Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Thursday

3 Jan 2019
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The way we were

‘The Spectator, having quite recently been a very bad magazine, is at present a very good one.’ Those gratifying words began a full-dress leading article in the Times on 22 September 1978, headed ‘On the Side of Liberty’. Its occasion was this magazine’s sesquicentenary, which we celebrated with a grand ball at the Lyceum Theatre, and much else besides. Although I can’t possibly be objective, I think that the praise was deserved. The revival of The Spectator 40 years ago was wonderful: it assured what had been the very insecure future of the paper, and it was the time of my life. Founded in 1828 by the Dundonian Robert Rintoul to promote the cause of Reform, by the late 19th century The Spectator had become Liberal Unionist under the almost 40-year editorship of John St Loe Strachey, ‘pompous, pretentious and futile’ in Lloyd George’s derisive words.

The way we were

Thursday

26 Apr 2018
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Cricket, unlovely cricket

In 2005 I published a book called The Strange Death of Tory England, and a long article called ‘Cricket’s final over’, lamenting the decline of the game. The book appeared shortly before an election in which, although Labour easily kept its majority, the Tories gained seats, presaging a great revival, or so Charles Moore later claimed while genially deriding my book. The piece on cricket appeared, with even more faultless timing, in the September issue of Prospect, at the very moment when England had just regained the Ashes, with the victorious team, including a gloriously hungover Andrew Flintoff, touring London in an open-topped bus and inevitably bidden to meet Tony Blair, while a wave of enthusiasm swept the country.

Cricket, unlovely cricket

Thursday

22 Jun 2017
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Do we give a hoot?

‘There is room for a very interesting work,’ Gibbon observed in a footnote, ‘which should lay open the connection between the languages and manners of nations.’ The manners of the peoples of the United Kingdom and of the United States are very different, although not always in the way that received prejudices have it: any English visitor to America must be struck by how much politer most Americans are than the average run of his compatriots. But The American Language, as H.L. Mencken called his great book, has developed in a way that isn’t always dainty. It has a vigor and color of its own, and a rich vocabulary which has combined with the central advantages English already possessed. Apart from its flexible syntax and rudimentary grammar, it has long had, to a degree quite unmatched by other European languages, two vocabularies, as Jacques Barzun observed, nearly parallel — formal and vernacular — which make it ideally suited to be the global lingua franca.

Do we give a hoot?

Thursday

17 Nov 2016
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Obituary: Eric Christiansen

Over the past year, we have lost two names cherished by Spectator readers. Rodney Milnes, our opera critic for 20 years before he moved to the Times, as well as editing the monthly magazine Opera, died last December, and Eric Christiansen, the Oxford medieval historian, who was a regular book reviewer here for many years, followed on the last day of October. They both died at 79, both of cancer. Their upbringing and education were similar — Rugby and Christ Church for Milnes, Charterhouse and New College for Christiansen.From the last peacetime ‘call-up’ generation, both served unenthusiastically and unheroically in the army. They were both old and dear friends of mine. Although I was sad that Rodney’s death wasn’t marked in these pages, I’ve written about him at some length for Opera, and so here I want to remember Eric.

Obituary: Eric Christiansen

Thursday

8 Sep 2016
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Local heroes | 8 September 2016

In one village after another across the country, pubs are closing, as many as 25 a week by some counts, and this is accepted with English fatalism. But the people of South Stoke, near Bath, chose not to accept the loss of the Packhorse mutely; the locals decided to save their local. And in the process they may have demonstrated that ‘community’ and indeed ‘local’ or localism are not merely empty rhetoric. Part of the charm of Bath is its setting, lying in a valley ringed by hills, a town surrounded by villages. Some of them, Widcombe or Weston, have been absorbed into the town, like those former villages called Hampstead and Clapham, but just to the south of Bath are true villages, Monkton Combe, Combe Hay, Wellow — and South Stoke, still separated from the city by open country, was praised by the great Pevsner as a rare example of a real village almost within walking distance of a mainline station.

Local heroes | 8 September 2016

Thursday

26 May 2016
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Junk Bond

You now need to be in your mid-sixties or older — a chilling thought — not to have lived your whole life in the shadow of James Bond. In 1953, the year of the Queen’s coronation and the conquest of Everest, Bond announced his arrival with the words, ‘The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning’, the opening line of Casino Royale. His creator was Ian Fleming, a cynical, not-very-clean-living newspaperman with a chequered career behind him, who wrote the book to take his mind off ‘the agony’ of getting married for the first time. Even Jonathan Cape, his publisher, thought the book ‘not up to scratch’, but brought it out in a modest print run as a favour to Fleming’s then better-known brother Peter, among other things the Spectator columnist ‘Strix’ for many years.

Junk Bond

Thursday

7 Apr 2016
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

How to save the monarchy

On 21 April Queen Elizabeth II marks her 90th birthday, the first of our reigning monarchs ever to do so, and it will be a very happy occasion, just as her Diamond Jubilee was in 2012. Five years ago there had been a more sombre milestone for the queen’s eldest son, Charles, Prince of Wales. He passed the mark of 59 years spent as heir to the throne set by his great-great-grandfather, Victoria’s eldest son, the Prince of Wales who became King Edward VII in 1901. The prince will be celebrating his mother’s birthday as enthusiastically as anyone, while oppressed by unmistakable frustration. He’s now 67; the Queen’s mother, the late Queen Mother, lived to 101; when he inherits the throne, he will be well beyond most people’s retirement age.

How to save the monarchy

Thursday

18 Sep 2014
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Hugh Trevor-Roper: the spy as historian, the historian as spy

Shortly after the war began in September 1939, the branch of the intelligence services called MI8, or the Radio Security Service, recruited H.R. Trevor-Roper (as his name would appear the following year on the title page of his first book, his acerbic and somewhat anti-clerical life of Archbishop Laud). He was a young Oxford don, or would-be don, a research fellow of Merton. His academic career was now interrupted for six years: nominally commissioned in the Life Guards, he plunged deep into the murky world of secret intelligence. Before that, and before he turned to Modern History, Trevor-Roper had been a brilliant classicist, winning a string of university prizes. He was repelled by what he found the sterility into which classical textual criticism had descended, but it was all the same the brilliant analytical mind he had shown in that field which was now turned to cryptography — other classicists, as well as mathematicians, chess players and musicians displayed a similar aptitude — and to interpreting raw intelligence.

Hugh Trevor-Roper: the spy as historian, the historian as spy

Thursday

20 Feb 2014
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

When Israel was but a dream

‘On the night of 15 April 1897, a small, elegant steamer is en route from Egypt’s Port Said to Jaffa.’ ‘At the end of October 1898 the small steamer Rossiya made its way from Alexandria in Egypt, via Port Said, to Jaffa.’ It is unusual, or maybe even unique, for the first chapters of two books published at the same time to open with almost identical sentences. But then My Promised Land and Herzl are telling different sides of the same tale: the story of Zionism from the beginning, one of the strangest, most romantic, most bewildering episodes in modern history, and to this day one of the most bitterly contentious Aboard that first steamer to Jaffa was ‘the Rt. Honourable Herbert Bentwich’, as Ari Shavit calls him, although the official record doesn’t suggest that he was entitled to the prefix of a Privy Councillor, for all his considerable distinction.

When Israel was but a dream

Thursday

9 May 2013
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s diary: Peter King, terror hypocrite, and the joys of Longhorns

As we landed at Houston, I suddenly thought of my first visit to America, in 1965 during what we didn’t then call my gap year. Forty-eight years does seem a long time, but my fascination with this country is undimmed. The occasion of this trip was to talk at the British Studies seminar at the University of Texas, which has become a regular gig over the years, and Austin is now a nest of old friends. This time I made a new pal. Holly McCarthy is a graduate student, who became my cicerone, offering to take me across Austin on the back of her motor-scooter. After a deep breath, I cheerfully accepted. Really, it’s much the best way to see the town. With all my American friendships and happy professional connections, on every visit I think yet again of what G.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s diary: Peter King, terror hypocrite, and the joys of Longhorns

Thursday

11 Apr 2013
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

‘The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2005-2008’, by Lawrence Goldman - review

Where else would you possibly find George Painter, Jackie Pallo and Sir Eduardo Paolozzi in immediate successive proximity? The incunabulist of the British Museum who emerged from scholarly obscurity with his biography of Proust, the curly-blond wrestler in kinky trunks, and the son of an Edinburgh-Italian confectioner who became an avant-garde sculptor, have nothing whatever in common except that they died within the same four-year period, and they have all been accounted British worthies, deserving places in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In September 2004, I wrote here about the astonishing new Oxford DNB, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison and published in 50 magnificent volumes for which not many private readers had the shelf space, or the money, but which was available online, and I told its own story.

Thursday

3 Jan 2013
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Not-so-special relationship

‘Three things of my own are about to burst on the world,’ Dean Acheson wrote to his friend Lady Pamela Berry, the London hostess and wife of Michael Berry, later Lord Hartwell, owner of the Daily Telegraph. They were ‘a leader in the December issue of Foreign Affairs… a speech at West Point… and a piece about my childhood in the Connecticut valley.’ It was characteristic of Acheson’s self-regard that he should have thought the first and last of these would ‘burst’ anywhere, but he was more right about the second than he can have known. Just over fifty years ago, on 5 December 1962, two days after his letter to Lady -Pamela, Acheson gave that speech, and indeed it exploded across the Atlantic like an artillery shell.

Not-so-special relationship

Saturday

28 Jul 2012
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Diary - 28 July 2012

Looking back, there was a moment right at the start when the coalition government could have asserted its authority, and changed the political weather. As soon as they took office, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and George Osborne should have said, quite truly, that they were dealing with the catastrophic economic inheritance of the previous government, that austerity was the order of the day, and that a symbolic start would be made with the coming London Olympics. These would be drastically reduced in size and scale, with some venues scrapped, and ‘non-events’ ejected altogether. Synchronised swimming isn’t sport, it’s kitsch, and beach volleyball is simply soft porn: the only ‘sport’ whose rules specify the maximum size of costumes, to ensure the babes wear itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny bikinis.

Saturday

7 Jan 2012
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The truest man of letters

In 1969 an author in his early thirties published his first book. The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters won the Duff Cooper prize, delighted the reading public, introduced them to the name of John Gross, and marked the beginning of what would be an illustrious and fascinating literary career. It ended with his death on 10 January 2011, a great sorrow for the many people who loved and admired John.A year ago, copious tributes were paid to this remarkable man, as writer, editor, critic, friend, which I wished I had joined in. He was the best-read man in the country, said Victoria Glendinning, or for Craig Brown, ‘the man who read everything’. His capacity for reading was indeed almost inhuman, and his memory frightening.

The truest man of letters

Saturday

17 Dec 2011
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Parliament shouldn’t pay

This year has seen a sombre centenary, which passed almost unnoticed. It was in August 1911 that Members of Parliament voted to pay themselves for the first time — an annual stipend of £400 a year. What was meant to open parliament to all ranks of society and allow men of low birth but high gifts to sit as MPs has proved a fine example of the law of unintended consequences. A seemingly modest innovation began the process which has culminated in what we now have: the professionalisation of politics and the creation of a new class of full-time but mediocre politicians. And instead of changing the House of Commons for the better, it has changed it in many ways very much for the worse. By 1934, that £400 had become £600, £1,250 by 1954, £6,897 by 1978, and then a startling leap to £30,854 in 1993.

Wednesday

1 Jul 2009
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Immortalised in print

When the great new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was published nearly five years ago — and a truly great achievement it was, despite a few carping critics — the printed version seemed almost a luxury item. Many larger public libraries still have the old DNB, with its decennial supplements published throughout the past century, which I myself acquired years ago, in New York rather improbably. It was missing the volume ‘Glover-Harriott’, but my chum Ivon Asquith at OUP kindly procured that for me, so that the handsome blue volumes now furnish my work room along with the Oxford English Dictionary, the 1911 Britannica and the Gibbs and Doubleday Complete Peerage. But not many libraries could easily fork out £5,000 for the 50 volumes, not to say even fewer private punters; those who did so may be a little pensive now that the price for the complete set has already dropped to £1,500.

Saturday

26 Jul 2008
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Diary - 26 July 2008

From London to Bath to Manhattan, ten funerals or memorial services since October makes more than one a month, and attending them can seem a full-time occupation, as well as a sorrowful one. John Biffen, Bill Deedes and Ian Gilmour were full of years and had done the state some service. James Michie and Euan Graham had also reached fourscore years, and Jean Freas, a dear family friend in New York whom my father met at a party there on the night Truman won his dramatic victory in 1948, was almost 80, as was Anthony Blond. At their age death is sad rather than tragic, but too many Fleet Street chums have been clocking out before their time, Nigel Dempster at 65 or Miles Kington at 66. Writing this Diary a couple of years ago, I described reaching 60, and mentioned Hugh Massingberd as a close contemporary.

Saturday

12 Apr 2008
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The solitary New York Jew

In a recent review of They Knew They Were Right, Jacob Heilbrunn’s book about the neo-conservatives, Mark Lilla began by asking: How many of you are sick to death of hearing about City College in the 1930s, Alcove One and Alcove Two, the prima donnas at Partisan Review, who stopped speaking to whom at which cocktail party .In a recent review of They Knew They Were Right, Jacob Heilbrunn’s book about the neo-conservatives, Mark Lilla began by asking: How many of you are sick to death of hearing about City College in the 1930s, Alcove One and Alcove Two, the prima donnas at Partisan Review, who stopped speaking to whom at which cocktail party . . . and a good deal more besides? Well, the answer is that some of us can’t get enough of the extraordinary story of the ‘New York intellectuals’, from Starting Out in the Thirties, the title of one of the books by that New York Jew — the title of another — Alfred Kazin.

Saturday

19 Jan 2008
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Best or worst?

After his famous ‘Age of . . .’ trilogy on the 19th century, E. J. Hobsbawm published a coda (best-selling but in my view much less satisfactory) on the history of the 20th centuryAfter his famous ‘Age of . . .’ trilogy on the 19th century, E. J. Hobsbawm published a coda (best-selling but in my view much less satisfactory) on the history of the 20th century. It begins with a bleak page of epigraphs, among others from Isaiah Berlin — ‘the most terrible century in Western history,’ William Golding — ‘the most violent century in human history,’ and René Dumont — ‘I see it only as a century of massacre and war.’ This theme of ‘mankind’s worst century’ has become something of a cliché, and deserves closer examination, not least because it almost implies that the horrors of the age were natural catastrophes, like hurricanes or epidemics.

Saturday

3 Nov 2007
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The curse of riches

When the second half of the 19th century began, South Africa was barely even a geographical expression, as Metternich had contemptuously called Italy. It certainly wasn’t a country, but merely an ill-defined area which included two Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, two British colonies, the Cape and Natal, and a number of African principalities. The British had acquired the Cape from the Dutch during the Napoleonic wars not quite in a fit of absence of mind, but with little enthusiasm, and although the Cape of Good Hope itself was of great strategic importance, commanding the passage to India and the Far East, James Stephen of the Colonial Office unpresciently called the lands of the interior ‘the most sterile and worthless in the whole Empire’.

Saturday

14 Jul 2007
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Dropping himself in the soup

One of Richard Nixon’s salient characteristics was his clumsiness. No one ever called him a man of the Left politically, but in the other figurative sense he was quite unusually gauche or linkisch. By the last grim days of his presidency that might have been explained by the martinis he was downing as if they were mineral water, but even sober he was always accident-prone. He bloodily cracked his forehead getting into a motor-car, he stopped serving soup at White House dinners after spilling it down his shirtfront, and, when asked to look in on a Cabinet meeting by Harold Wilson, President Nixon upset an inkwell on the hallowed table at No. 10.This gaucherie was not merely physical. There have been better presidents and there have been worse, including the present incumbent, but was any other such a strange, awkward creature? Nixon was intelligent and industrious, but tense, resentful, a walking definition of what we call chippy and of what the French call a man unhappy in his skin.

Saturday

24 Feb 2007
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

A tale of treachery

When The Spectator recently said goodbye to 56 Doughty Street, we said goodbye to more than three decades of memories. Whatever else we were any good at under Alexander Chancellor’s editorship, we knew how to throw a party, from the great sesquicentennial ball in 1978 to the summer garden parties to the Thursday lunches. Among other happy moments in that dining room perched giddily at the top of the building I remember a ludicrous exchange on biblical topography between Enoch Powell and Auberon Waugh; or Richard Cobb, the great historian of France, waking from a post-prandial nap with the words that he must get the 3.25 back to Oxford, to be told that it was nearly six; or Barry Humphries leaving briefly and reappearing as Dame Edna, to the consternation of Spiro Agnew (who had seen a thing or two in his time).

Saturday

16 Dec 2006
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Fowler’s ‘Modern English Usage’

When the library of V. S. Pritchett was sold off after his death some years ago, I bought a few books as a mark of homage, among them H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. I’d possessed other copies, but this was a first edition, and while I was thumbing it idly one day I noticed that it was published in 1926. I then also noticed that The King’s English, which he wrote with his brother F. W. Fowler, was published in 1906, and these anniversaries seem to have passed unnoticed. A hundred years on, and eighty years on, have there been more useful and influential books of their kind in our time? Fowler was a great lexicographer, but he was also the founding father of the language column, and patron saint to all of us who are concerned — sometimes to the point of obsession — with the wayward or faulty use of language.

Saturday

4 Nov 2006
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

A lesson still worth learning

Late in 1951, shortly after Winston Churchill had returned to Down- ing Street, with Sir Anthony Eden back at the Foreign Office also, there was an animated conversation, recorded by Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh of the Foreign Office, who was present. At the end of a bibulous evening, Prime Minister told Foreign Secretary how to deal with the Arabs, beginning with the troublesome Egyptians: Rising from his chair, the old man advanced on Anthony with clenched fists, saying with the inimitable Churchill growl, ‘Tell them that if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter, from which they should never have emerged.’That was saying it in terms which the most vehement neoconservative nowadays might hesitate to use, at least in public; and it might almost have planted a seed in Eden’s mind.

Saturday

28 Jan 2006
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Diary - 28 January 2006

‘To my knowledge, in my lifetime three prime ministers have been adulterers,’ Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1963, ‘and almost every Cabinet has had an addict of almost every sexual vice.’ Another pious Christian put it statistically higher: of the 11 prime ministers he had known, Gladstone said, seven had been adulterers. Mark Oaten’s addiction might have seemed a little outré to the GOM and Waugh, but neither of them was suggesting that private irregularity was a disqualification from public life, and it was Gladstone who had the last word at the time Parnell’s career was ended by the divorce scandal in 1890: ‘What, because a man is called leader of a party, does that constitute him a censor and a judge of faith and morals? I will not accept it.

Saturday

5 Nov 2005
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The perils of peace

In 1945, Europe lay prostrate after the greatest and most terrible war in history. More than 35 million people had been killed, Tony Judt says (other estimates are even higher), with combatant deaths easily outnumbered by civilian; whole countries were starving, scores of cities were razed. That was not what optimistic souls — or maybe anyone — had foreseen in the first decade of the century, when Europe seemed to be living through an age of peace, rising prosperity and increasing freedom which promised to last for ever. That happy century from Waterloo to the Marne had ended literally with a bang in August 1914. Three decades thereafter saw a terrifying regression, two wars on a scale surpassing anything ever known, totalitarian regimes called Communist and Fascist of a kind also never known before, economic collapse and mass-murder: in the title of Mark Mazower’s book about 20th-century Europe, this was a Dark Continent.

Saturday

13 Aug 2005
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Sardonic genius

On the morning of 13 August 1985 I was at my desk at the London Evening Standard when Mary Kenny rang; she had left a message the previous evening on my answering machine at home which I had failed to pick up. Shiva Naipaul had held his 40th birthday party in the spring. Less than a week earlier, he had rung and suggested lunch, which I couldn’t make. Now Mary told me that he had died the day before. Shiva had always been afraid of death. In that respect alone it had come to him mercifully, when he was struck by a coronary thrombosis while sitting alone in his flat in Belsize Park. But what was merciful for him was awful for his wife Jenny, his son Tarun, and a group of friends who were more devoted to him than he may ever have quite known.

Saturday

16 Jul 2005
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Driven cyclist

Pau, France Until 1981 no American even so much as rode in the Tour de France. Since then an invading fleet has crossed the Atlantic to dominate what was once a European sport, and a race whose very name is its country’s proud standard. First of the Yanks was Greg LeMond, who won the Tour in 1986, then Bobby Julich, and more recently Tyler Hamilton. After his Olympic triumph last year he is now in disgrace, charged with the faintly ghoulish offence of ‘blood-doping’, transfusing someone else’s blood, although nothing can erase his heroism in the great centennial Tour of two years ago, riding for three weeks in agony from a cracked collarbone. But Lance Armstrong is in special case — among cyclists, or sportsmen, or heroes.

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