Grand unified books thread

[Capetan Mihali]

I bet.   Is it worth reading?

So far, definitely. But I'm not sure how much ego I can take.

I ordered it for chump change on Amazon.  Looking forward to hearing what this practitioner of Mannerism, murder, and megalomania (or statuary, sodomy, and self-love) has to say about himself. 

[Ideologue]

Currently reading House of Leaves by Danielweski.  A bit trippy, as expected, but the story format isn't nearly as bizarre as I had been lead to believe.

Next up : Richard Overy's The Bombing War.   

Pre-review: "Airpower was an important element but only one of many factors that the Allies brought to blah blah blah" F

[Habbaku]

K.

[Ideologue]

I'm just kidding.  I forget what Overy's overall opinion of the subject was.  But I think that's about on target; it is, after all, largely correct.

[Sheilbh]

There's a biography coming about Roy Jenkins

Roy Jenkins: politics, parties and guilt-free adultery
He might have failed to become prime minister but Roy Jenkins had an awful lot of fun along the way
5 out of 5 stars


PM in waiting: Lord Jenkins Photo: Julian Calder/CORBIS
By Peter Oborne12:42PM GMT 13 Mar 2014 Comments76 Comments

Since the resignation of Clement Attlee in 1951, three politicians could be said to have initiated permanent change in Britain. Edward Heath piloted Britain into the Common Market, while Margaret Thatcher challenged union power and set us on a fresh economic course.

Only one Labour figure has a claim to have effected similarly momentous change: Roy Jenkins. Though he never became prime minister, his brief incumbency in the Home Office during the late Sixties coincided with a series of reforms to the laws concerning homosexuality, divorce, abortion and race relations that changed the nature of Britain almost overnight. John Campbell's captivating biography establishes his subject as one of the most significant political figures since the Second World War, while making an important parallel case for Jenkins' literary significance.

Jenkins was one of that small but fascinating group of front-rank politicians who were also substantial men of letters: Disraeli, Churchill, Michael Foot and (potentially) Boris Johnson also fall into this category. But Jenkins was also a social phenomenon. Though his father started life as a Welsh miner Jenkins was happiest among diplomats, writers, politicians, philosophers, academics and members of the cultivated upper class. One could call him the most successful social climber of the last century, except for the fact that Jenkins was indisputably grander than those whose company he aspired to keep. Entirely authentic, he insisted on living life on his own terms. He and his friends shared an enjoyment of food, wine, conversation, friendship and what the author refers to as "guilt-free adultery".

Campbell has been given full access to the Jenkins papers, and deals at some length with Jenkins' lovers. He says that Leslie Bonham Carter and Caroline Gilmour, both the wives of close friends, were the most important. Everyone involved, including his wife Jennifer (whom Jenkins married in 1945) knew about these relationships and were (says Campbell) happy with what was going on.

"Both women in their different ways," states Campbell, "exemplified the sort of upper-class society that Jenkins now inhabited in his private life when he was not being a Labour MP." There are some echoes here of the Bloomsbury set, the coterie of well-connected writers and intellectuals (though no major politicians) that established its personal standards of conduct in the Thirties.

Notoriously, many modern politicians enjoy private lives that sharply contradict the image of the public man or woman of rectitude. But Jenkins' private conduct fitted his public life like a glove. As Home Secretary he did not merely usher in permissive Britain, he was a cheerful participant in the new world he was helping to create. Very few politicians have been more in tune with their age.

There was, however, a contradiction between Jenkins and the Labour Party. Jenkins was essentially a Whig who enjoyed life too much for the Left-wing puritans. Ultimately this disagreement with the party into which he was born cost him the premiership. He was nevertheless one of the massive figures of his age, politically active from his arrival in the House of Commons in 1948 to his death in 2003. As Campbell notes, this parliamentary span of almost 55 years is surpassed only by Gladstone and Churchill.

His father Arthur Jenkins had been a miner before entering politics and became a close aide to Attlee afterwards. The young Roy Jenkins was invited to edit Attlee's speeches and his first book, at the age of 28, was a dutiful but pedestrian biography of his mentor. In reality Jenkins modelled himself, Campbell asserts, not on Attlee but on the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. He thought, implausibly, that Attlee's Labour Party was the natural inheritor of Asquithian Liberalism.

Appropriately it was Mark Bonham Carter, the grandson of Asquith, who commissioned Jenkins' first major political biography: a Life of the Victorian radical Sir Charles Dilke. It reads poorly today, but was a great success when published in 1958. At this point Jenkins was widely seen as a writer who dabbled in politics. In 1963, with Labour on the edge of power, Jenkins was offered the editorship of The Economist. He was seriously tempted by the job and asked for the summer to think it over before turning it down.

In 1964, aged 43, Jenkins was appointed Minister of Aviation in wake of the Labour Party election victory. He immediately proved himself an outstanding minister, good enough to earn promotion to Home Secretary in 1965, a post he held for less than two years. Campbell summarises his achievements in that short period as follows: "he ended flogging in prisons; secured Government time to ensure the passage of Private Members' bills on both homosexuality and abortion; initiated the ending of theatre censorship; and introduced a ground-breaking Race Relations bill." More than any other 20th century politician, Roy Jenkins shaped the society we live in today.

John Campbell is fascinating on Jenkins' working methods. He got into the office at 10am. His officials were ordered to leave his diary open for an hour and a half to two hours in the middle of every day. Lunch would include at least one decent bottle of wine, quite possibly followed by brandy. He never took work home with him. Jenkins claimed to have reread the whole of Proust on being appointed to the Home Office. He also played tennis, raised a family, frequently went to the theatre, was an assiduous attender of country house parties and belonged to a large number of dining clubs. Critics accused Jenkins of being lazy. In truth he was very efficient at conducting business.

When Jim Callaghan was forced to resign as chancellor in wake off the 1967 devaluation crisis, Jenkins was the natural successor. He was as formidable a Chancellor as he had been Home Secretary. Campbell dispels the Left wing myth that his refusal to countenance a giveaway budget on the eve of the 1970 general election was the cause of Labour's defeat. "If anything," notes Campbell, "it was Jenkins' budget that very nearly won Labour an election it had never looked like winning before."

When he turned 50 in November 1970 he could look back on a career of effortless success. Many observers regarded him as the most brilliant politician in the country and thought that the Labour leadership, and the premiership, were his for the taking. Thereafter everything turned to ashes. He led the group of Labour MPs that voted with Edward Heath's Conservatives for the European Communities Act that took Britain into the European Common Market, then helped lead the 1975 referendum campaign on British membership.

This took place during Wilson's final term as Prime Minister, and Jenkins was Home Secretary again. But it was increasingly obvious that his future in the Labour Party was precarious. Jenkins gratefully accepted the offer of President of the European Commission in 1977. The job bored him and took him away from British politics. By the time he returned to Britain the Labour Party, now led by Michael Foot, had changed beyond recognition.

Jenkins then tried to set up a new centre party in British Politics, the Social Democratic Party. It failed miserably, soon merging with the Liberals. Jenkins spent the last 20 years of his life as a grand Lib Dem elder statesman. There was a hopeful moment when he believed that Tony Blair could be his natural successor, and mend the rift in the Left between Attlee's Labourism and Asquith's liberalism. By the time of his death in 2003, Jenkins had despaired of Blair. In one wounding aside, Jenkins observed that Blair ranked "between Wilson and Baldwin", a damning assessment if ever there was one.

Towards the end of his life he told friends that "I have three great interests left in politics: the single currency, electoral reform, and the union of the Liberals with Labour". All three came to nothing. Yet it would be wrong to write off Roy Jenkins' final decades as an irrelevance. He produced a series of dazzling political biographies and other works. Some of them (including his autobiography Life at the Centre, and his Life of Winston Churchill) count as classics. When he died on the January 5 2003, he was planning a full-scale biography of President Kennedy. According to Campbell, his was "an enviably painless passing and his final words to Jennifer were to ask for 'two eggs lightly poached'. When she came back with them he was gone".

I read every single one of the 749 pages of this long book with relish and fascination. It is a splendid tribute to one of the greatest British politicians and writers (not necessarily in that order) of the last century.

Roy Jenkins: a Well-Rounded Life by John Campbell

[The Brain]

In France he's known as Le Roy Jenkins.

[Valmy]

So Martin has a book coming out this fall detailing all the history (aka back history) of his world?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EGMGGVK/ref=pd_csr_hcb_youra_b_i

Yeah he has been working on it forever.  Just finished it.  As somebody rooting for him to finish his main series that was a relief.

[Maladict]

I bet.   Is it worth reading?

So far, definitely. But I'm not sure how much ego I can take.

I ordered it for chump change on Amazon.  Looking forward to hearing what this practitioner of Mannerism, murder, and megalomania (or statuary, sodomy, and self-love) has to say about himself. 

[Capetan Mihali]

My Amazon splurge has arrived.   It contains:

The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
The Thirty Years' War: Europe's Tragedy, by Peter Wilson
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Milller, by Carlo Ginzburg
Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia by Gregory Carleton
(And a CD of Schubert's last three piano sonatas, performed by Alfred Brendel).

The first three all recommended to me here on Languish.

[mongers]

Not some you'd read from cover to cover, but I aquired a Chambers anthology of speeches through the ages; a nice large 1000 page volume with the speeches print with wide margins, within which copious notes.*

Something to dip into occasionally, just read Malcolm X's 'The ballet or the bullet'



*incidentally, nice to buy a book printed on decent quality paper for a change.

[Sheilbh]

Another mid-twentieth century British history book that sounds very interesting:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/09/spy-among-friends-kim-philby-ben-macintyre-review

There is an alarming chance that by the end of the year I'll be eating rationed spam fritters in threadbare cardigans while listening to the radio.

In fairness I am two for three already

[Ed Anger]

Hmmmm, fried spam. 

[Admiral Yi]

What's the skinny Shelf?

[Gups]

Surprised that review of theJenkins biog doesn't mention the book's biggest scoop - that Jenkins had an affair with Tony Crosland when at Oxford.

[Sheilbh]

Surprised that review of theJenkins biog doesn't mention the book's biggest scoop - that Jenkins had an affair with Tony Crosland when at Oxford.

It is by Peter Oborne. So he either didn't care, or was drunk when reading/writing the review.

I'm really enjoying Jenkins' Gladstone. It made me want to do a bit more reading on that era. Somehow that's lead me into reading Tim Blaning's 'Pursuit of Glory' which, so far, seems excellent and Hobsbawm's 'Age of Revolutions' which again is great with some really striking points. I think they're a good read together because they both have different perspectives and offer a bit more context when you're hopping from one to the other.

Edit: Also of quite niche interest, but I enjoyed this piece on Harold MacMillan's reading habits:
http://www.cercles.com/n11/catterall.pdf