Month: March 2012

Some books are just so well written that it makes reading them almost like watching a film.  In Stalingrad Antony Beevor has produced such a book. You lose awareness that you have a book in your hand and you just picture what is going on in your head.   This is a book that is that well written.  But I think that this isn’t just down to the skill of the author.  I imagine that to get the realistic feel that this book has it must have been necessary to spend many hours in research getting to know the subject matter intimately.  You don’t think about that when you are reading it of course.  The effort it must have taken to produce no more crosses your mind when you are reading a good book than you think about the animination techniques in a well made film.

The previous episodes in this three part series have told the story of how China came to be where it is today. This one tackles the question of where it is going next.

Roman Empire at Time of Julian the Apostate (thanks to Wikipedia)

Rome grew to dominate the world under the republic. After the republic fell, the emperors for the most part were content to simply defend what they had. But the tradition of conquest continued. Claudius added Britain and Dacia and Mesopotamia were conquered by Trajan. Several smaller scale campaigns outside the empire were undertaken too. So in 363 when Julian, the last pagan emperor led a Roman army drawn from all parts of the empire out across the border to conquer a foreign enemy he was doing something that was rare but which was not unprecedented. It would have broken his young and idealistic heart to know that this would be the last time the empire as he knew it would mount such an attack.

‘Better luck next time!’ – British sailors to Napoleon as he was transferred to the ship taking him to exile in St Helena.

The second programme in Niall Ferguson’s series on China opened with a chilling question. If we ask the Chinese to help with bail out western economies, does that mean that they will become our masters?  It is an interesting and sobering question.  But he then proceeded to spend the next hour answering a completely different question, which is how come Chairman Mao is still so popular in China.

Growing up in the seventies I was a socialist.  I was a pretty moderate socialist, but a socialist nonetheless.  But as I thought things through and became more aware of how the world was, I began to realise that socialists had two huge problems.  The first was the USSR.  The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was very obviously socialist, they even had it in the name.  It was also very obviously not somewhere to be admired.  For a start there was the violent repression of dissent.  But bad as that was, there was also the problem that it was just a bit crap.

With the latest results just in from the process to select the Republican candidate just in, yet another upset has materialised with the front runner, Mitt Romney, failing to win any states.  This fits in beautifully with the narrative being applied to the story by the media.  Republican voters are, we are told, deeply unhappy with poor choice being offered to them and are expressing this by their fickle switching from one doomed unpopular candiate to another.It must be a dispiriting business to be a Republican right now.  Without a decent candidate to get behind it must be miserable.

But I wonder if this is the real story?  Is there something else to explain it?

Niall Ferguson’s one hour history and sketch of China started with him admitting that he didn’t really understand it – in fact he feels like he is an alien when he visits.  Not a promising introduction, but he soon starts giving the lie to it by pointing out some of those obvious facts that stare you in the face but that you never really notice.