en-US Sun, 27 Apr 2025 06:37:30 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review7522714107 Sun, 27 Apr 2025 06:37:30 -0700 /review/show/7522714107 Tim gave 3 stars to It's a Battlefield (Paperback) by Graham Greene
bookshelves: british, crime, literature-general, twentieth-century

We were unimpressed with Greene's first novel. The next two were never published. The fourth ('Stamboul Train') was an over-written proto-'entertainment'. 'It's a Battlefield' (1934) was his fifth crack at literary respectability. He still hasn't quite got there yet.

The patrician observation of ordinary folk that we will see again in 'A Gun for Sale' is in place although the tendency to patronise from the position of Bloomsbury and Oxford is moderated by increasing signs of a humane understanding of the person within.

The story is a sad one of an unintellectual working class Communist who 'loses it' at a demonstration and kills a policeman - less a crime of political passion than one of misjudgement and protectiveness towards others. It is a horrible accident of history for all concerned.

This is the age of capital punishment but also a period when institutional questioning had started about its rightness. Questions of right bourgeois order were coming up against the uncomfortable feeling that, well, it was not quite right to kill a man for killing a man.

Greene observes all this with a distant and humane eye, empathy for the moments of life yet no great engagement in the social aspects of the crisis. His interest is not politics but love, human frailty, personality and the ambiguities of power relations. The deaths are rather secondary.

The shenanigans of politics and law enforcement role-playing are covered but not in depth. What is covered well is the equally detached personality of the law officer charged with a job that does not involve judgement and which is the more difficult for not being that of a colonial officer.

Unspoken is the fact that the methods of the colonial officer - 'necessarily' brutal - are not the methods appropriate to fellow subjects of the Crown. Greene hints at, without stating, the discomfort of a man who knows he has a role to play where the morality lies in the role not the individual.

Greene's detachment from the social emerges most evidently in his portrayals of the Communist community and the ancillary characters. He is known to have dabbled in the ideology as a very young man but not for long. His Communists are not villains or heroes but just lost and ordinary.

This is a transitional book. The overwriting is over but there are still moments of forced literariness which detract from the mood and the story. At 30 years old, Greene has still not entirely jettisoned the need to be a literary figure rather than just a good and clear writer.

When he stops being detached and literary (admittedly much less than in the dreadful 'The Man Within' and the less dreadful but second division 'Stamboul Train'), the acute and sensitive observation of the human predicament breaks through.

The characters (too many to be fully fleshed out with no clear protagonist) are, nevertheless, still closer to allegories than persons - of self-delusion, social paranoia, vapid intellectual posturing. Perhaps only the 'promiscuous' Kay retains some sort of authenticity in the round.

This is at its best when exploring the 'sehnsucht' of lonely desire (the book is surprisingly open sexually for a novel of that period), the indistinct and inconclusive self-questioning of people playing social roles and the way that people delude themselves about their own situation.

Yet the book is not a great success because the achievement is periodic rather than sustained and the detachment constantly verges on an inauthentic cynicism which is not actually where Greene stands. Greene is still masking his own sehnsucht for meaning.

Is Greene compassionate? I am not sure. He is trying to be compassionate but struggles to see it through in this novel. The compassion is still wrestling with something that despises his species for its very nature. These ambiguities are those of a depressive 'Catholic agnostic'.

]]> Review7520027466 Sat, 26 Apr 2025 06:06:00 -0700 /review/show/7520027466 Tim gave 3 stars to Five Weeks in a Balloon (Hardcover) by Jules Verne
bookshelves: africa, modern-european, nineteenth-century, literature-general, science-fiction, travel

The first of Verne's novels and so the first of his 'Voyages Extraordinaires' appeared in 1863 (1865 in English translation). It counts (just) as science fiction insofar as the balloon journey across Africa was 'ahead of its time'. This journey is described in sometimes nerdy scientific detail.

Detail that you would later come to expect from a description of armament in twentieth century thrillers would have been part of the appeal of the book to young males seeking vicarious pleasure. Scientific 'realism' adds to the feeling of 'being there' as our white men cross the Dark Continent.

The casual and obvious racism of the novel will shock many of today's more sensitive souls. There are heavily bowlderised versions of the tale out there but you should avoid these. To get the pleasure of the past is to see it as it was and not as we would have liked it to have been.

The detail extends to topography. You have a sense of being able to trace on a good map the balloon's precise journey across what would come to be first the British imperial zone and then the French with many boy's own adventures and accounts of fauna and territory along the way.

What is striking is that Verne, a Frenchman, makes his three heroes British archetypes (scholar-scientist, man of action and man-servant) pre-figuring the Phileas Fogg of 1872, whose superiority stands despite the coruscating critique of the British Empire by anti-hero Nemo in 1869.

This ambivalence is pragmatic. This was the age when Victorian Explorers, riding the back of trade routes, were opening up Africa. Livingstone had undertaken the first traverse of the central continent between 1853 and 1856 and Burton and Speke were on the track of the source of the Nile.

These were exciting times not only in Africa but in Canada and Australia. Tales of triumph over hardship in order to open up 'new territory' were becoming a staple of popular literature. To imagine early flight speeding up the process was the stuff of dreams.

In this context the British hero was the natural hero unless Verne had been inclined to polemic French nationalism which he clearly was not. Verne was (it is recorded) not really interested in ballooning. He was interested in Africa. He just wanted to make traversing Africa relatively quickly plausible.

As to the racism (increasingly normalised in that imperialist period when anthropology was only just beginning to come to terms with Darwinism), it is sometimes savage and nasty though not dominant. The local peoples are positioned half way between animal and civilised. They knew no better then.

The race issue is matched by a class issue with the ranking of the self-sacrificing man-servant clearly a significant notch below the two educated 'pals'. Joe is a loyal retainer half way perhaps between natives and the elite. He may not understand much but he knows his duty and is loved for it.

Placing those discomforts aside, his first novel helps to tell us why Verne (already in his mid-30s) was to become one of the most loved of popular authors globally and one of the fathers of science fiction (the others being Wells and Gernsback perhaps). Quite simply he can tell a rollicking good yarn.

Scholars now tend to agree that the science fiction components of his ouevre have been retrospectively exaggerated so that it is probably best to think of his stories as primarily richly imaginative adventure tales set in a world unfolding in real time before his readers' eyes.

The book becomes a snapshot not so much into the French mid-nineteenth century mind (only the rescue at the end betrays French pride) but of a common European mind that seems almost child-like in its curiosity, adventurous nature, happy ignorance and disregard for our 'ethics'.

It is as if 'science fiction' simply emerges at this point out of that rich imagination finding ways to exploit a remarkable expansion of knowledge for the middling sort. Balloons and submarines are just a way of exploring the novelty and rockets to extend further outwards the urge to 'find things out'. ]]> Review7518240432 Fri, 25 Apr 2025 11:48:37 -0700 /review/show/7518240432 Tim gave 5 stars to Capitalist Democracy in Britain (Paperback) by Ralph Miliband
bookshelves: british, economics, five-star, history, politics, public-policy, twentieth-century

It is quite remarkable that a book published over forty years ago and now out of print should be such a perfect description of the conditions that underlay the utter mess that is twenty first century Britain. It is from a Marxist perspective but you can strip that out if you want to enjoy the analysis.

Only today I found another bit of prescience in the Introduction to Noam Chomsky's 'Deterring Democracy' (1991) where, quoting Lawrence Eagleburger, the old anarchist strips bare current American foreign policy to its consistent basics with brutal precision.

In other words, no one can say that they were not warned about our current condition by intelligent intellectuals (are there any intelligent intellectuals left nowadays?) well on the other side of the Millennium. The facts were all there. The interpretation available.

Miliband, whose two sons have achieved a weird prominence riding the very system that the father excoriated in a political example of one half of the Oedipus story sustaining its own momentum after no less than 2,500 years, takes no prisoners in his analysis.

A current reader will have to cast themselves back to the story of the British Left of the 1970s and early 1980s forf the right ambience. That context means that some of the specific 'predictive' aspects do not stand up but the core analysis of how Britain was and is (notionally) managed still stands.

Well, except in one respect - the formal analysis is correct but what Miliband cannot have predicted would be that the Left's 'sotto voce' connivance in an essentially conservative structure would go into over-drive in the wake of Thatcher and become almost a parody of itself under Starmer.

The book tells us how the system actually worked in the last century and how the fools in government still think it does work even though it neither works functionally to deliver stability and prosperity nor works as it is supposed to do in keeping the population from asking for their 'share of the action'.

The bulk of the book is a systematic account of the way power has operated (and is intended now to operate) within the United Kingdom - as a liberal capitalist democracy that carefully manages the working class interest through the agency of a supine centre-left party (Labour).

That Party, once with millions of members embedded in the workplace and the community, has degenerated into a sort of nut club of activists managed by an opportunistic and not phenomenally bright self-reinforcing clique of professionals.

Although the liberal constitutionalist forms are different and there is much talk of 'freedom' (which can be quickly abrogated in war or in an 'emergency'), this system is not that much different from Bismarck's social militarism, maintained with the pacifying support of revisionist Marxists.

The system is a total system (persuading us that this is so is the most successful element of the book) structured around all levels of government from national to local, judiciary, state-business relations, trades unions, security apparat and media (not excluding the sinister BBC).

It is also not averse to hiding an iron fist inside its moth-eaten glove. Although of its period, Miliband evidences the contingent attitude of the propertied towards democracy in the age of Allende and the very idea of Left governance by a former chief prosecutor should cause tremors of the soul.

The purpose is to effect only the changes that will sustain the system and to ensure that any emergent social force is integrated into that system in order to protect it and 'capitalist relations' - that is, private property, not excluding land ownership (an inheritance from the eighteenth century).

There is, of course, an alternative conservative opinion on this - that stability requires such a system and that human nature dictates that prosperity is best served by markets protected by such a system - and this should not be dismissed out of hand. If this is so, let it be stated without the lies!

Whichever is the true opinion, it is important to understand the facts of the case much as Trump is forcing us to see the facts of the case of American foreign policy as outlined by Chomsky. It is the unholy guff (like the Crown) that surrounds these systems that insults our intelligence.

So what has happened since the book. Well, self-evidently, the British Left crashed and burned in its attempt to change the system, largely in an excess of narcissism, idiot utopianism and utterly asinine Trotskyist ideology. If 'Jeremy' is the best it could do in its last gasp, well ...

Indeed, what is perhaps most depressing is that the 1970s generation of intellectuals that failed the working class (or rather the 'people') sidled their way into the establishment in perfect confirmation of Miliband pere's analysis. Thus it was and perhaps thus it will always be.

But more fundamental changes were taking place. The trades unions lost their strong position in the corporatist team as Britain de-industralised. Their place was taken by a huge parasitical class of lower level administrators, academics and NGOcrats building identity politics on critical theory.

If once conservatives made efforts to build Labour as manager of the working class through trades unions, now conservatives (from businesses to governance) appropriated reasonable social demands by the marginalised and repurposed them into green and diversity agendas that got out of hand.

Just as the old corporatism smashed by Thatcher was grossly inefficient because of lack of decisive and effective central planning so the new liberal-left communitarianism was even more inefficient through emphasising coalitional baksheesh instead of productive capitalist or public investment.

The state of British public finances has declined (since the cataclysms of 2008-2010, COVID and the absurdities of economic war with Russia) to a point that is quite definitely very scary with everyone making ever greater demands on a shrinking pie. Where Birmingham goes, others will follow.

And, of course, this was compounded by the effects of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution which smashed the economic balance of the old order in which national capital and trades unions maintained a slow but possibly manageable post-imperial decline.

National capital got eviscerated in favour of international capital. This plundered social and public capital (the water utilities and energy pricing being the thin end of a huge wedge). Working class self-organisation (always inadequate protection in any case) as trades unions became NGOs.

In other words, Miliband's system still exists but it is a socio-economic 'Potemkin Village' in which a simulacrum of a morally corrupt but vaguely workable system has become influence without power in the world, a doomed cover for what is a province of international capital with almost no way out.

The book is still very much worth reading for two reasons. The ghost of that system is still what many of its office-holders still think is working. That is worth understanding. Second, the illusions of the honest Left of the early 1980s are a base line for understanding the Left's consequent degradation.

As to the author's two sons, one in global NGO management and once a 'king across the water' in New York for the neo-liberal Blairites and the other lost in the ideology of Net Zero fantasies, they must be given the benefit of some doubt.

If they had read their old man's book with any care, they would have known that there were only two conclusions - an unspoken despair at the solidity of a system that would never let a genuine Left politician a place at the table or an existential 'revolutionary' determination to fight and fight again.

The last serious fighter on the inside was actually an aristocrat - Anthony Wedgewood Benn. Since then, the realistic fighting for the street has been done not on the Left but on the Right by populists They are about as trustworthy as rattle snakes.

A whole generation of the Left watched the sclerotic Soviet Union collapse and never saw the rise of China. They gave up and became American-style left-liberals. In a fit of absence of mind, they gifted their nation to Tony Blair, commodity traders, private equity, bankers and hedge funds.

They may have been unconsciously depressed but perhaps they were not wrong. Perhaps the United Kingdom was doomed once it lost its ability to exploit an empire. Perhaps it will end up like Venice after its empire disappeared - a glorious tourist trap living off its heritage. Game over!?
]]> Review7517730132 Fri, 25 Apr 2025 07:41:24 -0700 /review/show/7517730132 Tim gave 4 stars to Wagner by Tanner. Michael ( 2008 ) Paperback by Tanner. Michael
bookshelves: biography, cultural-studies, history, nineteenth-century, music

Michael Tanner's 'Wagner' is a polemic and it is of its time (1996). The scene has to be set of a period when Wagner 'mattered' but had become embroiled (Heidegger has a similar issue) in the cultural politics of a rising left-liberalism. He was seen to be out-of-time as a villain of history.

The reason was that his own passionate politics had been set in another Germany in which the nationalist revolt in 1848 had been a central event (critical equally to what made Marx) and before the measured German nationalism of Bismarck became the imperial idiocy of Kaiser Wilhelm.

Appropriated by the Nazis and presumed to be a harbinger of a later racial antisemitism, the more 'socialist' aspects of at least the early Wagner were forgotten in what amounted to a sneering hate-fest about the man and his music from people most likely not to have the patience for it.

It is this remarkable ability of the late liberal mind to be unable to think themselves empathetically into past historical 'being' and to judge all pasts from a position of rather ridiculous moral absolutism that did for Wagner as it did for many great artefacts of the world of 'old white males'.

Tanner is thus hitting back and hitting back hard in a rearguard action against the middle brow. He writes as someone who understands music (which I do not) and the German philosophical tradition which is relevant here as Idealism, Schopenhauer and the squabble with Nietzsche.

He sweeps away (quite rightly) the fact that Wagner was a tremendous ego who would put Trump to shame. Many (though only a minority of all) geniuses are such but the egoism is not so much irrelevant as part of what enabled the man to produce remarkable feats of artistic creation.

Although not an easy read (too bound up with the polemic and rather donnish at times), if there is one thing Tanner manages to do it is to establish that this is a genius of great worth whose music was culturally transformative and a 'maker of the modern world' despite the latter's ignorance of that fact.

For example, the cinematic blockbuster and its music have become the total work of art in middle brow form. Few of its audience understand that Wagner's conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk is now central to their own cultural assumptions and reception of creativity.

And this is the problem of the book in 2025. The controversy has disappeared because the people who condemned Wagner and did not understand his work may have been intellectual lightweights in the 1990s but at least this was a bad God to be rejected. A God believed in still exists.

Today the problem is that Wagner only exists as a God of belief amongst the very knowledgeable of which an even smaller group has much knowledge of that mid-nineteenth century ferment of ideas in Germany before the Nazis even existed.

The History Channel view of the world - sharks, Nazis and aliens - distorts but the barrier it sets up is in popular understanding of the continuities in our culture and of the importance even of polemic itself. Instead, we have a bland and pasty-faced wimpish desire that all should have popular cake.

As to Tanner's book, it is an important corrective in this context. It is not strictly speaking a biography but rather an exercise in criticism that takes us through the major operatic works (notably the Ring cycle) in order to help us understand what is going on with Wagner's creative process.

If only there was more time (which I do not have) because Tanner encourages us to take each opera and live it as Wagner lived it as a creative process. He is excellent at giving us access to that liminal world between creator and creation where the work is not the man or vice versa.

There is Wagner creating himself, there is each work which can stand on its own musically and dramatically and then there is the 'process' in which the total work unfolds, sometimes haltingly and with major gaps, in order to express a particular but fluid philosophy of life.

Wagner's work unfolds here with (for me) less interest in the intellectual tour de force that is 'The Ring Cycle' than in the emotional expression of absolute desire in 'Tristan and Isolde' and the heroic Christian symbolism with hidden pagan aspects in 'Parsifal' (at the end of his life).

The irony of the book is that it is using a lot of words to try to describe what is ineffable - some people reach the ineffable through philosophy, the spiritual, poetry and the plastic arts or nature but music too, if it can be the very effable Offenbach, can also be the inexpressible 'being' of Wagner.

The phenomenology of Wagner is what Tanner appears to be striving at without creating a philosophical treatise. If he does not achieve this as often as we might like, he does open the door to our achieving it if we want to put the effort in on our own account.

I suspect that we do not live in a culture of effort, partly because of lack of time, partly because of an overwhelming access to information, partly from imposed ideology and partly from simple lack of basic cultural education. This is just how it is. We live in a different culture from Wagner's. ]]> Review7515312961 Thu, 24 Apr 2025 09:23:56 -0700 /review/show/7515312961 Tim gave 4 stars to The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The untold story of the shadowy international spy network, through its targets, traitors and spies (Kindle Edition) by Richard Kerbaj
bookshelves: australian, british, espionage, history, north-american, politics, pr-propaganda, public-policy, technology, twentieth-century, warfare

Kerbaj's history of the Five Eyes sigint system is useful in reminding us how technology is not necessarily liberatory. It can be an agent of surveillance and control. The story starts not in 1956 when it was created but with responses to earlier Nazi and more concerning Soviet Cold War spy operations.

The underlying tale is one of the de facto merging of US and British post-imperial intelligence technologies to counter the 'threat' of Sovietism and other forms of Communism. The three other Five Eyes were the 'white commonwealth' countries of Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

De facto but not de jure. Periodically there would be tensions and disputes when co-operation had to be smoothed over because of some (usually humint) blunder by one party or the other or because foreign policies were not exactly aligned. America was never not the dominant partner.

In general, however, the two systems were fully aligned and became an asset in the creation of the Anglo-Saxon ideal of the liberal West. As British power declined, Australia became more important but the total system was directed largely by US needs and desires.

This is not to say that the Five Eyes became a wholly owned Washington subsidiary but only that the British had to invest heavily in their own capacity and machinery in order to be useful to America and to deter it from thinking that it alone could displace the other Four Eyes.

Although not majored on in this book, the intelligence system was part of a greater whole of junior British dependency where its status as an asset was linked to US commitment to NATO, the maintenance of an allegedly 'independent' nuclear capacity and 'global influence'.

Of course, this is a structure up for grabs with the latest Presidency but all the indications are that the British have found themselves so trapped in a semi-abusive relationship that they cannot escape. Security is now about to be wrapped up in the economics of trade tariffs and in culture wars.

As to the book, it is written by a journalist and not a scholar with all the advantages and disadvantages of this. It is readable and reasonably well structured as a narrative but it is also rather vulnerable to seduction by sources who apparently allowed Kerbaj access to 'secrets'.

The critical faculty - though not absent - starts to melt away the nearer we get to our own time to the point that, by the end, we are sensing an official version of history subtly replacing a more critical and historical one. This is inevitable - you do not get access without a little bit of wolf becoming dog.

Nevertheless, so long as you retain your critical faculty as a consumer, it is a good read with intelligently presented anecdotes and a broadly coherent narrative that takes us through one very important element in Western security policy, its apparat and the negotiations that sustain it.

Finally, I should add that Canada, Australia and New Zealand are not forgotten. Each in its own way plays a significant if temporary role in a narrative otherwise dominated by the Anglo-American relationship. They are lesser but not insignificant players in the game.
]]> Review802411955 Thu, 24 Apr 2025 00:40:11 -0700 /review/show/802411955 Tim gave 5 stars to Egon Schiele: Drawings and Watercolors (Hardcover) by Jane Kallir
bookshelves: art, biography, cultural-studies, five-star, history-of-art, modern-european, sexuality-erotica, twentieth-century

This is a review of Egon Schiele's drawings and watercolours, perhaps around 10% of his 3,000 works, but not of his oil paintings which need to be explored elsewhere.

Jane Kallir, who appears to have dedicated her scholarly life to understanding and interpreting Schiele, provides a succinct and coherent psychological biography, tracing his short life year by year.

The production values (Thames & Hudson but owing a great deal to the editing of Ian Vartanian of Goliga Books in Japan) are superb with full page illustrations of the works to a very high standard.

There is not much to add other than that I am persuaded by Kallir's thesis that Schiele's power to move lies in his ability to express individual maturation from adolescence to adulthood.

There is, of course, the strong sexual element to his drawings but it should not be studied to the exclusion of what became his true area of genius - the portrait.

What Schiele does is rescue humanity from the false dichotomy between the erotic and the pornographic in his art while clearly struggling to come to terms with and eventually submit to social expectations.

This is why the life story is usefully read alongside the more intimate drawings and watercolours, away from grand and pompous allegories and market-driven portraiture great though these may be.

The works are an essay in strategies of love and objectification in dealing with the power of the sexual.

They will last so long as men and women are free to choose what they can see in order to effect personal transformation and so long as new individuals emerge to deal with sex and society.

It is a male perspective but, as Ms. Kallir points out, it comes to a view of women as persons in his final years (1917/1918). We can only guess where he might have headed if he had survived the Flu at 28. ]]> Review7509906323 Tue, 22 Apr 2025 11:26:15 -0700 /review/show/7509906323 Tim gave 5 stars to The Penguin Complete Ghost Stories of M.R. James (Library Binding) by M.R. James
bookshelves: british, five-star, horror, literature-general, twentieth-century

The 1984 Penguin Complete Edition of M R James' Ghost Stories includes all four published collections (1904, 1911, 1919 and 1925) with a very few rather weak appended items as well as a very short but informative Preface by the great man himself. This particular edition appears now to be out of print.

However, all these stories - seminal in the development of a particular type of detailed and scholarly horror tale that keeps threatening to prefigure the Lovecraftian but never quite makes the leap - are easily available and cheap online or elsewhere.

A complete works is never going to be completely masterful but the majority of stories are in that category with excellent tales appearing in all collections. Above all, we are attracted to the stories' atmosphere - introverted scholarly men facing uncanny discomfort and downright horror.

Sometimes introverted scholarly men are the bringers of horror through malice but here is one common denominator - the educated rational man out of his depth when his eagerness for knowledge results in the uncovering of something dark and malign invested in what he seeks.

But it is not modern 'cosmic' horror. The prevailing evil is much closer to the medieval and early modern fear of devils and the Devil, of something evil lurking in the natural, in the occult buried in something from the past and above all the dark power of text (which Lovecraft does develop further).

Hidden deeper is a very old fear of knowledge itself, of what it might uncover. This may be very much the anxiety of the cloistered academic in an era that was still coming to terms with both Darwin and serious Biblical criticism. The stories may be a late nineteenth century scholar's shadow side.

There is so much intelligent criticism available that not much can be usefully added by me. I can recommend the relevant passages in Merlin Coverley's relatively recent 'Hauntology' (reviewed here on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ by myself) as an excellent starting point.

All I can do is suggest that anyone interested in the Gothic, in horror, in the weird tale, in the ghost story and, indeed, in Edwardian culture needs to have the James tales in his or her library as well as make the effort to dig out some of the excellent BBC and other TV and film adaptations.

If I had to recommend just one story to give a flavour of the man's work, I would be hard put to it to choose between 'Lost Hearts', 'Oh, Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad', 'The Tractate Middoth', 'Casting the Runes' and 'A Warning to the Curious'.

Just those central five stories give you pagan child murder, malice that oozes around a magical text, a slip of paper whose possession means death and damnation and two similar hauntings from the past in which artefacts bring terror on the Anglian coast. James is strong on old artefacts that bring terror. ]]> Review7506524776 Mon, 21 Apr 2025 08:49:08 -0700 /review/show/7506524776 Tim gave 4 stars to Ancient Egypt: A Very Short Introduction (Paperback) by Ian Shaw
bookshelves: ancient-world, africa, archaeology, art, cultural-studies, egyptology, film-television, history, religion-spiritual

This entry in Oxford's 'Very Short Introduction' series does a serviceable job in dealing with a very big subject in a relatively short amount of space. Like many of these guides, it is well illustrated with a good list for further reading and ancillary material.

Why it is interesting is in its tough honesty about how little we know of how ancient Egyptians structured their lives and thought despite the vast amounts of data that will, perhaps, reveal more when artificial intelligence can be applied to its analysis.

The problem is that both archaeological and even textual data may seem large but it is only a small portion of over 3,000 years of history and heavily skewed to certain contexts - chief of which are obviously funerary contexts but increasingly settlement patterns.

Shaw's honesty allows him to explore critically the way that Egyptology has invented (not always without reason in many cases) an Egypt that relects some contemporary reality. Stripping away these layers does not solve the problem that there may not be much of a 'there' there.

This is not to say that a lot has not been discovered but only that caution is required in interpreting it. He is certainly 'brave' in removing two awkward accretions that are unhelpful - the desire to link Egypt to Biblical Studies and the Afrocentrist nonsense that would have Egypt as a 'black' civilisation.

In fact, race was probably not a great issue to Egyptians. Elsewhere we discover that African genes did enter into the population slowly and increasingly over time but were never a majority and certainly the inbreeding Greek Ptolemaic elite (including Cleopatra) was thoroughly European in origin.

There are some weaknesses to the book. The first is that building his narrative on the Narmer Palette in order to try and hold things together might have seemed like a good organisational idea at the time but it does not hold the narrative well as it unfolds. It eventually becomes forced.

The second is an embarrassing slight defensiveness about facing off various absurdities. He is too kind in tone to Afrocentrism and Pyramidology although he does show their absurdity but you can tell a professional anxiety about not going to far down the road of alienating the politically correct.

The book was published in 2004 just as left-liberalism was moving into place as hegemonic in the universities (a place it may be rapidly losing after the Trump Revolution). He would not be alone in bearing in mind that the practice of a profession required some caution in stating positions.

Finally, because he wants to show how Ancient Egypt has been used to meet contemporary needs at different stages, he fails to use the space provided to explain more of the civilisation but drifts instead into a cultural history that is still treated rather cursorily - for reasons of space.

It would have been far better to have encouraged Oxford to produce another book on the 'influence of Ancient Egypt' or as a more significant section of a book on 'Orientalism' than neglect to explain more of what we might know or surmise about Egyptian social structures and philosophy.

One gap is explaining the process by which the five-fold nature of the individual disintegrates and then reintegrates in the 'other world' or underworld. Similarly, the question of popular enslavement and free labour and of grain management and irrigation are left more open that we might like.

Of course, not everything can be covered in a book like this. There is a separate Very Short Introduction on Egyptian Myth but this book seemed unable to decide whether its remit was the story of Ancient Egypt or the story of Egyptology.

Having said this, the book is still useful and even thought-provoking not only in triggering questions about reasonable scepticism not only in archaeology but in historical literary studies and history but in making the reader interested in the subject and wanting to know more.
]]> Review7501049277 Sat, 19 Apr 2025 08:16:34 -0700 /review/show/7501049277 Tim gave 5 stars to A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East (Hardcover) by James Barr
bookshelves: british, espionage, five-star, history, middle-eastern, modern-european, politics, twentieth-century, warfare

The origins of the crises that might yet turn us all into radioactive ash - Chinese aspirations to acquire Taiwan, Russian concerns about national security to its West- are no more intractable for contemporary understanding than the consequences of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Most people observing the vicious and unholy assault on Gaza by Israel, the collapse of Syria into quasi-Islamism, earlier collapses into anarchy in Iraq and Libya, the re-emergence of Persia as regional power and so many other phenomena tend to have a fairly primitive black and white view.

As always, things are generally more complicated. Each case has its history that can take us back as far as you like but the causes of the modern network of crises in the Middle East are best centred on the near-final clash of empires that took place in the First World War.

The full story is far too complex to re-tell in a mere book review but Barr's account of imperial struggle between Britain and France between 1915 and 1948 is almost essential reading for anyone who thinks they should have an opinion on the matter today.

The central problem was that two already overburdened and potentially vulnerable empires (rather like the US today) were around to fill a vacuum left by the collapse of an aged and less developed empire (the Ottoman), perhaps the last heir of Rome itself.

During the First World War, victory for Britain and France was far from assured (certainly in 1915-1917) when the dumbest and most cowardly document in twentieth century history (the Balfour Declaration) set in motion a horrendous process that is still with us today.

A weak Foreign Secretary created the conditions for the incursion of an unnecessary 'Crusader Street' just at the time when other forces in the British Empire (more obviously progressive if self interested) were working to encourage conservative Arab nationalism to win the war and secure India.

At the same time (the main subject of Barr's book) a mutually distrustful France and Britain, with totally different conceptions of empire, were almost absent-mindedly carving up the Ottoman Empire (the Sykes-Picot Agreement) well before it had actually fallen.

And there we have it - a Palestine gifted to well funded ethno-nationalists over the heads of the local population, the encouragement and creation of a new Arab ethno-nationalism masked as conservative dynasticism and the latter betrayed not just by the first but by imperial ambition.

From this point on, it is all down hill as the increasing numbers of Jews in Palestine demand security and protection, Arab greed and disorganisation is always one step behind and France encourages (eventually) Jewish terrorism just as the British encouraged Arab resistance to French imperialism.

Barr covers the story in a very readable narrative style with considerable attention to detail. Every move in the local version of the Great Game is presented and explained. Emotion is removed so we can see the players precisely for what they were.

The British are their usual self-interested, lazily rational selves spoiled by inept politicians ... so not much change there. Their involvement is fundamentally one of protecting the communications and eventually oil flow across the empire. Egypt and India are what matter.

For London, the Arabs are there to be much like any other subservient affiliate of empire protecting a flank and denying rivals (which includes the French) from getting too close to essential interests. This is what the dumb Balfour Declaration totally screwed up.

The last period of the British mandate in Palestine shows just how out of its depth Britain was as its empire began the process of complete degeneration. The road to India was, of course, going to be less important after 1947. The surge of British brutality was nasty, desperate and actually out of character.

The French are just vicious. Their approach to empire can only be described as thuggish and overtly exploitative, run by officials who gave empire its bad name and who were much more happy working as Vichy than as Free French (a subsidiary story covered well by Barr).

De Gaulle was an exasperating narcissistic handful for the British and about as trustworthy as a rattle snake, mostly from weakness. For the French, whatever international law might say, Syria and Lebanon were 'possessions' to be possessed regardless of the natives.

The British by the twentieth century actually tried to be pretty decent without questioning that the fundaments of their rule were indecent. The French did not even bother to try. The Americans have proven that hegemony can enforce tolerance of the criminal on supine 'allies'.

The Zionists come across as one step from fanatic. In fact, let us call this straight. They were manipulative terrorists who did a right old post war number on the American people with their extremely astute exploitation of 'spin' and celebrity. Actors look stupid then as now.

No better than Arafat in his heyday or Hamas, Irgun and the Stern Gang's terrorism, funded and assisted by the French and American Jews, murdered Arabs and British soldiers and administrators alike. This makes the power of the Israel lobby in the UK today all the more impressive.

This leaves the Arabs. It is a picture that is not flattering in terms of organisational ability or coherence. Arab intellectuals are great talkers and love grandstanding events but they seem to have a problem organising a clear shared ideology or avoiding flattery and corruption.

Constantly out-played by Zionists and what amount to French Fascists (to all intents and purposes), the path to brutal dictatorship or flaccid Western-backed dynasticism or futile terrorism in response to what were masters at the trade is marked out during these years.

Certainly the Arab propensity to conspiracy theory and narratives of betrayal is borne out by much of the evidence in the book although much of any British betrayal is as much down to incompetence as deliberation. The French never promised anything in the first place.

Meanwhile two stories are unfolding outside this book that will come into play later. The first is the emergence of Islamism as the primary form of Egyptian resistance to colonialism and the second is the exploitation of the resources of Iran which will lead eventually to Mossadeq's overthrow.

What a mess! But the book is not a mess. Barr has produced an important narrative account of how we got to where we are today. Nor does it make judgements. It simply lays out the facts. I have my interpretation and yours may be different (if you have the courage to escape your prejudices).

And a conclusion? Perhaps that, when desiring the collapse of ramshackle of empires, we should be careful of what we wish for if the successor operations are exploitative, cynical and less-than-competent vampires who hate each other.

As to the self-determination which Woodrow Wilson threw into the pot and which the British were pragmatically prepared to concede in order to protect the whole, again, be careful of what you wish for if the ethnic entities involved are ruthless and mad on the one side or ill-formed on the other.

There are no solutions in this book. The two main Western empires are now virtually defunct despite their posturings. The great successor empire in Washington is grappling with the chaos with precisely the same mix of incompetencies, barren ideology and self interest.

The heir of the Jewish ethno-nationalists is a monster that the West, playing Dr. Frankenstein, refuses to recognise as one. The Arabs in the region of Sykes-Picot are either battered basket cases (Syria, Lebanon) or constantly living on the edge of becoming one (Jordan, Iraq).

As to the Palestinians - the poorly led front line victims of all these imperial shenanigans - they are 'busted' with the best on offer being a confined puppet state on the West Bank, humanitarian 'ethnic cleansing' and what many now consider localised 'genocide'.

Over a century after Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration, perhaps the biggest loser is the self-image of the 'West' (whatever that is) as the good guy. As the histories are told (and there are many of them now), the old rhetoric looks like a coating of cream on a pile of poo.

Traditional narrative history has often got lost in the drive to bore us with critical theory and minor academics wallowing in 'discourses'. Nobody reads that rubbish and so nothing changes. If you bother to read the facts and think for yourself, maybe our elites can actually be brought to account. ]]> Review7493942593 Wed, 16 Apr 2025 12:25:53 -0700 /review/show/7493942593 Tim gave 3 stars to Nietzsche, Volumes One and Two (Paperback) by Martin Heidegger
bookshelves: history-of-philosophy, modern-european, nineteenth-century, philosophy, twentieth-century

It must have been bloody tough being a student of Martin Heidegger and not just because he was intellectually demanding. He seems to have had a strong tendency towards rambling, thinking as a process circling in on itself rather than crystallising what was being thought into an event or system.

These two volumes (of four) represent the barely edited (in the sense of being fully synthesised into total coherence) of lectures given by Heidegger on Nietzche between 1936 and 1940. The dates are important - this was Germany with a university system under national socialist discipline.

We should not let this over-excite us. Heidegger's active national socialist engagement preceded this and was brief. It is not incorrect to say that he had his doubts about the very anti-intellectual ideology of the Party. He was thinking his own thoughts.

Nevertheless, we have a quasi-national socialist philosopher of genius lecturing here on the philosopher most appropriated for its own uses by national socialism to an audience of students who were designated the youth of a future national socialist regeneration.

Personally I have less problem with this than many liberals think that I should have because the core thought of Heidegger was revolutionary, devastatingly so in some respects, in ways that spin Heidegger well out of any simplistic ideology into something entirely new and 'true'.

I will not try and regurgitate here what it is that Heidegger thought but rather concentrate on the fact that his philosophising returned to the myth of Socrates before Plato got his grubby hands on the man - that is, the thinking, the process of thinking, is what counts no matter where it leads.

In Heidegger's case, the thinking, the process, was always wholly centred on the question of Being which is central to our relation to everything that is the case. This question of Being enters into territory that was God to the past, perhaps the Abyss to Nietzsche and the Void to dark magicians.

Part of the text is about a contestation of Nihilism (the primary problem for humanity after Darwin and articulated by Nietzsche). Nietzsche's philosophy is a working against Nihilism without clear success. Heidegger attempts to make his philosophy more of a success than it was in this respect.

This made me suspicious because of the text's location in place and time. National Socialist ideology was also constantly struggling with nihilism - a fight that was to collapse in a bunker in 1945 - and the book reads sometimes like an attempt to speed up a recovery from Nietzsche's challenge.

We must remember just how important Nietzsche became as an appropriated icon for national socialists. Here is Heidegger lecturing to a future cadre under internal and external pressure not to let nihilism be the guiding light for a future Germany. There is some 'mauvaise foi' lurking here.

The relationship between Nietzsche and Heidegger is, quite separately, central to understanding how it was even possible to move from God towards Being and, in other hands perhaps, Nothingness. These lectures show a man struggling, almost in real time, with his own connection to his precursor.

The God-thing was of great consequence to both philosophers but in subtly different ways. Nietzsche asserted the death of God with some courage and found a gaping hole. Heidegger was filling that hole with Being yet knowing the danger (as someone trained in Thomism) of Being becoming God.

If Heidegger's Being was to become no more than God by another name, then Heidegger may as well pack up and go home or rather become a priest in the Catholic Church. But Being that is not God could equally become Nihil and so meaningless as to deny anything of worth to being human (Dasein).

This was the struggle - God was dead. The process of thinking about Being was one where Being might become Nihil or bring God back from the dead if a grip was not maintained on the process itself, that is on philosophising as a relation to Being.

We can see straight away why 'dealing with' Nietzsche (who had only died less than forty or so years before) was ideological, political, cultural and philosophical and why Heidegger was on very dangerous ground to himself (philosophically rather than politically) in providing any narrative.

Unfortunately, Heidegger declines to be very clear because clarity would be a false friend in the process of thinking what may be close to or in fact unthinkable, let alone the notorious 'unthought thought' which might be regarded as Heidegger's response to Kant.

To have systematised the 'unthought thought' that lies behind the thought thought as Kant did would have merely ended up with ... a system. The point is that what is behind us as Dasein (thrown into the world) cannot be systematised. There is a place for Kant but not here.

Does this book take us very far along the road to understanding all this? Personally I think it is a rocky and demanding by-way. To a Heideggerian trying to think along Heideggerian lines, the book will be suggestive and useful. The rest of us might not be so sure.

As you read the well over 500 pages of text, it becomes increasingly clear that Heidegger is appropriating Nietzsche (as the Nazis did) for his own ends. His references are scholarly but his interpretations are designed to elucidate Heidegger's thought more than Nietzsche's.

This makes the book problematic because one does not know whether to take it seriously as an insight into what Nietzsche may have actual meant (Heidegger's intuitions are not to be dismissed too easily) or into what Heidegger thought using Nietzsche as an almost mediumistic vehicle.

The task is made more difficult by the fact that amidst long passages of obscurity and the turgid, Heidegger suddenly delivers a flash of deep insight into either Nietzsche or what can be thought or both. Separating these components out requires time only scholars will have.

One thing is very clear. Heidegger's takes Nietzsche's 'eternal return' very seriously as something the latter truly believed in. I find this hard to accept. Krell, the very scholarly editor and translator of the book (no easy task), does sometimes give us cause to doubt the precision of Heidegger's scholarship.

There are three factors that create doubt. The ideological environment of the time. The incompleteness of access to Nietzsche's total work, Heidegger's propensity to a form of thought-egoism in which the world of thought is always grist to his thinking mill.

Nevertheless, this is a book (alongside a read of Volumes 3 & 4) that I may come back to in a better informed and constructively critical frame of mind, not in order to understand Nietzsche better (one should go to source for that) but to understand better what was taken from him by Heidegger.

A strange contribution to thought that in its uncertainties and ambiguities is a form of demonstration of how Heideggerian thinking works - after all, the aphoristic Nietzsche was not averse to a playful misuse of sources and of assertion to drive our thinking forward away from false systematising.

***

A friend adds in a private note: "I know you are not keen but I think volumes 3 and 4 would be very interesting because his reading of Nietzsche is even more insane, but is also very critical, so there is a big contrast with 1 and 2. If you wanted to be kind to students of Heidegger who are likely to find your review online (there is quite a lack of good material on Heidegger's Nietzsche) then it would be helpful to say that volumes 1 and 2 are English translation of the German volume 1. Volumes 3 and 4 are the English translation of the German volume 2. This difference causes loads of confusion and I wasted a lot of time trying to work out what was going on, because some people refer to volumes 1-4 and some to volumes 1 and 2 without clarifying which text they are actually referring to." I hope that this is useful advice. ]]>