcomes. Meanwhile a wider framework for detente between NATO and the EU and Russia would be needed. Viewing all these various elements from a vantage point far from Ukraine, Doyle queries the wisdom of granting the country NATO membership and fears Ukraine would be a “strategic liability” for the Alliance. He concludes: 

“It might thus make sense for NATO to declare that it will not offer membership to Ukraine as long as Russia credibly promises not to destabilise the country and lives up to those promises in practice.” 

At its recent summit in Vilnius the Alliance took a different view and seemed unwilling to base its future security and that of Ukraine on “Russian promises”, credible or otherwise. I doubt Milan Kundera would have thought otherwise, too.

A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe by Milan Kundera
Faber & Faber £10 pp96

Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War by Michael Doyle
Liveright Publishing £23.99 pp288

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However, the main cities across what quickly became the new Laender or administrative divisions of Eastern Germany were quite another matter entirely. Old scars left from the Second World War were matched by newly self-inflicted ones. I recall visiting Magdeburg with its cathedral quite deliberately abutted by ugly new sets of flats. I journeyed down bumpy autobahns battling stinking fumes from slow moving Trabant (or Trabi) cars as I headed north to Rostock or south to Dresden. Evidence of the awful impact of the bombing of Dresden in 1944 could still be seen; and 50 years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had cloaked the city in a brown-coloured veneer, as if it were waiting to be cleaned up.

As Chancellor Helmut Kohl steered the process of Germans “coming-together” after the Wall had been breached, there was little doubt that it was a triumph for West Germany, but for East Germany it was a type of surrender. The “Wessies” knew this and the “Ossies” resented it, not because they thought their “system” deserved applause but as a matter of offended dignity. Even today opinion polls show that Germans in the eastern Laender still feel second-class citizens in their own country. It is not an accident that voters in that part of Germany are the most likely to opt for far-left or far-right political parties.

Katja Hoyer’s “Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990” is an attempt to restore a degree of dignity to histories of East Germany and portrayals of its citizens. Though now a researcher in London, Hoyer writes from the perspective of someone born and brought up in the GDR who studied at the University of Jena. She weaves her account of the establishment and evolution of the GDR with great skill, drawing on a wide range of sources including many individual interviews. Hoyer is not glassy-eyed or nostalgic about the GDR and the (many) villains of the piece – not least Erich Mielke the mastermind of the Stasi intelligence service for over thirty years – are targeted sharply and rightly. But she evidently seeks a just account, one which recognises that for many of its citizens the GDR was ‘home’ and valued as such. It was, she argues, a country which for all its failings and cruelties formed them as individuals and as families. Though its material comforts were inferior to those available on the other side of the Wall, it had more colour and arguably more equal opportunities than most depictions of it have allowed.

Of course as Hoyer shows all too clearly, the East drew the shortest German straw in 1945. After the implosion of the Nazi state they were landed with the Russians and a vengeful Stalin intent on milking the Soviet Zone of Germany through substantial reparation payments which dramatically slowed economic growth for decades. In large measure East Germany became a geopolitical pawn searching for a place on the European chess board. As East-West relations hardened into the Cold War the restoration of one German state seemed an ever more distant possibility. With few natural resources other than environmentally disastrous ‘brown’ coal, the GDR created out of the Soviet Zone of Germany remained dependent on increasingly expensive Russian oil supplies, especially after the mid-1970s.

East German government leaders, not least General Secretary Walter Ulbricht, were shaped by Soviet communism and practised repressive skills they had witnessed whilst in the Soviet Union before and during the war years. As Hoyer demonstrates, the 1953 uprisings in East Berlin and other cities were suppressed by Ulbricht and Co without mercy and left the leadership uneasy for many years thereafter. Control became the watchword of the GDR. Indeed it was an uncontrollable exodus of highly qualified citizens in the late 1950s which directly led to the construction in haste of the Wall across the whole country in 1961. Dozens thereafter died tragically in their efforts to escape across the border; but Hoyer tentatively suggests that the Wall induced a certain stability and a growing if reluctant acceptance of the GDR by its own citizens. 

Nor were Ulbricht and his successor from 1971, Erich Honecker, unmindful of the need to craft an economy and society which met at least some of the aspirations of their fellow East Germans. The communist leadership was often surprisingly pragmatic in pursuit of such objectives. Access to higher education for children from working class families was better in the GDR than in West Germany. Women had greater employment opportunities than their equivalents in West Germany because of the provision of universal child care in the GDR. Flats and houses may have been inferior to those in West Germany but they were available and affordable. Hoyer also cites in amusing detail less serious examples of the leadership responding to public demand such as the importing at great expense of Blue Jeans from the US.

The needs of young people and successor generations were a growing preoccupation of the leadership and one of those young people was Angela Merkel, the future Chancellor of a unified Germany. As support for her contention that the GDR was not all black and white repression and stunted opportunities, Hoyer relates how at her farewell ceremony in Berlin in late 2021, Merkel asked the Bundeswehr’s musicians to play Nina Hagen’s famous song ‘Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen’ (‘You Forgot the Colour Film’). She listened with tears in her eyes, the song serving as a reminder that life in the GDR wasn’t all bleak.  

What Hoyer has done in “Beyond the Wall” is to provide a rounded account of East Germany’s distinctive history. Her book is never saccharine or sentimental and she never implies that the Wall was other than an abomination. But she shows the GDR as another part of post-war Germany, one just as ’real’ as its western counterpart and worthy of as fair and balanced a portrayal as possible. 

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The thesis that drives “The Lost Future” is that nation states are no longer fit for purpose. They can no longer order their own domestic affairs effectively nor respond creatively to global challenges. Public disenchantment with governing elites is growing and extremist political ’solutions’ are consequently gaining support. Politicians in the democracies cannot see further than the short-term and longer-term approaches cannot gain traction. And though autocratic states are on the rise across the world they too are frustrated in their efforts to impose control and exclude external influences. Governing the world has become more complex and intractable and new technologies have added to the scale of complexity. The internet and AI have generated unbounded communication in a politically bounded world. Will states win out by corralling the internet or will the internet and its offshoots undermine order and provoke international anarchy?

Zielonka is not an utopian idealist intent on abolishing the nation state or a Luddite set on wrecking the internet and disrupting AI. What he tries to do is to tease out a different path altogether. He articulates a synthesis which recognises the need for ‘goods’ that can only be provided by the state – the rule of law, the safety of the citizen and the provision of armed forces, etc – whilst drawing civil society into more active participation in national and international decision-taking by an enhanced but controlled employment of the internet. Instead of exclusive top-down structures comprised of politicians elected for short periods in office supported by ‘expert’ civil servants to implement their decisions, he advocates more porous and differently configured modes of governance.

All of that said, trying to summarise “The Lost Future” is a hazardous business. It is a sophisticated analysis of a complex subject. Though it can also shade rather too often into an odd mix of the portentous and the frivolous. The early chapters on changing relationships with time and space attempt to give an overarching frame to the book, but they do so in a distinctly heavy and, for this reader at least, sometimes obscuring way. The cartoons which pepper the text and are presumably intended to lighten the mix are more irritating than illuminating. But it is worth persevering with the book because it grapples with an important subject and poses challenging questions. 

Zielonka suggests that the world is running ahead and away from us: we are losing control of tomorrow. Enlightened democracies can see the problems but are unclear how to address them. Pulling the existing levers of governance at home and abroad, singly or collectively, is not producing desired outcomes. Governance needs re-energising if issues arising insistently from the variable impact of globalisation, increased migration flows, resource constraints, and, most acutely, climate change are to be addressed successfully. If current opinion polls are to be believed and on the evidence of recent elections across Europe and in the US, citizens do not trust their governments to deliver desired results.  The autocracies – from Russia to China via a range of lesser ones in parts of Europe and beyond – may persuade themselves that their methods can work but they must realise that tightening borders and developing autarkic economies will not alone save them from the longer-term challenges of tomorrow. Both kinds of government suffer from short-term thinking even if the autocracies may for now think themselves different. 

The full title of Zielonka’s book is “The Lost Future and How to Reclaim It” but he is better at identifying what is being “lost” than at devising how to “reclaim” it. For many observers the impact of the internet (and the prospect of AI) are part of the problem rather than a remedy. Zielonka however believes that by expanding communication and using the internet to draw in wider sources of expertise via NGOs and other citizen groupings governance can be made more creative and less fixated on the immediate. He is not so naive as to think the internet is without risks or offers a simple way forward; but he is convinced that not escaping from the tramlines of traditional nation state governance poses even greater risks. Instead of reinforcing boundaries and borders in the hope of securing immediate and nationally favourable outcomes, Zielonka believes a properly ordered internet – which of course begs many questions – can help open up government planning and decision-making to a wider range of actors and to longer-term considerations. In this way the forum of public decision-making could be made wider, more comprehensive and more effective over time.

Which brings Zielonka and the reader back to Venice or what might be called a Venetian approach. Zielonka sees in the Serene Republic pointers to the possibilities of a more cosmopolitan approach in our own day. Venice was a strongly governed but open society. The rule of law existed and the state was equipped to protect its citizens and to face down its enemies. But it was also an expeditionary republic seeking trade and contacts of all kinds across the known world. It was a “cosmopolis” open to influence and good counsel. For Zielonka those elements are suggestive of what is needed today if states acting together are to be able to respond to global challenges. And the oil to grease the wheels of governance in our own time is in Zielonka’s view to be found in the imperfect form of the internet. 

For the reader of “The Lost Future” the question is whether such an approach is naive or visionary.

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Whatever his intention, that was not what he achieved. Chaos ensued. Disruption and calculated feuding became goals in themselves. Scores were settled, families divided, scapegoats sought and invariably found. It was clear it could not be allowed to continue, as even Mao had come to realise by 1968. The Red Guards were reined in but what replaced them was a further eight years of more systematic state-controlled repression. Only with Mao’s death in 1976 was it possible for new Party leaders to devise a more settled national pathway. 

Despite all the suffering there is no memorial in China to those who died. There isn’t any longer a museum since – only recently – the one built in a remote province has been closed. There are just private memories and private shame. It is an episode in Chinese history shrouded in a determined forgetfulness. Many would doubtless agree with words written only a few years before it all began by the novelist L P Hartley: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” But though individuals scarred by the Cultural Revolution may prefer to forget, the Communist Party and its leaders have not forgotten and the lessons they took from the Cultural Revolution still motivate their actions today. Chaos must never be allowed to “come again”.  

Tania Branigan’s “Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution” is an attempt to chart the tensions left behind and unresolved. Tensions that have been generated by an implied alliance between those Chinese – the great majority – who want to avert their eyes from a painful past and focus on a better and more prosperous future and a Party leadership intent on avoiding responsibility for the events and horrors of the Cultural Revolution. In between the apparent majority and a wilful Party Branigan has sought to accommodate those survivors and their families for whom the past is not “a foreign country” but a painful part of their lives and those of their families. 

Relying more on anecdote than an overarching analysis, Branigan draws on interviews conducted whilst she was working as a journalist in China to open spaces in the memories of survivors of the Revolution and its shocking abuses. “Red Memory” is not a history of the Cultural Revolution, nor does it criticise those who want to remain silent or attach blame to individuals who acted in ways we would find inexplicable or even despicable. We – as Branigan frequently reminds her readers – weren’t there and are not in a position to wholly understand, let alone to judge.

A particular strength of “Red Memory” is that individuals emerge in all their complexity and contradictions. Reactions to the Cultural Revolution are not uniform or monochrome. Among a small cast of survivors and witnesses willing to be interviewed, some stand out particularly sharply in Branigan’s account as I have tried to capture below. 

Yu Xiangzhen was a schoolgirl in 1966 but decades later started a blog online to record her life as a Red Guard. She did so simply in order to record and share with others what had happened. What she sought was a degree of liberation from her past.

Wang Xilin, a composer, suffered systematic and horrifyingly crude forms of torture; but, amazingly, he later benefitted from a local Party leader’s need for some music to be written to accompany an educational drama. Wang thereafter flourished more than he could have ever hoped. 

Wang Jingyao was a teacher and very early victim of the Red Guards. She was physically assaulted to within an inch of her life and then wantonly left too long without medical treatment and died as a result. Her husband took great risks to preserve some of Wang’s belongings and most poignant of all hid her ashes behind some bricks in the wall of the family home as a kind of shrine to her memory. 

And the tragic fate of Fang Zhongmou was far from uncommon. She was accused by her own husband and son of speaking ill of Mao and effectively turned over by them to the authorities and subsequently executed. 

Doubtless innumerable other victims or witnesses of persecution, physical and psychological, could be added to Branigan’s slim list. As she relates, most Chinese who lived through the Cultural Revolution want to suppress their memories of it whilst younger people know little of it except what their parents may have told them. That is perhaps understandable; but suppression of memory can have unintended consequences across the generations. Branigan’s interviews with a few Chinese psychotherapists (a discipline not officially recognised in China until 2013) show how painful memories can lie hidden from view and how episodes from a victim’s past can impact the family born subsequently.  

The Party leadership remains complicit in the suppression of memories of the Cultural Revolution. But the Cultural Revolution taught Mao’s successors that uncontrolled change could produce anarchy; and the brutal repression of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989 showed how determined they have been never to allow chaos to reign again. Whilst to label it a conspiracy of silence would be misleading, for the post-Mao political leadership as well as many ordinary Chinese people, there is a common inclination to “move on”. 

The current President of China, Xi Jinping, wants to move on, too. With history ever a cautionary guide, Xi and those who owe him allegiance have placed their hopes in controlled economic success and restored national prestige. Even if the economic engine has stuttered somewhat of late, the suppression of dissent in Hong Kong reflects a continuing determination by the current leadership to do whatever is necessary to retain control.

“Red Memory” is a lament above all for the horrors inflicted on so many ordinary Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution. It is a lament for memories suppressed and the damage caused to individuals and their families as a consequence. And perhaps it is a lament also for what Branigan appears to see as a disappearing opportunity for China better to respond to individual citizens’ personal hopes and aspirations.  

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Nouriel Roubini is an American economist and analyst with a reputation for invariably seeing the downside and for having been virtually alone in predicting the financial crisis of 2008. Despite being – his own term – mocked in 2006 as Dr Doom, he rather plays up the moniker in his new book, “Megathreats”. Indeed if dystopia were a country, Roubini would be an honoured citizen.

“Megathreats” is not a book for the faint-hearted. As Roubini analyses the risks and threats facing our world and its citizens, the reader is pummelled into submission as he piles on the negatives and concludes:

“We have run out of excuses. To delay is to surrender. The snooze button invites catastrophe. Megathreats are careening towards us. Their impact will shake our lives and upend the global order…. Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride through a dark night.”

Roubini identifies ten trends or key threats. They are not unfamiliar already: from the debt crisis and rising inflation to restrictions on migration and job threats from Artificial Intelligence (AI) to US/China competition and climate change. What makes “Megathreats” different is the sheer unrelenting accumulation of clearly articulated pessimism. Such is the nightmare quality of the analysis that the reader may not welcome it as a wake-up call but rather want to switch off the alarm and take refuge under the duvet.

Rubini writes as an economist and as an American who is an investment adviser and together those perspectives shape his narrative. Unsurprisingly he is at his strongest when he chases the financial data. As he demonstrates, the Covid crisis stretched public finances but the problems of loose money and accumulating debt (private as well as public) predated it: “Advanced economies with ample resources have let risk run amok”. Assumptions generated during the years of the “Great Moderation” when interest rates were stable have been replaced by gathering stagflation under the “Great Recession” now affecting the world economy. Globalisation offered great promise and real achievements, not least for low-cost economies which saw poverty levels decline; but offshoring and technology transfers have had unintended consequences in the United States and Western Europe fuelling public resentment and helping generate populist politics. 

As Roubini shows well, a pattern of deglobalisation (which he deplores as economically inefficient) is provoking a new set of pressures. Efforts – notably in the US – to reshore manufacturing will reduce opportunities in lower-income countries and spark migration flows northwards. In reaction and notwithstanding labour shortages and ageing populations in the advanced economies, populist pressures will more insistently demand restrictions on migration and protection of domestic markets.

Where Roubini is most persuasive is in his contention – which he shares with the IMF – that it is the confluence of the various trends and challenges he identifies that is generating the darkest clouds on the road ahead. Unprecedented levels of debt in both advanced and lower-income countries, fierce competition between the US and China, financial strains from US currency weakening, alongside demographic pressures and global climate change, are, Roubini argues, creating a “coming Great Stagflation”.

To such pressures Roubini adds geopolitical crises. This is where his analysis seems weaker. He admits that military matters, including what he calls “hot” wars, are outside his area of expertise. Though he includes a “new Cold War” among his “Megathreats” and refers a number of times to the disruptive impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he talks more about economic competition between China and the US than about risks of conflict between them. Roubini asserts that there is a putative alignment on the horizon between China and the global outriders of Russia, Iran and North Korea; but there is little or no serious examination of that possibility. In his principally US-focussed study, Europe gets a look-in but other regions are hardly on the stage. “Migrations” has glancing encounters with India but little on the rest of Asia, on the strains in the Middle East or on Latin America and Africa. Most conspicuously, he has virtually nothing on the renewed threat of nuclear conflict or on the heightened risk of civil nuclear accidents. 

Most disappointing of all is the thinness of Roubini’s examination of possible responses to the “Megathreats” he has signposted. Indeed at times he seems to suggest that there may be no solutions to some of the threats, just a hoped-for mitigation of some of their worst effects. Only 40 of the 273 pages of text are devoted to the question of whether “this disaster” can be averted. Even then his most specific advice is addressed to “individual and institutional investors” who should “protect at least their financial wealth”. Given the scale of the “disaster” his analysis portends, it seems a curiously offbeat question on which to concentrate the book’s last few pages.

In a music programme on BBC Radio Three a few years ago, a leading economist (and former professional pianist) was asked to talk about his life by reference to his favourite pieces of music. For his final choice, he felt obliged to play Noel Coward singing “There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner”. It is a choice Roubini might well be inclined to applaud. 

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James Scott’s “Black Snow” tells a disturbing story with a cool pen and with quiet objectivity. He takes as the epigraph for his book words written in 1921 by the influential military strategist and advocate of air power, Giulio Douhet:

“There will be no distinction any longer between soldiers and civilians”

Battle by battle, new weapon by new weapon, Scott takes the reader on a journey from the Nazi bombing blitz over Coventry and London in 1940, via Allied bombing raids on Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in February 1945 to the ever more insistent US attacks later the same year on multiple cities and towns all over Japan culminating in the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945. Allied advocates of air power thought that command of the skies and targeted use of ever larger bombs and ever more destructive incendiary devices would overwhelm the enemy and deliver victory. But their belief that civilian populations would be quelled into submission and their governments with them, proved to be wide of the mark. To use the language of US commanders at the start of the second Iraq War in 2003, “shock and awe” were not enough then nor had they been during the Second World War. 

Scott shows in unrelenting detail that air force commanders – and General Curtis LeMay in particular – frustrated in their inability to subdue the enemy by “precision” bombing, turned up the dial and with an increasing lack of discrimination slid towards “area” bombing or, to use the crude but vivid shorthand, “city-bashing”. Key to Scott’s account is the advent of the Boeing B-29 strategic bomber about which LeMay commented:

“Never before in the history of warfare has so much been expected of a single weapon”

The senior US air commander bought the plane off-plan, committing vast sums of money for its development without being sure it would deliver what was promised in terms of pay-load and range. Though the prototype achieved lift-off in late 1942, a massive engineering task lay ahead. Modifications were still being made in the course of 1943 before the first 97 aircraft emerged onto the tarmac in January 1944. Only a matter of months thereafter production was running at four aircraft a day; but the pressure to produce a sufficiently large fleet of aircraft to bring Japan to heel was unending. 

As always the US armed services competed for resources and key roles; the air component was still subordinate to the army and its leaders were anxious to show that only air power could end the war with the least loss of US servicemen. With the conveyor-belt arrival of increasing numbers of B-29s at newly constructed runways in the Marianna Islands east of the Philippines, US commanders at last had aircraft large and powerful enough to reach the Japanese mainland and drop significant tonnage of bombs on selected targets across the country. 

Perhaps the most sympathetic portrait of a US General in “Black Snow” is of Haywood Hansell who had led the intelligence and assessment work that underpinned US plans for aerial attacks on Japan. Hansell and his teams focussed on industrial and military targets in and around Japanese cities and it was he who first took command in the Marianna Islands of Saipan and Tinian. He wasn’t given long to deliver results. In Washington, there was soon growing concern that Hansell and the B-29s weren’t having sufficient impact with their precision targeting objectives; bad weather was a constant problem and the Japanese demonstrated  – as the cities of Coventry and Hamburg had shown earlier – an ability to recover industrial capacity surprisingly quickly notwithstanding the loss of civilian lives. Hansell was relieved of his command and a more determined and ruthless man took his place, General Curtis LeMay.

LeMay immediately began to draw on information assembled by US planners which demonstrated the vulnerability of many Japanese cities, Tokyo most of all. After a devastating earthquake in 1923, wooden dwellings were built rapidly and tightly packed together. Air planners realised that even more than had been the case in Hamburg, incendiary devices dropped from the B-29s could readily ignite the wooden buildings and generate widespread fires, even firestorms. Unlike Hansell who had ruled out bombing targets with significant concentrations of civilians nearby, LeMay had no such compunction. As precision targeting of military and industrial sites failed to produce the desired results quickly enough, LeMay geared his bombers and adjusted his operational tactics to deliver unrestrained attacks on city after city across Japan.

Even so the Japanese did not cave in as rapidly as LeMay had hoped. One of the strengths of “Black Snow” is the alternating way Scott relates what was happening on the ground in Tokyo with what was happening in the Marianna Islands and in Washington. LeMay operated with a good deal of local autonomy as his bombers extended their range of targets, but Tokyo was the main one and the chapters describing the impact of the incendiary devices on the ordinary people, the non-combatants, living there are truly harrowing. Even so and only a matter of days before firebombing was unleashed on Tokyo, the US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, told the press:

“Our policy has never been to inflict terror bombing on civilian populations. Our efforts are still confined to the attack of enemy military objectives.”

That was not though what LeMay was intent on doing. An incredible 87.4% of the designated incendiary zone in Tokyo was known to be residential. Even whilst recognising the horrors Japan had visited on subject territories in the course of the war, the statistics from the series of bombings over Tokyo remain profoundly unsettling: 15.8 square miles incinerated, over 250,000 homes and businesses destroyed, around 100,000 people killed and 1 million left homeless. Commenting in a radio interview shortly afterwards LeMay said:

“If the Japs persist, I now promise that they have nothing more to look forward to than the complete destruction of their cities.”

 “City-bashing” with incendiary devices did not achieve the decisive outcomes its proponents – whether “Bomber” Harris in Hamburg or LeMay in Tokyo – claimed as their objectives. Even after Tokyo and other Japanese cities had been devastated, the Japanese still didn’t surrender, though there were signs that they were heading in that direction by mid-1945. What Scott demonstrates – but never quite says explicitly – is that Le May’s area bombing or “city-bashing” served to desensitise US commanders to the scale of destruction they were effecting and thereby helped open the road to use of the first atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

The Japanese had indeed been worn down by the unending bombing of their cities, the mounting losses of civilian lives and, in the case of the atomic bombings, emerging radiation effects. But ironically, as Scott argues, Tokyo’s decision to surrender was at least in part determined by the Soviet Union’s late declaration of war on Japan and the consequential loss of any prospect (always unrealistic though it was) that Moscow might have been instrumental in brokering a peace deal in which they would have hoped to avoid an unconditional surrender, as demanded by Washington. 

The reader of Scott’s book is left far from convinced that the indiscriminate use of incendiary bombs against so many Japanese cities was militarily justifiable, even before use of the atomic bomb. Hansell had thought that more discriminating use of air power against military targets and industrial infrastructure could have delivered victory, albeit on a slightly slower timeframe. What is certainly clear is that LeMay’s bombing campaign was deliberately designed to target civilians alongside military infrastructure. LeMay himself was not unaware of the ethical dimensions of “city-bashing” but he took comfort from an assumption that by such means the US and its allies would win the war. As he remarked to a close aide immediately before the B-29s first took off to firebomb the city of Tokyo:

“If we lose, we’ll be tried as war criminals.”

LeMay’s private reflection seems especially resonant today as Ukrainian cities and their civilian populations are continuing to be pounded by Russian military forces.

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Pekka Hämäläinen’s “Indigenous Continent” explodes many such myths. It is a hugely ambitious mould-breaking study tracing the development of the “native nations” and of the long contest between them and European interlopers for control of North America. Hämäläinen comprehensively undermines previous accounts. The Indians were not random tribal groupings in a largely empty continent; they were the indigenous or “first” inhabitants of the huge expanse now comprising Canada and the USA. Nor were these founding peoples unsophisticated or primitive savages; indeed the savagery of the Europeans more often than not outdid that of the indigenous Indians. 

In brief but sweeping early chapters, Hämäläinen takes the reader across millennia as human habitation took shape in North America. Initially they were hunters rather than gatherers but as the last ice age drew to a close a warming climate favoured settlement. Distinct human groupings or “nations” gradually took shape with names that resonate still: Iroquois, Pawnees, Cherokees and Navajos. Highly devolved kinship-based governance structures oversaw economies based on animal husbandry and hunting or – increasingly – settled agriculture. These emerging “nations” were culturally sophisticated with origin narratives reflecting complex spirit worlds with sophisticated customary rules of behaviour. 

As Hämäläinen shows especially clearly, initial encounters between arriving Europeans and the “native nations” were mystifying to both. The Spanish incursions northwards from Mexico in the 16th century sought gold and silver and anticipated finding similar hierarchical structures as had facilitated their conquests in central and South America. But, unlike the Incas, the Indians in North America were not governed by kings and hierarchies and the Spanish grappled clumsily and unsuccessfully with such an unfamiliar world. For their part, the indigenous Indians had little interest in precious metals but every interest in securing food supplies inland and along the western coastlines; they played sharp games which frustrated the Spaniards. Indeed, despite repeated military efforts on their part, the Spaniards never secured lasting footholds in North America.

The French in the 17th and 18th centuries tacked differently and for a while at least, more successfully. In pursuit of hugely profitable beaver furs for the European market, Frenchmen traded successfully with indigenous Indians in the Great Lakes area until disputes between Indian “nations” either in their pay or opposed to them provoked corrosive local conflicts. The English took a different approach over the same period and settled migrants in crown colonies along the eastern seaboard. Here too efforts to reach accommodations with local indigenous peoples had mixed results; alliances were formed only to break down later. North America as a whole was in a complex state of flux with brutal encounters between “native nations” and among the Europeans and with indigenous peoples playing one European off against another to their own territorial or economic advantage. Notwithstanding their superior weaponry, the Europeans faced local challengers adept at use of their own albeit more limited weapons and – crucially – more familiar with the terrain on which they were fighting and able to box clever as a result. 

What changed everything before and after the establishment of the United States, was the Europeans shift from trading to settlement. From the Seven Years War and the diplomatic agreements which ended it in 1763, the territorial appetite of British colonists grew and the diplomatic engagement of key “native nations” with the Europeans was frustrated. The colonists sought independence from control by the British King and expansion beyond the Appalachian mountains. Instances of sheer brutality, even genocide, grew as the colonists sought more territory westwards and southwards. The story of the United States relationship with the “native nations” over most of the 19th century was one of westward territorial aggrandisement and of sustained but ultimately worn-down resistance by the indigenous peoples. That said, some “native nations” fought back tenaciously, notably the Comanche and Lakota.

What Hämäläinen demonstrates clearly and repeatedly is that “native nation” cohesion even in the face of disease-induced population decline, remained strong. Diplomacy coupled with military skill and sheer cunning were as apparent among the “native nations” as among the European interlopers and their US successors. A continent shaped and populated by indigenous peoples linked together in shifting alliances and confederations, resisted loss of territory to European outsiders for over four centuries. It was not until after the American Civil War that an ever more vigorous United States imposed territorial settlements (or “reservations”) to its liking and advantage on the “native nations”. 

Hämäläinen tells a shocking story in which savagery and cruelty attended the assertion of first European and then US ascendancy across North America. The “native nations” pushed back and where possible sought accommodation with their invading and colonising foes. They were sophisticated peoples civilised in their own distinctive ways; but they were gradually reduced to compliance on US terms. Most of history it might be argued is a story of conquest and colonisation; but it doesn’t make the grinding down of original inhabitants or indigenous peoples any less disturbing, even in retrospect.

When I started to read “Indigenous Continent”, I was struck by the fact that its author is from Finland. On reflection I realised that a Finnish historian is peculiarly well-qualified to write the story of the encounter between the “first” peoples of North America given that in Finland (and neighbouring countries), there still exists the only surviving “first people” of Europe. Across what we call Lapland, the Sami have continued to conduct their lives in ways established over many centuries. Finland and Sweden are richer countries and cultures as a result of having accommodated them. 

Hämäläinen’s immensely thought-provoking and stimulating study of the “native nations” of North America and their encounter with European outsiders, will revise our too often simplistic understanding of the evolution of that encounter. Unlike all those “Western” films and children’s games in back gardens in the post-war years this is a grown-up story and a salutary one.

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Until comparatively recently, this was Betjeman country. Agriculture and fishing together provided employment. Picturesque villages both inland and along the coast were served by strikingly large churches built on the proceeds of medieval wool wealth. Everything seemed unchanged since at least Victorian times. Carefully husbanded reed beds and inland waters provided sanctuaries for migrating birds. The modern world intruded from time to time – most acutely as USAF and RAF aircraft flew over en route to attack Nazi-occupied Europe – but never for long and quiet isolation soon re-asserted itself. 

The composer, Benjamin Britten, made his post-war home in the small town of Aldeburgh but he was born in the nearby and much larger fishing port of Lowestoft. The two places are now worlds apart as are many of the towns and villages along the Suffolk seaside. Nor is the Heritage Coast as idyllic as it can appear in weekend newspaper supplements and as it once was in reality. Recent decades have seen the growth of plumply upholstered and newly-enriched upmarket communities resented by many of those born and bred in the area and who now feel marginalised. 

Michael Palin used to be a regular visitor to the seaside hotspot of Southwold where his parents lived in retirement. From the late 1960s till the mid-1980s, he travelled there by train each month from north London. Arriving at Darsham station his mother would meet him and drive him on to Southwold: “You knew”, he later wrote, “that unlike anywhere else on the route, it would not have changed. It would still be comforting and unrushed …”

Well, not anymore. What forty years ago had been a quiet, old-fashioned, unpretentious seaside town with a High Street lined with ordinary shops serving the wider local community, has become a redoubt of high-priced second-homes rendered dark and dead to the world in the winter months. “Incomer” money – often bolstered by City bonuses – has fuelled an ever-ascending rise in property values. Few locals can any longer afford to live in the town whilst retail outlets and Adnams – the local brewers – draw on staff who live miles away in more affordable places. Traditional shops on the High Street have largely made way for the kinds of clothing and speciality outlets more usually available in London. MacDonald’s has no place here and even Waterstones thinks it best to camouflage its corporate self behind a bookshop pretending to be otherwise.

The Heritage Coast stretching from Orford northwards via Aldeburgh and Walberswick to Southwold has become a privileged littoral, an end in itself, increasingly resistant to unwanted intrusions. Driving past the meandering waterways and swaying reeds bordering Snape Maltings – home of the annual international music festival – onwards to Aldeburgh, billboards are lodged in nearby fields decrying Scottish Power’s intention to establish offshore wind farms which, we are told, will be a blight on the Heritage Coast. And bulging up between Walberswick and Orford, the white dome of the Sizewell B nuclear power station appears like an alien presence in an otherwise familiar and treasured landscape. 

Here on this beautiful coastline three worlds sit awkwardly alongside each other. Long-time Suffolk residents and their young families who are being squeezed out of the local housing market. Relatively new arrivals savouring a summer playground and keen to fashion their nests to their liking in an ecologically fragile neighbourhood. And huge – often foreign-owned but UK government-backed – companies intent on expanding local opportunities to meet burgeoning national energy and other needs. In crude shorthand it is a case of Southwold versus Sizewell.

Despite protests from articulate and often prominent local objectors at what they see as the wrong development in the wrong place, the go-ahead was given by the government on 20 July for the construction and operation of a nuclear power station near Leiston. This will become Sizewell C, the third nuclear facility to be built on this section of the coast. Opponents’ various arguments about alleged shortages of local water as coolant, damage to the local ecology, the questioned reliability of EDF (the French company leading the project), failed to make headway. The Truss government is likely to take the same view as the Johnson one and strongly support the development. Sizewell C is all set to spring up alongside the ageing Sizewell B and the mothballed Sizewell A power stations on the borders of the North Sea.

Not that any of this will have an impact on the ground any time soon. The new reactor will take at least 12 years to be built and won’t be contributing anything to the national grid before 2034 at the earliest. Its supporters see it as a key part of a low carbon future, eventually generating 7% of UK electricity needs. Many locals seeking work in the area as well as those who will be brought in for the purpose, expect Sizewell C to offer employment opportunities rare in Suffolk with a ripple effect on the local economy. For those anxious about Sizewell C’s potential effect on local wildlife or its impact on the expanding and very prosperous coastal communities from Orford to Southwold, there is likely to be a continuing battle to have the decision reversed. Doubtless many in Suffolk and in Britain more generally will accept the government’s decision as a necessary part of a national effort to provide for the country’s future energy needs. However the view from the plushly fashioned and equipped houses in Southwold and neighbouring communities is likely to be less benign.

There is no simple equation by which to evaluate a complex choice as to whether or not to build a new nuclear power generator on the Heritage Coast.  Nor is it a choice for Suffolk alone. The effects of the decision will however resonate across an already challenged county and coastline. Fishing communities have been in decline for decades and the once thriving port of Lowestoft remains comparatively deprived economically. Agriculture is increasingly large-scale and mechanised with constrained employment opportunities. Housing shortages and a lack of affordable properties to rent add greatly to local concerns. There have been tensions in the past between the needs of fishing, agriculture and tourism along what is now the Heritage Coast. But it was always one world and people rubbed along quietly enough. 

It doesn’t seem quite like that anymore. Different worlds now sit cheek by jowl on the same stretch of Suffolk coast. Metropolitan escapees want enclaves and townscapes preserved in aspic for their occasional visits and for those who rent their homes as holiday-lets. Ludicrously expensive beach huts function as summer play-pens, deckchairs out the front, small gas rings set inside (an Aga wouldn’t fit), faux simplicity for the well-heeled. Such conspicuous and exclusive plenty set alongside more challenged local communities risks provoking social discontent. 

The expanding communities of weekend homeowners along the Heritage Coast are seeking escape and respite. They are buying into a kind of dream; but it’s a dream in which other people must feature and who in turn need to have affordable homes and adequately paying jobs. If these very different sets of people can’t find ways to rub along together in future as they used to do in the past, the dream could turn sour. Against that background Sizewell C rather than being an unwelcome new development may prove itself an economic lubricant and help provide a better mix of opportunities for local people. 

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If you are ever on the receiving end of an inquiry from Patrick Radden Keefe, be on your guard. He is a seriously determined and tenacious investigator. His research is intimidatingly thorough and he doesn’t readily take “no” for an answer. 

There is a pattern to his journalism and the essays in his new book, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, reflect it. He scopes the undersides of the contemporary world and drugs, armaments, killings and all sorts of greed and chicanery feature strongly. If such hard-boiled stories appeal, then this is a book for you.

In his award-winning podcast series built around the Scorpions’ song “Wind of Change”, Keefe reflects on the character of his writing:

“… if there’s one connective thread that runs through a lot of my stories it’s Secrets, secret worlds,   uncovering things I’m not supposed to know.”

The essays in Rogues – originally published between 2008 and 2018 – are par for the course. Many have the appearance of being precis for the kind of longer studies which have made Keefe’s name, most recently the highly acclaimed Empire of Pain, an investigation of the opioid crisis in the US.

If there is a criticism to be made of the essays in Rogues it is that some have been overtaken by events and would have benefitted from more substantial updating than is provided in a few italicised sentences at the end of each chapter. But that would be to carp at what in the round is a scintillating set of exposures of the nasty and of the tragic.

Keefe is not easy to pigeonhole. Born into a third-generation Irish immigrant family in Boston, he was schooled at the prestigious Milton Academy in Massachusetts – attended earlier by T S Eliot and Robert and Teddy Kennedy – before studying at Columbia University in New York followed by postgraduate studies at Cambridge and the LSE.

Indeed his interest in the electronic eavesdropping covered later in his first book, Chatter, was sparked during his time in Britain when he caught sight of the listening station at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire. Thereafter via Chinese immigrant history (Snakehead), Keefe branched out into a world increasingly peopled by secretive bad guys involved in murder in Northern Ireland (Say Nothing) or who knowingly induced drug addiction in the US.

The nursery of Keefe’s talent – and the source for all the essays in Rogues – was the liberal magazine The New Yorker. That’s where he made his first pitch for publication and where he has remained a staff writer to this day. Keefe is not only a coolly conscientious investigative journalist but a real literary craftsman. His scene-setting is masterly. He invariably employs anecdotes to build interest, structure and tension.

The opening paragraphs of one of the best essays in the collection, The Hunt for El Chapo: Inside the Capture of the World’s Most Notorious Drug Lord, illustrate this well. The reader is first invited to witness the seemingly routine arrival of a passenger at Amsterdam airport; but soon thereafter the man is identified as a drugs cartel assassin. After this restrained start, Keefe opens out the narrative into a story of vicious drug gang rivalry, widespread corruption and of US frustration at repeated Mexican failures to capture El Chapo and after eventually putting him behind bars, keeping him there.

Drugs features in an entirely different way in the portrayal of Monzer al-Kassar, “The Prince of Marbella”, a ruthless Syrian procurer and seller of arms to anyone anywhere ready to pay for them. Behind his ostentatious vanity and use of his palatial mansion in Spain, Monzer operates through layers of deceit involving state and other terrorists.

He is a man who remained willing to arrange the disposal of anyone who got in his way before, eventually, he was himself extradited, arraigned and sentenced in a US court. Here as elsewhere in the collection, Keefe himself avoids judgement and allows Monzer and his defenders to implicate themselves.

Not all his stories are so conspicuously violent. Altogether lighter-toned, even comic, is The Jefferson Bottles an essay about counterfeit wines supposedly purchased in Paris and shipped back to the US by (future US President) Thomas Jefferson when a visitor to Paris in the late 18th century. In this story, there are no heroes just the fraudsters, the supposed independent experts and the credulous purchasers of supposedly rare wines duped in the process. It is hard to feel sorry for any of them.

Some characters are drawn in all their complex ambiguity and leave the reader uncertain as to their true motives. In the Swiss Bank Heist Keefe allows Herve Falciani, an IT specialist employed by HSBC in Geneva, to weave his seeming fantasies as he seeks to explain his reasons for having stolen bank customers’ data and subsequently publicising individual instances of assumed tax evasion.

Was this, as he claimed, to expose such evasion by foreign nationals or was it, as his former girlfriend argued, to hawk the information around to the highest bidder? Whilst the Swiss authorities fought to sustain their banking secrecy laws other countries, notably France, used the data Falciani provided to pursue tax dodgers and lauded him as a whistleblowing public servant. Keefe never quite draws a conclusion either way, though his sympathies are clearly not with the secretive Swiss.

After reading these essays  – as well as a number of Keefe’s earlier books – it is hard not to agree with the reported remark of his wife that he “is intrigued by all the bad guys”. There are certainly plenty to choose from in this collection. However, two of the essays tread more complex and unsettling paths. 

One – Journeyman, the last in the collection – is a portrait of the celebrated American food writer, traveller and broadcaster, Anthony Bourdain. It sits oddly among the other essays and was published originally in 2017, one year before Bourdain committed suicide. Keefe’s portrait is of a highly successful but also troubled man who had exhausted his professional interest in food and travel and whose marriage had recently collapsed. It is a melancholy essay about the sad end of a talented man.

The other and especially challenging essay is a truly tragic tale. A Loaded Gun tells the story of Amy Bishop, a neurobiologist at the University of Alabama who apparently provoked by her failure to obtain a permanent university appointment, turned a gun on her departmental colleagues in the course of a staff meeting. Three of them were killed and others injured.

With great control, Keefe leads the reader on an exploration of the relationship between the murders in Alabama and the death by shooting in a small town in Massachusetts twenty years earlier of Amy’s younger brother by her hand also. What emerges is a tale in which Amy’s mother repeatedly said Amy had only accidentally fired the gun in the family home.

Though the investigating police officers were suspicious at the time, the local head of police was a close acquaintance of Amy’s mother, Judy, and had closed down the case. But the murders in Alabama raised questions again as to what exactly had happened twenty years earlier. Keefe’s persistent questioning of Amy’s parents makes for disturbing reading; he doesn’t pull his punches as he seeks answers.

The implication is clear: that Amy’s mother had suppressed the incident in her own mind, unwilling to risk the loss of both of her children, one to the graveyard and the other to judicial execution or life-long imprisonment.

Keefe is clearly in his element when writing about the bad guys; but among the best essays in Rogues are those which require empathy and nuance as in the portraits of Anthony Bourdain and Amy Bishop.

Keefe has many strengths as a journalist and writer but he is at his very best when he explores individuals who are more flawed than fallen.

The immediate reasons are plain to see: rising costs and staff shortages on top of an earlier battering during the Covid lockdowns. However, the deeper reasons are more complex and it is often the people who lament the passing of the local pub who have in part caused the decline by taking away their custom. But the story isn’t all doom and there are some fine survivors and some great transformations.

Many of us get distinctly sentimental about pubs. For some they are part of a lost England eulogised notoriously by John Major when he was Prime Minister in the 1990s: a land of cricket on village greens, mediaeval churches set among trees nearby and historic pubs as meeting places for the local community. In some parts of the country, such an England still exists and is often used as a backdrop for murderous encounters in the fictional village of Midsomer and for nostalgic TV adverts with music by Vaughan Williams or Elgar providing a soundtrack. But for most people in Britain today, that soft-focus world has never really existed except on occasional day trips away from the cityscapes in which most of us actually live and where the best of the urban pubs still standing are determined survivors.

Pubs have been on the defensive for at least the past four decades. Britain has changed and pubs have had to change as well, some more willingly and successfully than others. Until at least the 1970s pubs were mirror images of a socially stratified and gender-divided country. It is startling to realise that, in those far off days, women rarely visited a pub on their own. The customers, male and female, “knew their place”. Working men — but no women — frequented the “Public Bar” which had wooden flooring and offered slightly cheaper beers to drink. Through a partition door (or sometimes via a separate entrance) were to be seen the carpeted comforts of the “Saloon Bar” where jacketed men and married or “courting” couples gathered, content to pay higher prices for the privilege. In early episodes of the long-running TV soap opera Coronation Street, there was also a small, separate, area of the “Rovers Return” behind an opaque glass door, known as the “Snug” where ladies could take their tipples discretely. There the redoubtable hair-netted Ena Sharples was to be found drinking a glass of Stout and gossiping with the more reticent Minnie Caldwell. It is a world of yesterday.

Before supermarkets, there were only “off-licences”. Away from the licensed outlets – mostly “Public Houses” but also restaurants and hotel bars – these were the shops where the average person bought the beers, gins, whiskies and cream sherries that were the staple of home drinking all those decades ago. Generally, only the men went to the local pub and stay-at-home-spouses expected a gin and orange, a Babycham or a glass or two of Advocaat as compensation over the weekend. But quite suddenly the traditional pub culture took a hit from which it has never fully recovered. Supermarkets started to sell alcohol which spelt the death knell of “off-licenses” and increased the amount of at-home drinking, instead of at the pub. At about the same time mass tourism took flight and unlike, say, Great Yarmouth, Benidorm sold wines as well as beers and women joined the men and took to drink not just in sunny Spain but in wintery Britain. Home from holidays abroad people wanted opportunities to eat foreign foods and drink foreign drinks. A more sophisticated world of eating and drinking was forming, one which owed nothing to village greens and traditional pubs.

Lovers of traditional beers and pubs fought back and the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) had a genuine impact on what was sold in pubs, including by local and bespoke mini-breweries. A much advertised but dreadful beer called Watney’s Red Barrel became the butt of TV satires including of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It was eventually withdrawn from sale; but thereafter CAMRA’s campaign began to lose headway as larger beers became increasingly popular with young people — female as well as male — who were able to buy them in six-packs from their local supermarket to drink at home or wherever else they wanted. Meanwhile, beautiful pubs were levelled or desecrated as Victorian and Edwardian glasswork and decoration were destroyed by panicked pub-owners seeking to “modernise” public and saloon bars as single spaces with newly installed jukeboxes. The pub as centre of the local community and the main public venue for the sale of alcohol seemed to be on its uppers.

The threat was all too real. Pubs floundered and many are still fighting for their continued existence. The pub has been with us a very long time — alehouses were first licensed in the late 16th century — and has had a long and often chequered history in which cock-fighting and other so-called sports hid in the gardens of drinking venues. Britons have always enjoyed a drink, often quite a lot of drink. Licensing of pubs was intended to impose some order (and secure some tax revenues) and fortified wines and homegrown spirits were added to the ales (which have their origins in Anglo-Saxon times). As Britain industrialised in the 19th century ales offered an alternative to often poor quality water supplies and provided a kind of release for many whose working lives were oppressive. In time ale houses morphed into the pubs that many of us have come to enjoy and treasure.

Despite the present trends and risks, pubs are great survivors. They have adapted to fashions and popular taste. Food was once limited to pickled eggs and pies if you were lucky; but now gastro pubs like the “Sportsman” near Whitstable in Kent, are winning Michelin stars. A myriad of specialist brews have been added to mainstream keg beers, alongside quality lagers from Germany and elsewhere. Wines which once were offered begrudgingly and only in glasses of downmarket table wines (“vin ordinaire”) have been replaced by quality wines from across the globe. Newly minted gins and numerous malt whiskies are as present at the bar as beers and wines; and whereas pubs were until recently never the preferred place to stay overnight, the meld of pub and inn championed by the likes of the Inkin brothers in Cornwall (the “Old Coastguard” in Mousehole and the “Gurnard’s Head” near St Ives) can be found in many places across Britain.  

And some of those formerly endangered Victorian and Edwardian pubs have managed to hold rapacious developers at bay and can still be enjoyed in all their decorative glory. Drop into the “Salisbury” off St Martin’s Lane in central London or the “Lamb” on Lamb’s Conduit Street in Bloomsbury to savour what has been saved. Many other traditional pubs are holding their own across our cities. The best have learned to keep the basics but tweak them to suit contemporary tastes. The “Ship and Mitre” and the “The Railway” in Liverpool both have a great range of beers with inexpensive but good food to accompany. Also in Liverpool, and in an attractive listed building with open fires, is the “The Baltic Fleet” down by the docks and with low prices as an added incentive. Over in Manchester “The Gas Lamp” is a quirky old-style drinking venue with a modern twist whilst “The Marble Arch” brews beers on-site and in their “Tap Room” in Salford, customers can drink their beers alongside the casks in which they settled after the brew.

So the pub isn’t dead yet. Traditional pubs plainly furnished serving quality beers, as well as new-fangled gins, are still flourishing. Others have adapted to provide upmarket eating and quality overnight accommodation. Overall pub numbers have declined greatly and may reduce further as they seek to navigate past rising costs and a prospective recession. The pub will survive in one form or another, but of course, only if the punters are ready to support them and pay the prices that will enable them to do so.  

In a Twitter post on finishing his new book, The Social Distance Between Us, the Scottish writer, rapper and TV host, Darren McGarvey, reflected that “after 3 years of crazy ups and downs, false starts and moments where I felt I might throw in the towel, my second book is complete”. Well, here we have it and what an angry little beast it is.

McGarvey springs from a challenging background which formed the backbone of his 2018 Orwell Prize-winning Poverty Safari. Deprivation, drugs and alcohol addled his Glasgow youth. Once again, he ventilates the resentments of those who continue to be held back by disadvantages he himself once suffered.

He is preoccupied with “class” as the key to understanding modern Britain. That said, this is a very Scottish-focussed study, notwithstanding excursions into wider Britain. It took shape, largely, whilst McGarvey was making a series of Scottish television programmes about poverty and its broader social impacts. Sometimes the seams show all too clearly.

McGarvey uses a thesis about social proximity, or rather its absence, in an attempt to explain what he sees as wrong with contemporary Britain. The social landscape he depicts is almost unremittingly bleak, shading into the dystopian. For him, only those with a “lived experience” of deprivation and its effects are qualified to speak about them.

He counts himself as among the authentic voices able to articulate parts of society that middle-class commentators cannot truly reach. His voice is unwaveringly sarcastic, often bilious. Any uncertainty does not constrain him; his is a righteous anger. The Social Distance Between Us is less a work of advocacy than an unapologetic scream against what he considers decades of societal neglect: It is not a work for the fainthearted or sensitive.

The book is at his strongest and most persuasive when taking the reader into discrete worlds where inescapable poverty grinds down families and individuals, where unemployment and mental stress generate patterns of homelessness, crime, imprisonment and drug abuse, each reinforcing the other. Drawing mainly on Scottish examples known to him but also on research by academics and NGOs in wider Britain, McGarvey makes his readers (whom he often addresses directly) conscious of the odds stacked against many of his fellow citizens locked in repetitive patterns of comparative disadvantage.

He dismisses claims that modern Britain enables social mobility through educational opportunity, demonstrating effectively that where someone is born and brought up is highly determinant of their subsequent lives. He shows how a person’s postcode directly affects the quality of education and health service access and even the types of employment available to them. He shows also how law enforcement is more readily applied in deprived areas as is evidenced in the make-up of the prison population. 

However, McGarvey is at his weakest regarding potential solutions and policy proposals for the problems he identifies. Though he vents his spleen on almost every page, his anger is an outcry and a bitter rage against class divisions. He will brook no objection to the limits of an analysis based on class alone. For him the working classes are the disregarded victims — whether unintended or not — of complacent and self-satisfied middle and upper classes intent above all on looking after their own interests.

Brexit was, to his mind, an expression of deep social resentments built up over many decades and focussed on a plaintive bid to regain control, not of national borders but of deprived lives. Though the book’s title points to social distance and remote politics as a core explanation for a “wrecked Britain”, the driving thesis is startlingly “old Left” or what McGarvey calls “radical Left”. 

Though McGarvey doesn’t seem to have a plan or subscribe to anybody else’s plans for addressing the social injustices he describes and articulates, the undertow of his argument favours wealth redistribution and radical equality. The canvas on which he draws and the examples he deploys are moreover narrowly national and largely Scottish. There is nothing wrong with that as such, but it is very limiting. There is no sense of how other European countries are handling not dissimilar instances of deindustrialisation and social deprivation.

There is little sense either of the social impacts of an increasingly diverse population, possibly because that is more readily or extensively evident in England than Scotland. Neither is there much recognition of the importance and significance of intermediary groupings in society, not least religious ones, whether Christian or Muslim. And although there are nods to the economic and other effects of social media, there is no real analysis of what might, after all, be thought especially relevant to any argument about forms of social distance. 

McGarvey and his publishers have undoubtedly produced a book that resonates with the times in which we live. Post-Brexit, post-Covid-19 and in the midst of the global economic downturn hastened by the war in Ukraine, the growing level of poverty in Britain is unavoidably and rightly a core political concern. Inflation is rising rapidly with government spending and taxes at historically high levels. Energy costs are doubling and prices of basic foodstuffs are on a substantial upward curve. The social fabric is strained and in places fraying.

Nonetheless and even though societal strains are all too apparent, McGarvey’s apocalyptic headline about a “wrecked” Britain is hyperbole. He is surely right to look behind the immediate problems to the deeper sources of deprivation and their long-term effects.

His anger may well be understandable but it is not sufficient. In terms of policy choices, the circle to be squared is how to structure sustainable public expenditures on housing, education, health and so on in ways conducive to poverty alleviation whilst growing the economy to pay for them. That is the key question and not a fixation on class division as an explanation for everything. 

The Welsh Borders are shaped by ancient intimidating geologies. The mountains reign supremely and the valleys pay them homage. It is a magnificent landscape with some of the best walking in Britain. Nearby moreover across the hills into England, there is a lushness in the wide expanse of the Wye valley.

And ranged along the Marches that divide the two are the remains of castles marking the contested interface between medieval Wales and England. But there is softness too and warmth and culture and great food and drink. Three or four days in these Borderlands is a real escape for any urbanite pining for freshness; but dress sturdily for winds rise readily and rain falls easily and plentifully. 

History stalks the Borders landscape, sometimes bleakly but often with a gentle touch. The short-stay visitor is tempted to look through car windows and drive on greedily seeking “views” and vistas and the leftovers of history. Tempting but a mistake. The car needs to be parked from time to time and a hill climbed or a track or pathway walked even at the price of a misty dampness on the face.

The Welsh Borders need to be felt and the scents of the Wye Valley inhaled. There is much to do and much to be seen but above all the visitor has to experience the area and that truly starts only as walking shoes touch the rocky greenness on the ground.

What to Do

Begin with a walk and a challenge. The road south from the town of Brecon rises steadily as you head towards Storey Arms in sight of the highest peaks in the Brecon Beacons at Corn Du (2863ft) and Pen y Fan (2907ft). They are your objectives and Pen y Fan should take the average walker two hours up and back down. It’s a popular route, so arrive early. You will find a few exceptionally fit runners heading past you, some possibly from the Regimental HQ of the Royal Welsh in Brecon. Do not despair and walk on upwards steadily.

For a very different but in some ways more inspiring exploration, head further east to the outer reaches of the Black Mountains around the tiny hamlet of Llanthony. Before doing so or whilst on your way, stop and read the wonderfully evocative account of Gerald of Wales’ journey through this area in the 12th century (available in a Penguin Classics paperback).

Of mainly Norman origin but a quarter Welsh, Gerald was a churchman with a mission to become Archbishop of Wales, an ambition which despite all his connections with Kings and other notables he never attained. But he was a traveller who looked and inquired and reported. He wrote of the vale in which Llanthony is situated that it “is shut in on all sides by a circle of lofty mountains … [and] … there stands the abbey church of Saint John the Baptist … constructed on the very spot where once there stood the humble chapel of St David …”

And there its substantial remains still stand, beautiful as architecture and uplifting as a location. Getting to the abbey ruins takes determination but it is as worth the journey today as it was a thousand years ago.

In my case come across by accident, the house where the great Australian painter, Sidney Nolan, lived his last ten years is also off the beaten track. Hard by the Wales/England border near Presteigne but just inside Herefordshire, “The Rodd”, is a late medieval manor house surrounded by 250 acres of land with a barn converted for use as an exhibition space. A number of Nolan’s own paintings are shown in the house itself. It seems fitting that an artist best known for his spare Australian landscapes and abstract portraits should have spent his final years adjacent to the spare beauties of the Borders and Black Mountains. Opening hours are limited but it is an enticing stopping place.

By way of contrast and not far from Presteigne and still in the Welsh Marches are the Hergest Croft Gardens laid out by the Banks family early in the 20th century and developed over the succeeding 120 years. The setting is superb on a sloping hillside facing the Black Mountains. Within its 70 acres are to be found an incredible range of trees, the Redwoods and Monkey Puzzles well-established and towering upwards. During our visit, the innumerable numbers of Azaleas were still in multi-coloured bloom and the rhododendrons were opening up. The house is set back with a veranda typical of a certain type of Edwardian house. Indeed if Sidney Nolan ever called by he must surely have been reminded of the verandaed houses plentiful in parts of Sydney and Adelaide.  

Where to Eat and Drink

Pubs abound providing a community focus in somewhat isolated villages. Indeed chapel and pub often sit like antiphonal resonances or claims to attention in Welsh communities of a certain age. Whilst some chapels offer a melancholy prospect as abandoned or new-formed homes, the pubs are holding up well though quite a few of them have also fallen on hard times or even closed. For the more fastidious or adventurous eater, there are many quality outlets, especially on either side of Offa’s Dyke separating England and Wales.

Hay-on-Wye is renowned for its books but book readers are also usually discriminating – or at least enthusiastic – eaters and drinkers and the Blue Boar Pub and the Hay Tap are British food outlets among the Italian and other offerings. On the Welsh side of the border and a bit further south in Abergavenny, is a prized local restaurant which is a favourite of mine, The Walnut Tree. Under the stewardship of chef Shaun Hill, the restaurant has had a Michelin star since 2010. In my view, if your budget is limited – and whose isn’t nowadays – the trick is to go for lunch; the menu is not extensive but of very high quality and eaten in a charmingly unfussy dining room.

Where to Stay

And talking still of eating whilst thinking of sleeping, there is a little jewel to be found between Brecon and Hay-on-Wye in the village of Felin Fach called The Felin Fach Griffin. Here the Inkin brothers (owners also of The Gurnards Head on the north coast of Cornwall near St Ives and of The Old Coastguard at Mousehole near Newlyn) have produced in the “Griffin” a wonderful meld of excellence and informality. After a long day of walking and exploring among the mountains and valleys, you can retire for a hot bath in a warmly furnished room before heading down for a superbly executed dinner and a choice of carefully curated wines.

The Inkins draw on their Cornish inns to provide high-quality fish and on the local area to source fine lamb. The chefs are skilled users of the good produce and the dishes are sophisticated in execution. And following a short after-dinner stroll, a comfortable bed beckons with the prospect of a good breakfast the next morning.