When I was given a signed hardback of Alan Clark’s Diaries by politically-minded friends as a 40th birthday present I had little interest in reading them.
But I had to dip in to get a flavour so I could write an insincere thank you letter. Incidentally the same birthday threw up a first edition in hardback of Louis de Bernières’ Captain Corelli’s Mandolin; a pity that it is not signed by the author but it does have a cherished inscription: ” Christopher – this novel should provide those of us intimate with the Greek islands something sufficiently demanding to read with the third gin … ” The implication that I’m virtually a direct descendant of Odysseus is flattering and an alcoholic realistic.
Louis de Bernières’ dedication is bitter: “To my mother and father, who in different places and in different ways fought against the Fascists and the Nazis, lost many of their closest friends, and were never thanked”. Well, that oversight has been remedied this week.
When I dipped into Alan Clark’s Diaries of course I was hooked and bought the second volume. Recently I was sent another book I wasn’t sure would interest me: The Making of the English Landscape by WG Hoskins, first published in 1955 and reprinted many times. Hoskins quite simply explains how the English landscape has evolved from primeval forest, fen and moor into what we see today. It is a scholarly book written for laymen. Every page has a plum; e.g. “The building of Eton College called for two and a half million bricks between 1442 and 1452. Most of the early bricks were imported from Flanders, … “. There were three sheep to every human being at the beginning of the 16th century; fewer than three million people and about eight million sheep. Today there are about 56 million people and 16 million sheep – not sure what that means and if I did I’d have to write a book.
In January 2017 you met medieval historian, Sandy Murray in We Live in the Middle Ages. I wondered what he thought of Hoskins. Here is part of his reply.
“My Greek-professor-grandfather loved an expression he found in German scholarship to denote ‘primeval ignorance’, viz. Urdummheit. What I sometimes inaccurately describe – for want of time to use a more accurate expression – as my ‘academic career’ has in fact been an indecorous struggle with Urdummheit. So I do remember – as Keats remembered discovering Chapman’s Homer – my discovery of Hoskins. Having to teach something is the best way of learning it. So Univ. history pupils got lots of fall-out from Hoskins, explaining, e.g., why the old main roads near Oxford ran along hill-ridges, above the tributaries to the upper Thames which flow between them; as also from Hoskins’ revised new edition, in the forward in which he announced that EVERYTHING IS MUCH OLDER THAN YOU THINK. A lovely book, introducing (to me, and to many) a new way of approaching history. Qui volet monumentum, circumspice.”
I’m enjoying Hoskins immensely and I have only got as far as Tudor to Georgian England.