Jonathan Parry teaches 19th-century history at Cambridge. His short history of British political liberalism is out now.
If historians are remembered posthumously, it tends to be for their book titles, while the books themselves gather dust. James Bryce is mostly known today for his surveys of two of history’s great federations: The Holy Roman Empire and The American Commonwealth. He admired both. In some quarters, he retains a more substantial reputation, as a powerful advocate of Anglo-American...
The publication of The Four Feathers in 1902 established A.E.W. Mason’s reputation as a writer of adventure stories. Over the next forty years, the book sold nearly a million copies. The plot turns on Harry Feversham’s receipt of four white feathers accusing him of cowardice for refusing to enlist in Britain’s military campaign in Egypt in 1882. Subsequently, he attempts...
One can imagine the dilemma this sound narrative history posed to a publisher looking for a catchy title. Even so, The First Cold War is an unhelpful one. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain and Russia did not seek to divide the world between them and very rarely pointed weapons at each other. Russia fought almost two dozen wars after 1783, but only the Crimean War of 1854-56 and the...
When we think of the fashions of the 1890s, several objects come to mind: the tennis racquet, the golfing cap, the Daily Mail, a full-length Singer Sargent portrait, The Diary of a Nobody. In 1896, A. & C. Black purchased the rights to a dull annual almanac called Who’s Who and relaunched it the following year in a format designed to appeal to contemporary taste. The original
In 1863 extracts from the journal of the Hon. Impulsia Gushington were published under the title Lispings from Low Latitudes. Impulsia had joined the fad for Egyptian travel and enjoyed an English lady’s usual adventures with camels, pyramids and cunning Orientals. Finally, she fell for the charms of a French aristocrat, Monsieur de Rataplan, and a sequel was promised that would...
The Ottoman regime allowed the British considerable latitude so long as they didn’t directly threaten Ottoman interests. The British themselves only slowly realised quite how lucky they were in having...
This impressive study of Victorian politics is built around a challenging thesis: that Gladstone, far from being the creator of the Liberal Party, was in fact a maverick who stumbled into the...
The culture, of the first fifty years or so of this century – ‘Modernism’ – comes increasingly to be seen in historical perspective: as a period of the past with its own...
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