Tony Blair and other leaders whose careers have been blighted by the Middle East

An interesting article in today's Independent by Patrick Cockburn compares Tony Blair with three previous British leaders whose careers were wrecked over the Middle East: Churchill, Lloyd George and Eden. 

This is inaccurate. Turkey is in the Near East not the Middle East. It was war in Turkey that caused Lloyd George to fall and caused Churchill's resignation after the Dardanelles campaign (the admirals, not Churchill, were in fact to blame for that debacle).

However, I agree with Patrick Cockburn on this.

The invasion of Iraq by the US and Britain in 2003 was in some respects a re-run of the Suez crisis, except that this time it was the US that had outrun the limits of its power. 

And this:

.....Blair complains to this day that Iranian intervention destabilises Iraq, as if it was likely that Iran would ever again accept its Iraqi neighbour being ruled by an enemy. Bush and Blair destroyed the Iraqi state and nobody has succeeded in putting it together again. The doors began to open for Islamic State.

Had the USA not prevented Britain and France seizing back the Suez canal in 1956 the history of the region would probably have been much happier and we might have been spared Gaddafi and Saddam. What bad imperialists the Americans have made compared to the British and French. 

Part of me thinks it might be time to let Iran sort out Iraq and Syria, perhaps with Vladimir Putin's help - he might be good at that. But Iran is backing the Assad regime and therefore is responsible for its barbarities. General Petraeus and the Americans think Iran more frightening than IS and, much as I wish we had never intervened in Iraq and wanted us to get out, I see no alternative to our intervening against IS.

E.M. Forster predicted the internet in 1909

What would the great writers have made of the internet? It's impossible to know, except in the case of E.M. Forster, who wrote about them in this story in 1909. I started reading this long ago, in my teens when I read most things, but can't remember if I finished it. Now I read it with fresh eyes.


On the subject of dystopias, this article tells how in 1949, George Orwell received a curious letter from his former high school French teacher, Aldous Huxley, comparing 1984 to Brave New World.

Petraeus: The Islamic State isn’t our biggest problem in Iraq

This analysis by General Petraeus, who  took charge of the US 'surge' in Iraq, is worth taking the time to read. He says, inter alia,

I would argue that the foremost threat to Iraq’s long-term stability and the broader regional equilibrium is not the Islamic State; rather, it is Shiite militias, many backed by — and some guided by — Iran. 

....I am also profoundly worried about the continuing meltdown of Syria, which is a geopolitical Chernobyl. Until it is capped, it is going to continue to spew radioactive instability and extremist ideology over the entire region.

I don't quite understand why General Petraeus fears the Shia militias and Iran more than IS or ISIS, since once it was decided to remove Saddam it was inevitable that Iraq would be Iraq's satellite. 

Perhaps we should leave Iraq to Iran to sort out, possibly with the help of Russia?

Had we not toppled Gaddafi would Assad have contained and defeated the Syrian rebels? I wonder. But that is in the past. 

As AJP Taylor said, we learn from the mistakes of the past how to make new mistakes.

The first European Union

My chum Andrew MacDowall has allowed me to copy this, his latest Facebook status. He is a journalist based in Belgrade.

Chat with a Belgrade taxi driver today: "We [Yugoslavia] were the European Union before the European Union!" He has a point, but perhaps not a reassuring one.

No more Muslim prayer services in churches, says bishop

A bishop has investigated the Muslim prayer service that took place in a Church of England building in London and has pledged that no such service will take place again.

I should like to know what the prayers were. The bits of the Koran I heard on TV being chanted in Zanzibar - I remember 

'God loves those who fear Him' 

did not sound like the God I believe in - though the hotel concierge watched spellbound. But Allah is simply a word for the same God all monotheists worship and Muslim prayers might be ones in which Christians can join. I wonder whether Muslim's would object to saying the Lord's Prayer.

Still I sympathise with the clergyman quoted in the article who said

"At a time when Christian men, women and children are being slaughtered in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Nigeria and elsewhere for their belief in the unique salvation delivered by Christ Crucified it is a scandal and an offence that a clergyman of the Church of England should embrace an act of islamic worship in a consecrated building dedicated to the glory of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit."

Interestingly, I have a friend, an Episcopalian layman, who spent years in Nazareth instructing Muslims who were converting to Christianity and he told me half of them said the Muslim God is not the same as the Christian God.

Bishop Richard Holloway of the Episcopalian Church once described people protesting against an inter-faith service as 'the distant cousins of the National Front.' What an unpleasant man he is.

Jeremy Clarkson, Nigel Farage and the death of the outsider

This is an interesting article by Brendan O'Neill on faux outsiders such as Jeremy Clarkson and Nigel Farage. 

I liked this line about the Guardian pretending to be an outsider:

When actually the Guardian is the house journal of every stultifying, misanthropic orthodoxy of our age, whether it’s on the environment (murdered by human hubris), economic growth (bad), or the massive, creaking welfare state (the best thing ever invented because the poor are fat and stupid and can’t look after themselves).

The points the article makes are good ones but I agree rather less than I usually do with O'Neil. I normally agree with most things he says, Trotskyite though he is.

In fact I think many right wing Conservatives including Mrs Thatcher WERE outsiders. Rupert Murdoch considers himself one in a way that, say, Anglican bishops and Supreme Court judges do not. The ultimate outsiders are people who don't like homosexuality or immigration even if they are hereditary peers. 

I wonder how it happened that people born into the establishment and holding very conservative views became outsiders. It is not a recent phenomenon. The Monday Club the right-wing. anti-Immigration. pro-Empire political group within the British Conservative Party numbered a number of hereditary peers among its members, including two Marquesses of Salisbury, but was always on the outside. How this happened we need a historian to investigate. Rather urgently.

On the other hand people can choose to be insiders or outsiders. Chippy people like being outsiders. Rupert Murdoch, despite being the son of a newspaper baron chooses to be one. So do many malcontents, levellers, the kind of people that Squire Haggard would shoot.

In any case, what England does need are more characters, more eccentrics, real ones, not false ones. I am told they are almost extinct. I almost wish we could have some Squire Haggards, but I don't approve of shooting papists.

A footnote to the history of tattoos

I once met a Canadian when I was sharing a dorm in a youth hostel whose arm bore a tattoo and who told me middle class Canadians went in for them. So do many Romanian women of gentle birth. Perhaps it is only in Great Britain that tattoos are a specifically working class thing, usually an unskilled manual worker thing. But it was not always so, even in England. King Edward VII's entire body was covered in them.


Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, according to legend, had a tattoo on his back of the Waterford Hunt in full cry, of which the notable feature was the fox. All that could be seen of it (and only by Lady Charles, one imagines) was the fox's brush disappearing into what Americans would call his Lordship's ass cleavage.

'Gone to earth'. Quite droll, in a rather naval sort of way.

Andrei Vasilescu pointed out to me that in 1881, visiting a port in Japan as a midshipman in the Royal Navy, the future King George V of England had a blue and red dragon tattooed on his arm. Andrei says that in Romania before the 1989 Revolution only convicts and sailors had tattoos. 

Moving from history to fiction, but staying in the same historical period, here is the story of a commercial traveller who had the Fall of Icarus tattooed on his back, thinking Icarus was a city that was captured by Wallenstein in the Thirty Years' War, but who was unable to pay the tattooist's bill.

Another quotation I just came across is from Edward Norman.

Now the main difference between Catholic Christianity and Anglicanism is the nature of the Doctrine of the Church itself. It is not that Catholicism has one understanding and Anglicanism another; it is that Catholicism has such a doctrine and a very clear one and that Anglicanism does not really have one at all. Far too much was left unattended at the Reformation, when English Christianity was detached from the centre of unity and from the Magisterium of the universal Church, leaving the Church in England without a means of determining its own doctrines. No one could have foreseen at the time that the split with Rome was to prove permanent. And so for the next three and a half centuries doctrine in the Church of England was determined by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

Why a statue in London to that humbug Gandhi?

How silly Gandhi's costume is. [Jinnah, by contrast, wore Savile Row suits. He also drank whisky and ate ham sandwiches.]

I have quite a lot of sympathy for pacifism. After our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya who does not?  But why a statue in London to that humbug Gandhi? He was an enemy of the British Empire. His political career led to Indian independence, partition of India and up to one million dead. That puts the Amritsar massacre, which made Gandhi lose trust in Britain, into perspective.

India like Ireland was only united under British rule - indirectly because of Gandhi and Nehru we have the failed state of Pakistan. And at this historical moment it is vitally important that we in Britain take pride in our empire and know about its great achievements, rather than honour those who demolished it. On the other hand we can take responsibility for those people too - the British Empire formed them, gave them their love of parliamentary government. Unfortunately the our worst colonial legacy was socialism which held India and other colonies back for so many years.

Paedophilia and racism are the two things our relativistic society believes in persecuting hard and of course Gandhi is accused of both these things. He was racist, regarding Africans, as all Indians in his day were. I suspect many Indians of our day are too, but on that my only real evidence is a conversation I had with an Indian in his forties in a first class railway carriage going to Delhi. The same man, by the way, quoted his mother as saying

'All the good things in India were made by the British'.

He added the gloss, 

'This is not completely true but it is almost completely true.'

I suspected his mother was right. 

I think Gandhi did not do very much at all with the young girls with whom he shared his bed, but anything is much too much. 

This is all part of a tradition in England which led to George Washington's statue being placed in Trafalgar Sq close to the one of the arch-reactionary King James II (after whom New York is named). It was a gift in 1921, from the Commonwealth of Virginia. I don't know but imagine that those who placed the statue there did so, shortly after the USA entered the First World War on the UK's side, taking the (mistaken) Whig view that Washington was a great Englishman fighting for English Common Law liberties.

The same cannot be said of Gandhi  but Gandhi was a better man than the unprincipled and devious Washington, at least, and opposed war against the British. 

I prefer to think of Lord Curzon's attractive statue in Carlton House Terrace, which I know very well and love. What would he think of Gandhi and the Communist Nelson Mandela outranking him? 

I imagine Curzon would say it was 'ghastly', said with his characteristic short Midlands 'a' sound. He considered the long 'a' middle class.

I wonder what the dear Queen Mother would have had to say or Churchill. When Gandhi launched his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill said that he 

"ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back." 

Churchill, a racist even by the standards of his day, also said, 

"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." 

In fact independence came not because of Gandhi or Nehru or the British educated elite who wanted to take power themselves via the independence movement, but because Japan's victories over Britain destroyed British prestige and because the economic cost of war made maintaining the Indian Empire unaffordable. British rule melted away like snow in spring.

Had Great Britain not gone to war with Germany in 1939 but we'd armed ourselves to the teeth, as some people wanted us to do, e.g. Lloyd George, we would have not been attacked by Japan and history would have been very different. It was also a mistake to end our alliance with Japan to please the Americans.

Gandhi is not responsible for independence, which had been the British goal since 1913, although in 1938 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said he expected it in around 1980. Had Gandhi not led the independence movement somebody worse would have done. It's his sanctification on the part of my British contemporaries that I object to. That statue means public acceptance of the Liberal-Labour view of colonialism and the Empire, the view of the Fabian Society and E.M. Forster, the view that thinks independence in 1947 (with a huge death toll, remember) was the Raj's greatest moment, rather than the Delhi Durbar in 1911.

The answer to my question with which I headed this item is, of course, to win Indian votes for the Conservative Party in the forthcoming general election.

Another regrettable mistake by Romanian diplomats

News item (AP):

The Romanian Foreign Ministry fired its spokeswoman Wednesday after Germany's foreign minister was handed a gift with a map of France instead of Germany.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier received the gift— the German flag contained in an outline of France— from Romanian counterpart Bogdan Aurescu after a news conference on Monday to mark 135 years of diplomatic relations.

No-one seems to expect the Foreign Minister to resign but he might have said something before handing the brochure over.

I remember when the Slovenian President came and they played the Slovakian national anthem. A Slovene diplomat said, diplomatically, 

Don't worry. It happens all the time.

But equally often it happens the other way round and foreign statesman refer to being in Budapest when they mean Bucharest. The Nato Secretary General back in the 90s announced to an expectant crowd 

How nice it is to be in Budapest again 

and a little man walked across the stage and handed him a piece of paper. He read it and then corrected himself.

I knew an Englishman in his fifties who came here to head the local branch of an international law firm. Despite being a sophisticated man of the world (educated at a major public school and Oxford) and in his 50s, he told me he had never visited a European city before he came to Bucharest and had accepted the job thinking it was Budapest. He never overcame his disappointment at the absence of the Danube, goulash and Hapsburg architecture.

On the other hand, Romanian diplomats do have a lot of form. Only last month the Romanian Embassy in Paris sent invitations via email for a dinner reception in honour of President Iohannis, who was visiting, invitations accompanied by a spreadsheet with notes about the invitees in which one guest was described as “undesirable” and another as “ghastly.” Hee hee.

Shortly before that the Romanian Ambassador to Armenia was recalled after he went into a long, unwise, not very intelligent discussion on the theme that whether or not holocaust denial is right or wrong is a matter of timing - or something or the sort - it was not easy to understand. He rounded it off with a joke about a Jew, which was not in fact anti-Semitic but terribly gauche. The whole performance was slightly like Borat. I suppose Armenian-Romanian relations will never be quite the same again.

And yet would one wish that the Romanian state were less amateurish? 

My favourite historian on Islam

While on the subject of Islam, it is always a joy for me to come across anything written by Edward Norman, one of the greatest living historians and my favourite. I just found this, which I'd forgotten, from a book review he wrote in 2007.

In Britain public money is being allocated to identify and promote ‘moderate’ Islam, in the hope of discouraging the ‘extremists’ and ‘fundamentalists’ whose supposed misunderstanding of the Faith is, in fact, the version most practised in those societies where it is the majority religion. The result is not likely to be much more than the detachment of a favoured westernised coterie of leaders from the main body of believers.

A great friend of mine, now dead, a very erudite British Bengali Muslim, would have vehemently disagreed with this view and shown much learning in arguing against it. But he was a Guardian reader and Labour supporter, Oxford-educated and thoroughly westernised in many ways, despite his considering race the explanation for most behaviour and his covert antipathy to Jews. I suspect his Western education made him have less rather than more understanding of the Koran. 

Come to that, Nigerian Christians may understand the Bible better than affluent Ivy League educated American Episcopalians, but that's another story.

I loved Edward Norman since he delivered his drily funny attack on the modern Church of England in the Reith Lectures all those years ago. His The Roman Catholic Church: An Illustrated History  is a stimulating and mischievously provocative essay rather than a mere coffee table book, with an irony almost worthy of Gibbon, but deployed in favour of Christianity. He mentions modern Christians' apologies for the Crusades and comments

Perhaps, however, a balance of remorse might be achieved if the Islamic bodies were, in turn, asked to apologise for their own invasions of the Byzantine provinces and Holy Land some three and a half centuries earlier.

He says of Moorish Spain, 

All those placid courtyards and sparkling fountains, that poetry and art, rested upon the existence of one of the largest slave populations the world has ever seen.

He also tells us that the Moors developed savage techniques for extracting confessions from suspected heretics and

there is a sense in which the notorious Spanish Inquisition was a Moorish legacy.

This reminds me that I spent forty minutes with Augustine Ndeliakyama Shao, the Catholic Bishop of Zanzibar (an island which is 95% Muslim), when I was there. The Bishop asked me how people in England felt about Muslims and I told him about the widespread concern about Islamophobia and that Muslims being brown-skinned were seen as victims. The Bishop told me that

Muslims worry about victimisation when thy are a minority. When they are a majority they are very different.

A number of churches have been attacked in Zanzibar since we met. 

I must say that I have liked a great deal most of the Muslims I have known and I imagine their habit of praying several times a day is part of the reason they are attractive. They have remarkable qualities, a remarkable seriousness and depth, usually. However, John Buchan's description of Islam as a warlike creed (or rather Sandy Arbuthnot's) in Greenmantle is clearly accurate. Islam will give rise to countless conflicts in the future in Europe as well as Africa and Asia. 

I agree with a fair bit of the Muslim critique of the modern West. I want there to be peace between the world's religions and there should certainly be peace between Christians, Jews and Muslims, who all worship the same God, but there will not be. 

The cantonisation of England along racial and religious lines became inevitable as soon as immigration from the New Commonweath reached several hundreds of thousands back in the early 1960s, I suppose. Here is a very saddening article by Ben Judah, a fantastically gifted young journalist, about widespread anti-Jewish feeling among Muslims in Bradford. Nothing is written in the papers, as far as I know, about how Muslim communities in England feel towards indigenous white English Christians. It would be interesting to find out. Judging from what British Pakistani friends of mine say on Facebook, it might not be very positive. 

Lunch with a Syrian friend

Yesterday I had lunch with the Syrian Christian friend whom - I was horrified when he told me - I hadn't seen since he bought me lunch eighteen months ago. I wrote about that lunch here and think what he said then is still worth reading.


He has not been back to Syria since moving here two and a half years ago but keeps in constant touch with the country and has an online recruitment portal serving the needs of employers in Syria (there are some, of course, and they need to replace people who emigrate or, i suppose, though he didn't say this, are killed.)


It was a great pleasure to see him again but what he had to say was very depressing. He sees no likelihood of any end to the war and, which depressed me even more, he is very alarmed that Muslims are growing ever more numerous in Europe because of migration and having many babies. He believes exaggerated statistics about the number of Muslims in Europe, but the true numbers are astonishing and show rapid increases.

I told him:

Christian Syrians like you should write about this.

And his reply was astute:

No-one would listen to us.

He, by the way, has very many Muslim friends in Syria and says they are good people. Their religion makes the problems, he says. He thinks Islam is incompatible with democracy.

He likes it in Romania and went on

'Romania's not very civilised but it's better that way'

and contrasts civilised France, where cartoonists are murdered for insulting Mohammed.  I agreed that ever since I first came here I have thought that in very many ways Romania is more civilised than the West.

As I write this, I remember an Austrian banker who settled here telling me years ago that the West was decadent and Romania was not. I believed that when he told me, though the word decadent amused me, sounded Spenglerian, but I see it much more clearly now how decadent the West is, because it is much clearer now.

My Syrian thinks Assad and ISIS in some occult way work in tandem. I think he is right and people who think Assad is a good guy - there are lots of these people on the net - are very foolish. My friend thinks, though, that the moderate rebels were not very moderate. Christians do not have illusions about the regime but prefer it to the other options. 

My friend wants the regime to be reformed rather than overthrown, simply because the alternative is chaos, but Iran, which has kept Assad in power, he blames for the crimes of the regime. Iran, he says, is the devil.

Why is there no word Hinduphobia?

And why is there no such thing as Hinduphobia?

No-one is anti-Hindu except possibly Muslims in India. Muslims make waves everywhere, it seems.

Anti-Indian, yes, anti-immigrant yes, colour prejudiced yes (but not often nowadays), anti-Hindu never.

Why is there no word Catholicophobia, come to that?

By the way, as a Catholic I am indifferent to anti Catholic prejudice. In fact, to be honest I am secretly pleased that people take us seriously enough to dislike our beliefs, beautiful though they are. It makes me feel I belong to a select club.

I wonder why Muslims mind Islamophobia.

I also wonder if humility is a virtue in the Muslim religion. I read somewhere that it is unique to Christianity, but it is one of the greatest virtues. Muslims, like everyone else, should practice it.

Immigrants should be the most patriotic citizens there are because only they choose their country. We make a great mistake teaching them to feel victimised or to take offence. Though it is the children of immigrants who more often are discontented. The invention of the word Islamophobia was a very great mistake. 

Beauty is a short lived tyranny

Socrates said

Beauty is a short lived tyranny.

Nowadays surgery can sometimes lead to what Churchill called

a tyranny made perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science

but surgery only helps delay aging.

There is a short poem I like by Matthew Prior, called The Lady Who Offers Her Looking-Glass to Venus:

Venus, take my votive glass;

Since I am not what I was,

What from this day I shall be, 

Venus, let me never see.

When I read Prior in my teens that seemed pretty but now I understand much more. Aging is NOT pleasant for very pretty women.

Some, like Brigitte Bardot, deliberately make themselves look as unattractive as possible, some grow old gracefully, some fight the ageing process, few as successfully as Raquel Welch.

A friend of mine explained on his Facebook wall how Raquel Welch keeps her famous figure in old age. (Raquel Welch an old woman?) 

I was having Sunday lunch at the Dorchester a few years ago and Raquel Welch was at the next table looking stunning. Moving into her 70s with a body bordering on the miraculous in a tight, tailored two piece Chanel dress suit: taut, toned, flat but swelling in all the right places. I keep a watchful camp eye as she'd ordered everything we had (lavish traditional three course roast with all the trimmings, smoked salmon, toffee pud etc) and you don't keep your figure looking like THAT eating like a mere mortal. She did the old movie queen trick of eating exactly half of everything on the plate with almost mathematical precision and kept to a single glass of white wine (50% left at the end of meal). Staggering self control - the food was superb - and undoubtedly practiced for decades. Oh, the joys of stardom...

This diet works, by the way. I know because a friend of mine kept it, but it requires will power.

This all reminds me of something Mary Kenny wrote:

It is a law of life that there are compensations to everything: and among the compensations of age is the satisfying observation that your contemporaries are ageing at just about the same rate. Anna Ford was the great beauty of our time, and while she remains an attractive woman, for her age, she is unmistakably a woman in her fifties. Age brings a kind of equalisation. I see women I knew as girls who were Zuleika Dobson figures in their time: stunning beauties all our boyfriends wanted to go out with. And now they are pleasant, but lined, middle-aged women just like the rest of us. In some cases the stunning beauties age less well than the average, for no better reason than the lottery of life.

Her whole article is here. 

At the age of 49 the Baroness de Courtebiche, in that wonderful novel and TV series Clochemerle, 

retired from the pleasures of the boudoir 

to be a religious chatelaine on her ancestral estate in the Beaujolais village of Clochemerle, defending the Church against the republicans as had her fathers. When I read that I was 46 and felt I was still young. 

Gloria Swanson and Diana Dors

British Muslim girls who run away to be brides of ISIS fighters are certainly brave

According to Scotland Yard, nearly 20 young British Muslim girls have gone to Syria to join ISIS in the past year. They are brave girls, warlike perhaps, who want adventure and want, like many stroppy teenage girls, to rebel against their families and schoolteachers. 
Some British Muslim girls do this just by wearing a full veil. These have gone much further. Most are under eighteen, in some cases only fifteen, and the BBC and the papers want to stop them going or bring them back. Some kind people are worried for them, others hope that they never return.

The girls should obey their parents, but I don't think we can bring them back. (By the way they are all much older than Muhammed's youngest wife, Ayisha, who is said to have been six or seven when they married and nine when she went to live with him, but this is a digression). 

The girls might find fulfilment with ISIS, perhaps. ISIS fighters are genuine Muslims who take the Koran very seriously, even though their interpretation of it is not the only one. 

I don't agree with those who say good riddance to them - they, after all, are very young. Their behaviour is probably symptomatic of a huge dissatisfaction on the part of young British Muslims with British society. I can offer no suggestion as to what we can do about that.

They presumably see ISIS building an ideal Islamic society. Whether they are sadists, as some teenage girls are, and find the thought of beheading Christians or killing infidels exciting, who can say? No doubt warriors appeal to them and rejecting the country whose passport they carry. 

What I do know is that British subjects should be free to fight in foreign wars, as Orwell and Laurie Lee did in Spain. Or free to go abroad to marry foreign fighters, though only when they reach the age of consent. 

ISIS, by the way, are no worse than the Spanish Republicans, for whom Orwell, Laurie Lee, etc fought, dominated as they were by Stalinists. The Spanish Reds killed countless priests and raped countless nuns. The Spanish Civil War was for Communists a dress rehearsal for the takeover of Eastern Europe after 1945. (Walter Roman, Petre Roman's father and 500 other Romanian Communists took part.) ISIS have not committed as many atrocities as the Spanish Reds, though admittedly it is early days so far.

Some people, like Orwell, left Spain disillusioned with Communism but many others remained Communists all their lives. Some went on to tyrannise Eastern Europe or, in the case of Jack Jones, undermine Britain as a Communist trade union leader who took his orders from Moscow. i remember the BBC sentimentally televising his reunions after his retirement with the other veterans of the Spanish Civil War, no doubt many of them card carrying party members and enemies of their country.

So it will be with people who join ISIS - some will die, some will be wounded, some will return disillusioned, some hardened in their faith. Some will never return.

The girls, despite what so many people, including Julie Burchill, Rod Liddle and others, ​ are saying, have to be free to return too. The great issue is not whether to let them go or let them come back but whether we want more Muslim immigrants in the future in the UK.

72 hours in Transnistria

Transnistria is soporific but refreshingly uncool even by Eastern European standards. Nothing is less avant-garde than communism.

I took this picture in the Romanian village in Transnistria where I spent Saturday morning and I apologise that it is the cliched Transnistrian snapshot. There is much  more to the place than just statues of Lenin, and though the villages feel like a time warp they have changed a lot since the Soviet Union split up.

The villagers think the 1920s and 1930s famines in which many died of hunger were not Stalin's fault and bitterly regret the end of the USSR, the end of the village kolkhoz (collective farm) and the loss of the markets for their produce in Siberia and the Baltic states etc. Now the farm is split up and run by businessmen who exploit their workers. They sound like kulaks. Things were better in Mr. Brezhnev's time.

This article is what Wikipedia calls a stub. Come back in a few hours or a day and it will be a wonderful travelogue. Alexander Kinglake won't be in it.

A journey to Moldova and Transnistria

My friend Tony has two great hobbies - learning languages and visiting unusual places. He has just arrived in Tiraspol, capital of Transnistria, and will spend two weeks there studying Russian. Transnistria is a country, but one that does not appear on any map and is not recognised by any givernment. It's an enclave of the republic of Moldova on the Ukrainian border which, though not contiguous with Russia,  is occupied by a Russian army.  It is a conflict that began with a fighting a disco in a small town and has been frozen since 1991. 

I am jealous of Tony's knowledge of languages and much more jealous of the fact that he was there in such times and places as Mozambique when it was a Portuguese colony, Libya just after Gaddafi came to power and Albania in 1979 under Hoxha. The fact that I'm jealous will please him as he is a competitive person and I am glad that I thereby make him happy. However, I shall not envy him Transnistria because I intend to muscle in, by taking a couple of days off work and staying in the same hotel in Tiraspol. I shall arrive in Chisinau tomorrow morning, go to Transnistria Friday morning and shall blog about it.

But I start by copying Tony's Facebook status of today.

End of my second day in Transnistria. My guide told me that i was his first client this year but he was expected things to pick up. He also told me that there were two expats living in Tiraspol, but one, a 70-year old German had recently left. The other one is an American called Tim who runs an unlicensed hostel and is married to a local girl. I met Tim this evening, he looked drunk and washed-out and was with 10 tourists from an adventure tour company lead by an Englishman living in China. This person told me that nine out of 10 of the people in his Group had been to North Korea and so Transnistria was a natural follow-on. He also does tours to Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

My Russian teacher told me that there were rarely music concerts in Tiraspol and that performers were mostly local or from Russia. The only international name, Boney M, performed here 15 years ago. Since then nobody has been. She also said there were foreigners who came to Tiraspol to learn Russian and that i was not the first. On average the school where she worked had four students per year.

When all is said, Tiraspol is quiet and friendly and very Russian. They consider Russians their saviours and protectors. I like this place, it is not Soviet but has some of the post-Soviet charm that you found in Kiev before the Orange Revolution in 2004.

Books read in the years of grace 2013 and 2014

Bold means I loved it and highly recommend it. * means I have read it before.

2013

Not for Turning Charles Moore I reviewed it here.

The Ministry of Fear* Graham Greene I've read it three times. His best book. One of the best books about the Blitz and the war: surreal but also a ripping yarn. Reminiscent of Lewis Carroll, John Buchan and Michael Innes.

Mister Johnson Joyce Carey I loved this wonderful novel set in Nigeria. 

The Tao is Silent Raymond Smullyan

Dark Star Safari Paul Theroux - I reviewed it here - very good but I think my account of Ethiopia is even better

Notes from a Small Island Bill Bryson For a mass audience, but full of insights into England 

The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes* Conan Doyle was not a good writer, unlike Buchan, the stories are silly melodrama,  but Holmes and Watson are wonderful, peerless characters

The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford

Golden Earth Norman Lewis - he wrote very well about his journey to Burma in 1951

2014

Burmese Days George Orwell (much) better than Thackeray. Great social comedy.

Around the World in Eighty Days Jules Verne I skimmed it - fun. 

Finding George Orwell in Burma Emma Larkin - interesting, though not well written.

The River of Lost Footprints - Thant Myint U absorbing history of Burma

The Glass Palace Amitav Ghosh - unfinished, but a readable historical saga set in Burma

Greenmantle* John Buchan I reviewed it here. My comfort blanket.

Iron Curtain Anne Applebaum - I reviewed it here. Liberals do not write thick, satisfying history like conservatives or Marxists but she proves to be a historian, not just a journalist.

Romania John Villiers (ed.) - dull little collection of essays. Don't bother.

Selfish, Whining Monkeys Rod Liddle A big disappointment - I reviewed it here.

De Ce Este Romania Altfel? Lucian Boia Very, very good.

Dracula’s Bloodline Radu Florescu, atrociously edited but fascinating.

The Man without a Face Masha Gassen - MG is a Russian-American lesbian. She is a good writer too. Very informative account of Vladimir Putin and recommended. 

Everything is Illuminated - unfinished -  East European narrator's comic English was wearing

Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers - unfinished: very well-written but too much yachting

Fragile Empire Ben Judah - I keep meaning to post my review.

Bloodlands Timothy Snyder - a good book, though very harrowing. I wrote about it here.

Cheating at Canasta William Trevor unfinished

The Beetle* Richard Marsh unfinished. I loved this 1890s occult novel when I was 26. Now disbelief cannot be suspended. A man turns into an Egyptian god and then a beetle?

The Perfect Spy John Le Carré unfinished - not enough spying, too much a novel.

The Classless Society Alwyn Turner - about John Major's Britain, not a patch on Andy Beckett's books about recent past in Britain, but it just about whiled away a plane journey.

Churchill:  The End of Glory John Charmley in progress

The Danger Tree Olivia Manning - a good novel. The Second World War now seems long ago. 

What a lowbrow list. My schoolboy self would be disgusted that everything I read was written after 1890, it includes four thrillers plus Jules Verne, no poetry and nothing literary, except The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford, which I hated. Ford reminded me of Henry James. Worse than that I cannot say.  

How very few books I read in 2013. The reason was my internet addiction. In fact I only read THREE cover to cover: the three novels. At least I read three novels. I usually only manage one or two. I do most of my reading online, though, these days, which is a great shame because books, even on a kindle, are so much more enjoyable. Books are absorbing,the net enervating.

In 2014 I started by reading more books in two months than in the year before, although most were connected to my holiday in Burma. I then started reading on my kindle but tailed off and The Danger Tree was the only thing I read in the last three or four months. It's the first novel of Olivia Manning's Levant Trilogy, the continuation of her Balkan Trilogy which I have read several times. I strongly recommend the first two autobiographical novels set in Bucharest in 1939 and 1940.

The Danger Tree is better than any of the Balkan Trilogy but I shall not read the remaining novels. Olivia Manning writes well but I do not care a jot about any of her characters. Still, it's a much better series of books than Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy (and I am a huge Waugh enthusiast). I am not sure how it compares with Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time.  ADTTMOT is probably better but I have only read the first and third volumes, many years apart. 

John Charmley's Churchill:  The End of Glory, published in 1993, is very good, though before starting it I had already come to accept his thesis and think that the conventional history of Britain's role in the Second World War is very misconceived. Dr. Charmley tells the heart-rending story of how Great Britain gave away her power and became the American satellite she is today. Cicero said

An unjust peace is better than a just war.

That is not always true, but true very often.

I have a big pile of books to read, I still intend to finish Gibbon, laid aside two years ago, but my priority now is War and Peace (about time) in preparation for my expedition to Moscow.

The grand old Duke of Norfolk and the MCC tour of Australia in 1962-63

From the memoirs of the cricketer Ian Wooldridge.

It was the first time that most of us had met the portly, florid aristocrat...we hardly knew what to expect: he hadn't exactly sprung to mind as a front-running candidate for the job. It was a black-tie affair, of course, and none of us dared get drunk. Eventually, over the port, the Duke rose, cleared his throat and delivered himself of a sentence I shall treasure till the end of my days:

"Gentlemen",

he said,

"I wish this to be an entirely informal tour. You will merely address me as 'Sir'". 

Wikipedia fills in the background to the Duke's appointment

The announcement that the Duke would manage the MCC cricket team in Australia in 1962–63 came as a complete surprise. He was a keen cricketer, who was President of the MCC in 1956-57 and was still a member of its powerful committee. He had managed his own tour of the West Indies with a Duke of Norfolk's XI in 1956-67, which had included the England players Tom Graveney, John Warr, Doug Wright and Willie Watson, and would organise another in 1969-70. His father the 15th Duke had built the picturesque Arundel Castle Cricket Ground and the Duke hosted matches against touring teams there from 1954, a tradition continued by his wife Lavinia, Duchess of Norfolk after his death in 1975. He was not a good cricketer, even at village green level, and it was customary to let him get off the mark before he returned to the pavilion. At Arundel the umpire was his own butler, who when he was out would diplomatically announce "His Grace is not in". The Duke was chosen after a chance remark while having drinks after a MCC Committee meeting. Billy Griffith was the prime candidate to manage the tour, but he had just been appointed the Secretary of the MCC and needed to remain at Lord's to oversee the change from the old divisions between amateurs and professionals that had been decided that autumn. The Duke offered his services when it was mentioned that the new captain Ted Dexter would be difficult to control. Like Dexter the Duke was a keen follower of horse-racing, and as President of Sussex County Cricket Club he was often at Hove and Arundel and had appointed Dexter county captain. When his appointment was announced it was joked that only a duke could manage "Lord Ted". In those days the MCC tour was seen as a social event.

In England the 1950s were intended to be a return to the 1930s and the early 1960s were a continuation of this. The 1960s social revolution only got underway in about 1964. My grandmother and her sisters and my father, working class people with not a lot of money, all maintained that England was a much better place before the war and especially before the 1960s. It was wrong of them, as  my mother once pointed out, to poison my mind against my own era but they did. 

Nevertheless, I was convinced that they were probably mistaken about the 1930s having been better. In the 1930s, as they themselves repeatedly said, there had been real poverty in England ('There's no poverty today'). So I thought, before I came to live in Romania in 1998. Romania in 1998 had the same standard of living as in England in 1959 and many other things in common. It felt like the 1950s here and I came to see why my parents regretted the 1960s. 

The 1962-63 MCC tour reminds me of Belloc's immortal lines

For the hoary social curse 

Gets hoarier and hoarier, 

And it stinks a trifle worse 

Than in the days of Queen Victoria, 

When they married and gave in marriage, 

And danced at the County Hall, 

And some of them kept a carriage. 

AND THE FLOOD DESTROYED THEM ALL. 

But, pace Belloc, I still regret the passing of a cohesive, homogeneous, repressed England united by class distinction, jokes in common, a sense of patriotism and what Maurice Cowling called 

England's real religion, low-key respectability.

I hope and believe that that England has not completely passed, despite the politicians. 

Danube delta in November (Sorin Onisor)