Quotulatiousness

January 20, 2021

Larry Correia (mostly) leaves Facebook

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

SF author Larry Correia has spent a lot of time in “Facebook jail” for posting things that the admins considered unacceptable under their constantly changing guidelines, so he’s finally bidding adieu to the platform:

I’m paring down my FB presence. For the last week I’ve only been on for a brief time each day. I’ll be taking that down even further. I’ll be posting links when I blog for the people who stick around. There’s a few groups I use here that I can’t get the equivalent resource anywhere else yet (but I’m currently banned from posting in all groups anyway). And that’s about it.

Basically, I’m done being a content creator for these censorious pieces of shit. Guys like me write stuff which gets shared hundreds of times and gets thousands of people commenting/participating. FB uses that free content to keep people corralled here so they can mine your data.

And then when us content creators get uppity, they fuck us over with impunity while their ideological allies get a pass. But then we come crawling back again and again, like abused trailer park wives, because we don’t want to abandon the kids (as in the communities we spent the last ten years building before the relationship turned abusive).

I’ve stuck around because I didn’t want to hurt my business/sales. This is still the best place to reach the most people the fastest. We made it that way. All us content creators foolishly moved over here back when Facebook promised to be one thing. Now that they’ve pulled a bait and switch, the content creators feel trapped.

In good conscience, this can’t continue. I’m done helping these parasites. Facebook is trash. We all know it. We’ve all seen it. We’re just here because of inertia.

Over the last decade, working with some stupendous moderators and great fans, we built a gigantic, thriving, fun, fan page here on Facebook. It’s one of the bigger author fan pages on the internet where the author can still actually talk to his fans. Being able to interact there was great. But Facebook took that from me on a whim. They banned me from my own group because of what I MIGHT say.

However we prepared a fallback. There’s another Monster Hunter Nation fan page over on MeWe. I’ll be posting there instead from here on. If the fans want to keep posting here, great, but I won’t be. I can’t even post this to my own FB fan page, which illustrates just how screwed up this situation is.

We’ll see how long that lasts, until Big Tech finds some way to squish every place they can’t control.

My primary place will still be my blog, monsterhunternation dot com. There is an email newsletter there you can sign up for which is only book related stuff, no politics. I’m on MeWe under my same name. I was on Parler as @monsterhunter45, though I never really used it, and I have no idea if that place is going to survive. I’ll be looking into other alternatives as well.

January 18, 2021

How It’s Made — Bookbindings

Filed under: Books — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

How It’s Made
Published 2 Aug 2016

How It’s Made Bookbindings
#HowItsmade

January 17, 2021

QotD: Hunter S. Thompson

Filed under: Books, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

HST killed himself. He never would have “turned his life around” — that’s a hard thing to try when the room’s been spinning for 40 years. Depression? Wouldn’t be surprising. A bad verdict from the doc? Wouldn’t be surprising. A great writer in his prime, but the DVD of his career would have the last two decades on the disc reserved for outtakes and bloopers. It was all bile and spittle at the end, and it was hard to read the work without smelling the dank sweat of someone consumed by confusion, anger, sudden drunken certainties and the horrible fear that when he sat down to write, he could only muster a pale parody of someone else’s satirical version of his infamous middle period. I feel sorry for him, but I’ve felt sorry for him for years. File under Capote, Truman — meaning, whatever you thought of the latter-day persona, don’t forget that there was a reason he had a reputation. Read Hell’s Angels. That was a man who could hit the keys right.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-02-21

January 16, 2021

Howard Anglin reviews The Riotous Passions of Robbie Burns

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Line now apparently also does book reviews:

I don’t know what I was expecting before I picked up John Ivison’s new book, The Riotous Passions of Robbie Burns, but it was not this. In my head, I’d already started composing the end of my review. Something round and pat and full of holiday hygge like: “So light the fire, pour yourself a dram of Annandale whisky, and enjoy …” Because Ivison grew up in Dumfries, where Burns spent the last years of his life, I suppose I expected a more personal narrative, not a work of historical fiction. One expects fiction from political journalists in their day jobs, not in a labour of love composed off the clock.

What I really expected was more of Burns’ poetry — the source of his enduring fame, after all — and less of his person, which was the source of his contemporary infamy. Instead, Ivison gives us something more interesting and unusual: the poetry of Burns’ non-poetic speech. Ivison has taken snippets, and sometimes cribbed whole paragraphs from, Burns’s copious surviving correspondence and woven them into dialogue that carries the story of the poet’s stay in Edinburgh between 1786 and 1788. By putting Burns’ actual words into his mouth, even if sometimes out of context, Ivison gives the reader a direct and plausible impression of Burns the man. We hear verbatim both the coarse tavern wit and the elemental passion that spilled into his prolific verse — sometimes into unprintable doggerel (literally: his poems later collected as The Merry Muses of Caledonia were banned as obscene in the U.K. until 1965), sometimes into achingly beautiful verses like “Flow gently, sweet Afton” or “Ae Fond Kiss.”

Ivison’s book sets us in Edinburgh at a time when, as he writes, “it was said if you stood at the Mercat Cross with a pistol, you could hit 50 geniuses, 50 bankers, 50 lawyers and 50 rogues at any given hour” (no doubt allowing for some overlap between latter two categories). Our narrator and guide is the newly-arrived and impressionable young lawyer’s apprentice, John Bruce, a composite and Zelig-like stand in for many young men of the poet’s acquaintance. (The only record of Burns meeting a John Bruce that I can find was a Rev. John Bruce, Minister of the Highland town of Forfar, whom the poet found “pleasant, agreeable and engaging.”) Through Burns, Bruce and the reader are introduced to the ways of women, drink, the printing business, drink, aristocratic libertinism, and a little more drink.

The two main plots, such as they are, link Bruce and Burns to the notorious escapades of Deacon Brodie, whom Burns met in real life, and to the poet’s long, futile, but apparently sincere courtship of the unhappily-married Agnes (sometimes Nancy) Maclehose. The real life letters between Burns and Maclehose, written under the pseudonyms “Sylvander” and “Clarinda,” make for moving reading and, in this telling, for surprisingly convincing dialogue between Burns and Maclehose and between Burns and Bruce. The text is especially affecting when the poet is in the grip of what he called his “low spirits & blue devils” and his usually florid speech turns fatalistic, brooding, and palpably human.

But the plots are not the point of this charming book; they are frames on which to hang Burns’s words and excuses to showcase Edinburgh as it was coming of age as an intellectual and commercial capital, with all the growing pains that entailed. Filling the city with historical characters, Ivison shows us the city as Burns found it, its population bursting out of the overbuilt medieval closes and wynds that lined the Royal Mile running down the hill from the castle and spreading across the North Bridge to New Town and down to the sea port at Leith.

January 15, 2021

QotD: Capitalism and socialism, viewed from Harvard in 1942

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), Joseph Schumpeter] suggested [that] capitalism’s greatest strength — its propensity for “creative destruction” — is also a source of weakness. Disruption may be the process that clears out the obsolescent and fosters the advent of the new, but precisely for that reason it can never be universally loved. Second, capitalism itself tends toward oligopoly, not perfect competition. The more concentrated economic power becomes, the harder it is to legitimize the system, especially in America, where “big business” tends to get confused with “monopoly.” Third, capitalism “creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest” — namely, intellectuals. (Here was the influence of Harvard; Schumpeter knew whereof he spoke.) Finally, Schumpeter noted, socialism is politically irresistible to bureaucrats and democratic politicians.

The idea that socialism would ultimately prevail over capitalism was quite a widespread view — especially in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It persisted throughout the Cold War. “The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive,” wrote Paul Samuelson, Schumpeter’s pupil, in the 1961 edition of his economics textbook — a sentence that still appeared in the 1989 edition. In successive editions, Samuelson’s hugely influential book carried a chart projecting that the gross national product of the Soviet Union would exceed that of the United States at some point between 1984 and 1997. The 1967 edition suggested that the great overtaking could happen as early as 1977. By the 1980 edition, the timeframe for this great overtaking had been moved forward to 2002–12. The graph was quietly dropped after the 1980 edition.

Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.

January 9, 2021

QotD: Heinlein’s “Future History”

Filed under: Books, Quotations, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’ve been planning to write about Elon Musk’s Bowie-blasting space car ever since the video footage was transmitted back to Earth in the middle of this week. But I did not even notice until I sat down to the job that I have also been rereading Robert A. Heinlein’s “Future History” short-story cycle. This is not exactly a coincidence: I go back to the Future History every few years. This time I had one of those “Surprise! You’re old!” moments upon realizing that my cheap trade paperback of The Past Through Tomorrow, a collection of the Future History stories, must be 30 years old if it’s a day.

Written between 1939 and 1950 for quickie publication in pulp magazines, the Future History is a series of snapshots of what is now an alternate human future — one that features atomic energy, solar system imperialism, and the first steps to deep space, all within a Spenglerian choreography of social progress and occasional resurgent barbarity. It stands with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy as a monument of golden-age science fiction.

In some respects the Future History has not aged any better than one might expect. Like other young nerds who created the science-fiction canon, Heinlein was interested in rocketry before it was thought to have any practical use. And Heinlein was really, really good at acquiring or faking expert knowledge of those topics in which he happened to get interested. The man knew his Tsiolkovsky.

The result, in the key story of the Future History, is an uncannily accurate description of the design and launch of a Saturn V rocket. (Written before 1950, remember.) But because Heinlein happened not to be interested in electronic computers, all the spacefaring in his books is done with the aid of slide rules or Marchant-style mechanical calculators (which, in non-Heinlein history, had to become obsolete before humans could go to Luna at all). Heinlein sends people to colonize the moon, but nobody there has internet, or is conscious of its absence.

Colby Cosh, “Heinlein’s monster? The literary key to Elon Musk’s sales technique”, National Post, 2018-02-12.

January 4, 2021

Getting started reading the works of P.G. Wodehouse

Filed under: Books, Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

I only started reading any of P.G. Wodehouse’s wonderful body of work a few years ago — I can’t imagine why I waited that long — but because there are so many books and short stories to choose from, it may be hard to decide where to begin. If you find yourself in that situation, the P.G. Wodehouse reading guide from Plumtopia may be of interest:

So you’d like to give P.G. Wodehouse a try, but don’t know where to start? Or perhaps you’ve read the Jeeves stories and want to discover the wider world of Wodehouse.

You’ve come to the right place.

There is no correct approach to reading Wodehouse. If you ask a dozen Wodehouse fans, you’ll get at least a dozen different suggestions — and picking up the first book you come across can be as good a starting point as any. But if you want more practical advice, this guide will help you discover the joys of Wodehouse — from Jeeves and Wooster to Blandings, and the hidden gems beyond.

Bertie Wooster & Jeeves
Bertie Wooster and his manservant Jeeves are P.G. Wodehouse’s most celebrated characters. They appear in a series of short stories and novels, all masterfully crafted for optimum joy. Bertie Wooster’s narrative voice is one of the greatest delights in all literature.

[…]

Blandings
Evelyn Waugh put it best when he said: “the gardens of Blandings Castle are the original gardens of Eden from which we are all exiled.”

Lord Emsworth wants only to be left alone to enjoy his garden and tend to his prize winning pig, the Empress of Blandings, without interference from his relations, neighbours, guests and imposters. So many imposters.

[…]

Psmith
Psmith (the “p” is silent as in pshrimp) made his first appearance in an early Wodehouse school story. Wodehouse knew when he was onto a good thing, and Psmith made the transition to adult novels along with his author. Adoration for Psmith among Wodehouse fans borders on the cultish, and for good reason (he certainly makes me swoon).

[…]

Ukridge
The character Wodehouse readers love to hate, Ukridge is a blighter and a scoundrel, but his adventures are comedy gold. If you’ve ever had a friend or relation who pinches items from your wardrobe without asking, and is perpetually “borrowing” money, this series is for you.

January 3, 2021

Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon ranks with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Filed under: Books, History, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

James E. Hartley on why Koestler’s 1941 novel should be seen as a prescient guide to modern-day “wokeness”:

The puzzling thing about wokeness is not that it is fashionable among a small subset of the Campus Left. One should never be surprised by what is fashionable among college faculty and students. The curious question is how these ideas broke out of the academic asylum and met acquiescence among a large group of people who should have known better.

The answer is found in a book which should have never fallen off the radar: Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. First published in 1941, it was — along with 1984 — one of the great books about totalitarianism written in the 1940s. Widely praised when it was published, the book was enormously influential in fostering the consensus view of post-war anti-communism. In 1998, Modern Library published a list of the 100 best English novels of the 20th century; Darkness at Noon was ranked eighth, five places above 1984.

The plot of the novel itself is fairly simple. The story begins with the imprisonment of Nicholas Rubashov, one of the heroes of the communist revolution in a country which is clearly the Soviet Union. Decades after the revolution, Number 1 (read: Stalin) has assumed power. Rubashov is imprisoned on the absurdly false charges of plotting to kill Number 1. The entire novel takes place in prison, as Rubashov is interrogated and eventually comes to voluntarily confess at a public trial to crimes he did not commit. He is then shot.

The novel explores the philosophical puzzle of why Rubashov would join with what has obviously become a murderous cult run by a totalitarian who is solely interested in amassing enough power to stamp his will upon the whole country. Rubashov, a devoted communist to the end, abandons his principles and bit by bit comes to accede to demands of the new generation who are seeking scapegoats and ritualistic confessions of guilt.

What is the nature of the new generation? One of the Party officials interrogating Rubashov explains:

    There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community — which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb.

The individual does not matter. The group matters. What is good for the group is by definition good, regardless of whether it is good for the individual. As the interrogators make abundantly clear, no individual has the right to stand in the way of the group. The Party represents the group, and thus no individual has the right to oppose the Party.

December 28, 2020

QotD: Book accumulation

Filed under: Books, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

I am an accumulator rather than a collector, and my library grows according to a bad Malthusian principle: I buy books geometrically and read them arithmetically, with the most obvious consequences for shelf-space. Furthermore, at my age I should be shedding possessions rather than still accumulating them: but I have this strange reluctance to get rid even of books that I shall never look at again and were no good in the first place.

However, I never buy a book without intending to read it, and intention is, if not nine-tenths of accomplishment, at least some portion of it.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Sufficiently Educated to Embrace the Simplistic”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-24.

December 27, 2020

QotD: Charles Dickens

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… That I was, unparadoxically, also trying to put in the reader’s head, that Dickens has contributed to the demoralization of our world, was on the surface of my essay. In this respect, I was acknowledging this author’s great power. The reduction of hard moral fact, to mushy simper and what we now call “empathy,” was partly his doing. I detect it even in the unpleasant vibrations of BLM rioters, and other agents of our Left.

They “protest” things that, indirectly, they learnt to protest from the kind-hearted Dickens; subjective hysterias about the world being unfair. Of course it is unfair, as it has always been, and to everyone who has been living in it. But unfairness is a whim, compared to sound moral judgements, and the reticence that should accompany them. We cannot make the world “more fair” by rioting. Dickens, incidentally, agrees with me on that.

He was among the writers (and artists generally) who contributed subtly to our post-Christian worldview, based on emotion, not remorseless thought. Who made, say, Christmas about giving presents to little children, rather than centrally about the birth of Christ. That doesn’t mean his works should be suppressed. On the contrary, they should be read and enjoyed, with this thought in mind. He moralizes, but in a way that may actually subvert morality, by substituting “feelings” for the hard truths, which are to die for.

David Warren, “Retractiones”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-07-29.

December 26, 2020

Legends Summarized: The Journey To The West (Part VIII)

Filed under: Books, China, History, Humour, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 25 Dec 2020

Journey to the West Kai, episode 5: Fishy Business and Mountaineering Madness!

Danger! Intrigue! Sandy fights a carp! Pigsy gets two makeovers! Monkey reunites with several old frenemies, and Tripitaka gets less screentime than the horse!

(merry christmas)

(Here’s a cheeky little bit of merch: https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/656…)

FIRST EPISODE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61nuX…
PREVIOUS EPISODE: https://youtu.be/ABuG8hZqynI
FULL SERIES: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…

Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.

PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP

MERCH LINKS: https://www.redbubble.com/people/OSPY…

DISCORD: https://discord.gg/h3AqJPe

OUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProductions.com
Find us on Twitter https://www.Twitter.com/OSPYouTube
Find us on Reddit https://www.Reddit.com/r/OSP/

December 19, 2020

History-Makers: Ibn Khaldun

Filed under: Africa, Books, History, Humour, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 18 Dec 2020

Big thanks to our friend Al-Muqaddimah for his help with this video. The look of this video’s maps is an homage to his wonderful mapmaking style. For more Islamic History, check out his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf0O…

From the coast of Tunisia across the Straits of Gibraltar, over the Atlas Mountains, and east to the Nile of Egypt, Ibn Khaldun had certainly seen history at work. That experience came in handy as he wrote The Muqaddimah, a genre-defining masterwork of Historiography — not just retelling the events of the past, but explaining their causes and effects through the lens of human behavior and sociology.

SOURCES & Further Reading: Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography by Irwin, The Muqaddimah

This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/

Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.

PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP

PODCAST: https://overlysarcasticpodcast.transi…

DISCORD: https://discord.gg/osp

MERCH LINKS: http://rdbl.co/osp

OUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProductions.com
Find us on Twitter https://www.Twitter.com/OSPYouTube
Find us on Reddit https://www.Reddit.com/r/OSP/

December 7, 2020

Churchill and the Bengal Famine of 1943

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, India, Military, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Zareer Masani debunks a recent book’s claim that British PM Winston Churchill was responsible for the Bengal famine during the Second World War:

Prime Minister Winston Churchill greets Canadian PM William Lyon Mackenzie King, 1941.
Photo from Library and Archives Canada (reference number C-047565) via Wikimedia Commons.

A favourite trope of the current Black Lives Madness and its left-liberal white apologists has been the alleged infamy of Britain’s most cherished hero, Winston Churchill, charged with everything from mere racism to actual genocide. The worst accusation is that of deliberately starving four million Bengalis to death in the famine of 1943.

The famine took place at the height of World War Two, with the Japanese already occupying Burma and invading the British Indian province of Bengal, bombing its capital, Calcutta, and patrolling its coast with submarines.

The famine raged for about six months, from the summer of 1943 until the end of that year, and estimates of its victims range from half a million upwards, depending on whether one includes its indirect and long-term effects. Most famine experts agree that famines can be caused by both nature and human agency, but never by any single individual. So how has a 67-year-old British prime minister in poor health, 5,000 miles away, fighting near-annihilation in a world war, come to be charged with causing such a cataclysmic disaster?

The attempt to lay this at Churchill’s door stems from a sensationalist book by a Bengali-American journalist called Madhusree Mukerjee. As its title, Churchill’s Secret War, indicates, it was a largely conspiracist attempt to pin responsibility on distant Churchill for undoubted mistakes on the ground in Bengal.

The actual evidence shows that Churchill believed, based on the information he had been getting, that there was no food supply shortage in Bengal, but a demand problem caused by local mismanagement of the distribution system. Ironically, his view found unexpected support in a 2010 exchange between Mukerjee and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, the world’s foremost expert on famine in India.

Commenting in the New York Times, Sen said of Mukerjee, that “she seems satisfied with little information” and that her data came from only two rice research stations, and those in only two out of 27 districts in Bengal. “The analysis I made,” countered Sen, “using data from all districts … indicated that food availability in 1943 (the famine year) was significantly higher than in 1941 (when there was no famine) … There was indeed a substantial shortfall compared with demand, hugely enhanced in a war economy … but that is quite different from a shortfall of supply compared with supply in previous years … Mukerjee seems to miss this crucial distinction, and in her single-minded … attempt to nail down Churchill, she ends up absolving British imperial policy of confusion and callousness.”

December 1, 2020

QotD: Elon Musk as a real life Delos D. Harriman

Filed under: Books, Business, Quotations, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The “key story” [in Robert Heinlein’s “Future History” stories] I just mentioned is called “The Man Who Sold The Moon.” And if you’re one of the people who has been polarized by the promotional legerdemain of Elon Musk — whether you have been antagonized into loathing him, or lured into his explorer-hero cult — you probably need to make a special point of reading that story.

The shock of recognition will, I promise, flip your lid. The story is, inarguably, Musk’s playbook. Its protagonist, the idealistic business tycoon D.D. Harriman, is what Musk sees when he looks in the mirror.

“The Man Who Sold The Moon” is the story of how Harriman makes the first moon landing happen. Engineers and astronauts are present as peripheral characters, but it is a business romance. Harriman is a sophisticated sort of “Mary Sue” — an older chap whose backstory encompasses the youthful interests of the creators of classic pulp science fiction, but who is given a great fortune, built on terrestrial transport and housing, for the purposes of the story.

Our hero has no interest in the money for its own sake: in late life he liquidates to fund a moon rocket, intending to take the first trip himself, because he is convinced the future of humanity depends on extraterrestrial expansion of the human species. (Also, the guy just really loves the moon.)

The actual stuff of the story consists of the financial and promotional chicanery that Harriman uses to leverage his personal investment. Harriman uses sharp dealing with governments, broadcasters, political groups: he plants fake news about diamonds on the moon to blackmail (a disguised version of) the de Beers cartel, and terrorizes companies with the threat of using the moon to advertise for competitors. He is, in short, not afraid to use questionable means to achieve a worthwhile higher end, and does not — Musk haters take note! — recoil from actual fraud.

Heinlein didn’t provide for live broadcasting of his imagined lunar mission, which is almost an afterthought in his Great Man business yarn. TV cameras were, like computers, one of his blind spots. But if he had thought to make Harriman the owner of a fancy-sportscar manufacturing concern, and if he had thought to have Harriman put a car in solar (trans-Martian!) orbit as one of his publicity stunts, that would have been there in “The Man Who Sold The Moon.” Selling the moon is just what Musk is doing. Except the moon is a tad worked-over as a piece of intangible property, so we get Mars instead.

Colby Cosh, “Heinlein’s monster? The literary key to Elon Musk’s sales technique”, National Post, 2018-02-12.

November 29, 2020

An unusually sympathetic biography of George III

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Roberts reviews a new biography of King George III for The Critic:

King George III in his coronation robes.
Portrait by Allan Ramsay (1713-1784), original in the Art Gallery of South Australia via Wikimedia Commons.

Over the past six years, Penguin have been publishing their excellent Monarchs series in which a leading historian writes a 30,000-word book on a king or queen from Athelstan to Elizabeth II. There are now 45 of them (including David Horspool on Oliver Cromwell, who sneaks in despite the monarchical rubric, and Jonathan Keates who reasonably enough lumped William III and Queen Mary together). These extended essays are attractively produced, can be read in a couple of hours, and many are true gems, from historians such as Tom Holland, John Guy, Tim Blanning, Norman Davies, Roger Knight, Jane Ridley, Richard Davenport-Hines, David Cannadine — you get the idea.

Now Professor Jeremy Black gives us a full-throated defence of the monarch who is only really generally known as the king who went insane and who lost the American colonies, and who now prances around in the camp-yet-sinister show-stopping song in Hamilton: The Musical. “When considering George III’s mistakes,” Black argues, persuasively, “it is important to assess the parameters of the possible and to consider comparisons.” With his expertise in eighteenth-century European history, Black is able to place George III in the wider context of contemporary monarchs such as Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, Louis XVI and Napoleon.

“In contradiction to the Whig and American image of George as a tyrant, or at least a would-be tyrant,” Black states, “he had a strong conviction of the value of limited monarchy and was a willing student of the lessons of the Glorious Revolution and the subsequent Revolution Settlement.”

Black brilliantly demolishes the paranoiac Whig view of George as trying to accrete powers to himself unconstitutionally. The George who emerges is a far more attractive figure than the Whig historians depicted, let alone Thomas Jefferson with his 28 histrionic and inaccurate accusations against George in the Declaration of Independence, and especially Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hilarious but profoundly historically incorrect caricature.

Instead, Black portrays a monarch with “a strong religious faith, a passion for hunting and an interest in art, architecture, music, astronomy and exploration”. He was a Renaissance man with an Enlightenment viewpoint, although Black also lists his failings, which were obstinacy, self-righteousness and a certain amount of priggishness when young. Black calls him a “fogey”. These were hardly cardinal sins, and a world away from the lust for dictatorship of which he has been accused.

Jeremy Black — who is fast becoming a national treasure in his own right, having written well over 100 books — takes a refreshingly unmodish stance towards George (as you might have guessed from listing hunting amongst the king’s attributes). “His qualities are easier to understand for those who prize commitment, duty, and integrity,” he concludes, “than in a modern age when scorn and satire, even hatred of the nation’s history, are often prominent.”

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress