Seems I hit the jackpot. Schiller's and Gardiner's books are both now on my kindle. Gardiner looks to be the better jumping off point. Perhaps this year I will finally get to grips with this rather forbidding topic. Thanks.Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
Oh you are welcome. And yes, if you want to get a grip on the issues, you should start with Gardiner. Schiller's histories can be like Voltaire's: consummate reading experiences but not necessarily consummate as history. And with Schiller, of course, you are dealing with translations, which may or may not mitigate his fine language. Gardiner was not as poet as Schiller was. but he was an excellent historian with an engaging style.
Wilson makes the claim in his book that neither of these works gives enough attention to the later years of the conflict (by which time virtually all the principle figures at the war's start were dead). On the other hand, his book is 997 pages long, so don't plan on reading much else for a while: it may be the reader who dies waiting for the Peace of Westphalia! Wilson also attributes the lack of current histories on the conflict to wide range of languages needed for serious study, and an excess of historical material:
To cover all aspects would require knowledge of at least fourteen European languages, while there is sufficient archival materials enough to occupy many lifetimes of research. Even the printed material runs to millions of pages; there are over 4,000 titles just on the Peace of Westphalia that concluded the conflict.
And yet, as you say, the war was a watershed event in European history. The Peace of Westphalia was arguably the reason that Europe was able to rise the heights that it later did. (Some historians even consider the period between 1914 and 1945 to have been a kind of "Thirty Years War II").
In any case, I hope you enjoy the histories. Von Ranke is also eminently worth your time, although I know these photocopies eat up memory like summer candy. Happy reading in any case!
Last edited by Pompey Bum; 01-23-2015 at 10:52 AM.
Victor Hugo wrote a character not sympathetic at all who enjoys manipulating people in order to get more influence. However, I think Cesar - his brother - appears more vicious than her.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently" – Friedrich Nietzsche
You're welcome, and I hope you're enjoying your "Boston caviar." And thank you for the reference to Prebble. His trilogy of novels about the Highlands clans looks interesting, but--to my further frustration--I find that it is not available on Kindle. It's not like the old days when if a store didn't have something you could just ask them to order it. O tempes! O mores! Anyway...
Schama's an interesting character. He seems to have spent his career reacting against the trendy Marxism of his professors, so he's never been afraid to think for himself. His snobbishness can be a bit irritating at times, but at other times it's just sort of funny. Stand beside a man when measuring his snark, I always say.
Well, he was probably right (although not as vicious as Cesar Borgia isn't saying a whole lot). In fact, there isn't that much known about Lucrezia Borgia apart from the calumnies her enemies maintained about incest and poisoning. One has to consider the sources on that, of course, and the lack of any real evidence against her. Some feminist scholars think she was just a gal doing what she had to do in the Machiavellian family into which she was born. Again, maybe but who knows? Sometimes a person's life takes on a legendary quality that quite eclipses the truth. Poor Lucrezia? I doubt it. She lived in some pretty cutthroat times.
I find it interesting how popular Hugo and Scott and Dumas remain, at least based on this thread. I'm surprised there haven't been more contemporary historical novels cited.
Not quite. If you care to read my novel Pro Bono Publico, you will see how it all came apart after WWII."The U.K, all the way!"
^ All the history I need to know, baby.
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
Another empire man?
Speaking of the empire, when the queen (may she live forever) dies are we going to get William on our money? I don't think I'm comfortable with that if it is the case.
So with the courage of a clown, or a cur, or a kite jerkin tight at it's tether
No, it's concerned primarily with domestic politics, although any novel concerning the changes in post-war Britain would of necessity have some reference to its former colonies. If you want to Google it you will be able to read a synopsis.
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
Emil redpill me on Thatcher, good or bad for Bri'un?
So with the courage of a clown, or a cur, or a kite jerkin tight at it's tether
Yes, Plutarch is awesome. Many of his works are available online for free, including some of the lesser known ones. And like you, I would recommend the Purvis translation ("The Landmark Herodotus"), as long as the reader doesn't mind shelling out the dough (the hardback version is $72.35 from Amazon). If not, then once again there are good translations available online for free.
"After the first 100-120 pages it just takes off" is another one of those unintentionally funny remarks, only because (I'm guessing) not everyone is going to take it as a recommendation.But I couldn't agree with you more about the book as a whole; except that I like the first 120 pages, too--Pierre was a sort of personal identification character for me when I first read it.
As I was discussing with someone or other a few months ago (never get old, Vota), War and Peace is not just a historical novel, it is also a theory of history, and moreover a theory of fate. Tolstoy is rejecting the "great man" theory of Thomas Carlyle, which was such an important part of the 19th century European mindset. A narcissistic Napoleon gives orders and imagines (along with much of Europe) that he is the incubus of martial brilliance. But no one on the battlefields really get the orders. Things just go along as they have to, dependent only on the constantly shifting interplay the force and needs of "small individuals" over vast tableaus of battles that Tolstoy creates. Likewise Kutuzov doesn't really have a master plan for beating Napoleon that involves withdrawing into the heart of Russia. In fact, when he learns that Napoleon has been stupid enough to evacuate Moscow, Kutuzov stands weeping before an icon, giving thanks because he finally understands how he is going to be able to beat the guy. (And even then, it's just by harassing his columns).
And as with war, so with "peace," that is, with the society of aristocratic families, and older men, and women, and lovers in Alexander I's Russia. For Tolstoy, fate works like the planchette of Ouija board, which everyone's fingers lightly touch. Tiny vibrations pull it this way and that. One senses a pattern, some assert a meaning to what is seen to transpire, but in fact it is just the collective machination of a great web of competing forces (as Tolstoy himself describes it) pushing and pulling humanity at war and peace into the trajectory of the planchette. No great hero has imposed his will and led the way. These ideas, which drew on Augustine, link that remote past to modernist ideas of the 20th century and beyond. If only for that, War and Peace is a phenomenon.
But as you say, there is so much more to War and Peace that the novel cannot be recommended highly enough. There the conception of fully human characters like Pierre, Prince Andrey, Natasha Rastova, and Marka Bolkonskaya, and others; their character development into real adults; and even, in the case of Pierre and Natasha, by the end, hints of changes into people we may not completely like: who seem, in a way, to be lesser than their "fully realized" adult selves. That is a difficult realism recognizable only from the vantage point of age. Only Tolstoy. Only Tolstoy.
And then there are the magnificent and sometimes experimental images. Andrey, wounded at Austerlitz, staring up at God, who seems to be staring down at Andrey--staring down at Austerliz. The minor gunnery soldier, sitting on his promontory raining down death like a thunder god. But away from battle he is an anonymous mediocrity. And then there is the almost post-modern description of the city of Moscow, after Kutuzov has withdrawn but before Napoleon's troops have entered, as a great, moribund beehive--with the metaphor extended for an entire chapter. This is not just brilliant prose, it is radical and experimental literature.
Oh I'm sorry, I got carried away. I like War and Peace. It's my favorite historical novel. Somebody (E.M. Forster?) said that those who read long books like them because they like the fact that they finished them. Anyone who feels that way about War and Peace seriously needs to open the book up from the beginning and read it for real this time.
Last edited by Pompey Bum; 01-23-2015 at 04:39 PM.
One of my bigger pet peeves is people insisting that the Russian novels are 'slow' somehow... I suppose because they are long they must necessarily also be slow. Whatever.
Prince Andrey is probably my favourite literary character alongside Bernando Soares or Raskolnikov who will always maintain a top spot for being my first love (Crime and Punishment was the second or third 'serious' work of literature I read).
So with the courage of a clown, or a cur, or a kite jerkin tight at it's tether
Well my book ends where Thatcher's arrival in Downing street begins. In principle I support what she did in saving the country from the bankruptcy that had overtaken it by 1976. However, there are signs that she covered up for paedophiles in her cabinet: something that has come to light since she died and which implicates some of the highest members of the political elite during the period both before and after her premiership.
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
Well that's pretty bad, but you would say that she left the country better than where she found it when she took office, or no?
So with the courage of a clown, or a cur, or a kite jerkin tight at it's tether
Oh definitely! It couldn't have been much worse than when she took office.
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
