Review of Tinderbox by MJ Akbar

Tinderbox – The Past and Future of Pakistan

by M J Akbar

Anyone who has watched Attenborough's Gandhi, knows the metaphor of India being a beautiful women with lustrous eyes: one eye Hindu, one eye Muslim. How a country where two faiths had lived intertwined for over a millennium could degenerate into the violence of partition is one of the real mysteries of India.

In Tinderbox Akbar analyses the ‘DNA’ of Pakistan, going back to the defeat of the Mughal Empire by the British and the impact of defeat and conquest on Muslim elites in the North of the Subcontinent.

Akbar shows how one aspect of that reaction is embodied in the Muslim league’s leader Jinnah. Jinnah was a pretty careless Muslim. He enjoyed a drink; could not quote the Koran, and invited Mountbatten to lunch during Ramadan. His model was Attaturk. He believed in a secular republic whose majority were Muslims and saw the Muslim faith and Urdu language as indispensable but vulnerable markers of community, which required their own state apparatus to survive.

Jinnah is often called the father of Pakistan. Akbar then focuses on Maulana Maududi, whom he calls the Godfather of Pakistan. Maududi, who died in 1979 was a Wahabi influenced religious scholar with a vitriolic hatred of the West and all its works. Maududi’s theological worldview could get traction in certain sections of the Muslim population both because of a historical (albeit contentious) memory of defeat and humiliation at the hands of the British Raj and the ongoing injustice and fitful economic progress of Pakistan.

Add bad politics and self-seeking politicians and, according to Akbar, you have the potential for a ‘toxic jelly state’ – one that neither collapses nor stabilizes and where there is a real chance that nuclear weapons could end up being controlled by people who believe suicide is a pathway to paradise.

That last proposition seems somewhat alarmist. What Akbar does not do is analyse in any detail the political numbers or the current allegiances of key military and judicial figures. When given a chance, the Pakistani people have consistently rejected Islamist political parties. The army has moved to crush the Taliban in the Swat Valley. A doomsday scenario is a long way off. What would have been useful, and what Akbar – an Indian Muslim and evidently no great fan of Pakistan – does not provide, is an analysis of how a more positive future, one where the tendency embodied in Jinnah prevails, might come about.

Review of Jacks and Jokers

Jacks and Jokers

By Matthew Condon

In an interview in the Courier Mail in March last year Matthew Condon said this about what at that time was a projected two volume work on police corruption in Queensland:

"I felt ...that I was in a unique position, as a storyteller, to try to get to the heart of this drama before even more people passed away and their memories were lost ..."

Unfortunately, this worthy ambition remains unfulfilled in Jacks and Jokers - now the second in a trilogy. The problem is easy to understand. Condon is dealing with about thirty years of policing history and literally hundreds of characters. Keeping track of who is who is a real challenge - all those Irish surnames - and is not assisted by Condon's episodic true crime writing style.

What Jacks and Jokers does provide is a picaresque journey through the dregs of Queensland society in the late 70s and early 80s on both sides of the thin blue line. But the "big picture" as the participants themselves refer to it, tends to get lost in a mass of sordid detail.

To illustrate the problem, a key thread in the story is the efforts of the corrupt police who are in "the Joke" to get rid of ex commissioner Whitrod's adherent and  chief of the Licensing Branch, Alec Jeppesen. The elements of this fascinating tale and its consequences are scattered over at least a dozen or so short references (beginning at page 98 and not concluding until page 365). But this is not a peripheral part of the story. It was the evidence on indemnity of Dwyer and his successor Parker which really exposed how the Joke worked - the Licensing Branch enforced the laws on prostitution and illegal gambling and generated about $250,000 a year in bribes - and their evidence also sent Tom Lewis to gaol. The history of the battle for control of the Licensing Branch was crying out for its own sustained analysis and not the fragmented treatment it receives.

And this is where Condon's dependence on former Commissioner Tom Lewis as a source is problematic. Lewis served seven years for corruption but maintains his innocence. He kept detailed diaries but was ultimately convicted on the evidence of other corrupt police. Lewis clearly has an agenda: to maintain deniability and Condon does not take him on (though he stops well short of exculpating him as well).

Perhaps the great unsolved question of the Moonlight State era is the precise relationship between former Assistant Commissioner Tony Murphy - never charged but generally agreed to have been the real criminal mastermind - and Commissioner Tom Lewis. As Tony Koch wrote in The Australian at the time of Tony Murphy's death in 2010: "Obviously the only one who could fill in the gaps and put history right is Lewis, but that is an unlikely event."

Japanese Prose Literature from 1000 CE and counting.

Japanese Prose Literature from 1000 CE and counting.

The editor of Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan (Hearn was an earlier populariser of Japanoiserie in the west) has observed that the classic Western attitude to Japan goes through three stages: unreasoning infatuation; heedless dislike; and finally acceptance. As he puts it “more like marriage than a love affair”.
I first went to Japan in 1983 and freely admit to having experienced the three stages so described. These days, the bubble economy of the 1980s is a distant memory and Japan is only our third biggest trading partner.  Japanese investment in Australia has been in retreat for at least 20 years and Toyota is just the last of a long line of failed ventures.
So why bother? The answer of course lies in a culture that is a brilliant meld of tradition and innovation (though maybe not quite as unique as the Japanese like to think) and its cultural productions which, properly considered, really are uniquely rewarding.
So let’s begin at the beginning. And I do mean the beginning at least as far as the novel goes.
Some picaresque (and fairly pornographic) efforts from the Romans to one side (eg the Satyricon) the first novel ever was Genji Monogatari written in the early 11th century Heian Japan. This is a world with nothing in common with the more familiar Tokugawa period scenario of samurai, geisha and ninja. Not surprisingly, its author was a woman - Shikibu Murasaki. Genji is a massive house brick of a book and is usually consumed, at least in translation, in sensible abridgments. In common with its many descendants, part of its success is in capturing the atmosphere of a moment in time (or at least what the reader is persuaded must be that atmosphere) and few works succeed so completely in communicating a world which to most readers (including and perhaps especially to modern Japanese) is truly alien. The effete aristos who comprise Lady Murasaki’s subject matter do not engender a lot of sympathy but they are fascinating. Part of the problem in knowing how to react to this work is embedded in the potential Japanese has as a language to obscure agency. Unlike an inflected language the subject has no marker; unlike a syntactic language word order is not a reliable guide to grammatical meaning. Particles that follow nouns are capable of resolving the confusion but only if the composer so wishes. In the pitch dark veranda houses of 10th century Japan on a moonless night a certain amount of ambiguity was evidently considered desirable.
For a more immediately simpatico rendering of this era see the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. Shonagon writes about the minutiae of Court life with sardonic wit. It is a world where the first thing you do on returning from a romantic tryst at day break is pen a “morning after poem” and despatch it forthwith. A typical excursion involves listening to cuckoos and inspecting a noble house where the quaint singing of the peasantry is the occasion for amusement.
In the history of literature it is vanishingly rare to have even one female perspective into such a distant time and place. In the whole history of classical Latin and Greek we have nothing like it except a few poems by Sappho. To have two female perspectives within a comparable time frame is pretty close to a miracle. And in fact there is a whole corpus of female poetry and diaries beyond the scope of this article. See the Anthology of Japanese Literature edited by Donald Keene.
But the gentle world which permitted this literary output – and remember, no output without an audience – was about to end. Yup, the blokes were in the saddle again.
Interestingly they found no reason to disrupt the outward form of things. An emperor would continue but real power would be exercised by soldiers.  Three ”tent government” regimes– the Kamakura, Ashikaga and Tokugawa Shogunates - ruled or attempted to rule Japan from the 12th century CE until the Meiji restoration in the 1860s. The emperor in Kyoto reigned, the Shogun ruled.  The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi in 1643 is one of the few literary productions we have written by a professional killer. Given his profession – training sword fighters to survive in a violent age – it is hardly surprising that the numerous aphorisms, all eminently quotable, are also all practically useless. No point in giving the competition a leg up when the stakes are so high. As he puts it: “amatueristic martial arts are the source of serious wounds”.
The Book of Family Traditions on the Art of War by way of contrast was written by Yagyu Menenori an official in the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1632 – effectively head of the secret service – and is at pains to bend Zen Buddhist techniques (such as the contradiction in terms) in the service of the State. For example:  “[if] myriad people are saved by the killing of one man. Would not this be a true example of ‘the sword that kills is the sword that gives life?’”
A more authentic version of this Buddhist view is in Kamo no Chomei’s “Account of my Hut” hut “  written in the early 13th century and which introduces themes which recur regularly in Japanese literature, particularly of disengagement from the contemporary world whose worth is illusory and the flowing river, always there but never the same.
Under the Tokugawa Shogunate Japan was a closed country from the early 17th century until the 1860s. Contacts with the West and China were closely controlled and confined to the port of Nagasaki. Christianity was ruthlessly suppressed and an attempt made to enforce strict caste distinctions between samurai, merchants and farmers. It is not surprising therefore that the cultural productions of the era owe nothing to Western models. Perhaps the most famous writer of the period is Matsu Bassho whose haiku in Japanese literature have the status of Shakespeare’s sonnets. He also wrote prose, particularly about his extensive travels in Japan. His The Narrow Road to Oku is a very early example of the high flown travel genre; strangely reminiscent of Samuel Johnson’s Walking Tour of Western Scotland and the Isles.
Notwithstanding the essentially reactionary nature of Tokugawa rule these centuries were also a period of massive and sustained economic development. By the time the American fleet obtained trading rights in the 1860s Japan was already ripe for radical change. The Last Shogun by Ryotaro Shiba is a well-researched novel set in this era. In Australia it would probably be classed as “faction” and marketed as non-fiction but the Japanese thankfully still know the difference between history and historical fiction.
The Meiji Restoration and entailed a thorough going commitment to adapt and utilise Western technology to preserve and strengthen the Japanese State. And it succeeded. Along with Thailand, Japan is the only Asian country to escape Western invasion and domination in the late 19th century. Inevitably however the influence of the West could not be confined to the means of production and the weapons of war. That this process would culminate in a military dominated regime whose armed forces routinely committed atrocities that would make Genghis Khan blush and ended in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was by no means a forgone conclusion. At the time it seemed that the breakdown of the Tokugawa caste system and introduction of Western idea and persons was a historic opportunity.
Those of us who visited Japan before “kokusaika” –internationalisation – was government policy are a little miffed to find that in fact the road we are on has been trampled to the stubble by many before.  By the late 19th century Westerners were everywhere in Japan: proselytizing (with very limited success); doing business; training technicians and teaching English (even then the real international language). Compulsory primary school education quickly produced a massive reading public. Per head of population the Japanese consume more novels than any other nation. There are still 18,000 odd book stores in the country compared to 6,000 in the United States. And from the beginning of this cultural efflorescence the Japanese were fascinated by the intersection of the West and their own powerful traditions.
Natsume Soseki is the Meiji era novelist who captures this extraordinary time. In Kokoro he writes about young people encountering a world full of new possibilities and problems. In I am a Cat, his first person narrator, a cat of course, engages in fairly savage satire at the expense of his middle class owners and their pretentious circle of friends.
Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country tells the relationship between an onsen (hot spring resort) geisha and an effete and independently wealthy ballet critic (who has never seen an actual ballet). This story, which has the potential to offend on just about every imaginable level, manages to transcend the Pretty Woman cliché, and becomes a serious meditation on the possibilities of love in the context of human selfishness. It all ends badly of course but also provides a vivid picture of the life of an onsen resort; one of Japans truly great contributions to civilized hedonism.
Junichiro Tanizaki is perhaps the greatest Japanese novelist to come to maturity before the Second World War. His Makioka Sisters bears comparison with anything Tolstoy wrote and is a brilliant evocation of the world destroyed by the war. Tanizaki’s The Key is an acute insight into one kind of dysfunctional marriage while his Naomi is a clear eyed study of what happens when sexual attraction overwhelms common sense.
All of these pre-war writers succeed in conveying a world which is exotic, sensual and yet recogniseably modern. Western readers accustomed to the obliqueness of their 19th century tradition on matters sexual are usually pleasantly surprised by Japanese directness in this area (which is not to say that these writers are engaged in erotica; they are just not products of a Judaeo-Christian ethical system).The characters are constrained (or left free to indulge their passions) by forces and expectations particular to pre-war Japan but they respond in ways that make sense given their context. Of particular note is the theme of male female difference and the feminine tradition which went underground at the end of the Heian era can be seen struggling to assert itself.
What these writers do not do is give any insight into the mindset which produced the Rape of Nanking. Unlike the Germans, the Japanese have been slow to come to grips with the enormities committed in their name. There is no Japanese Gunter Grass.
That the “old Japan” is a world that is ceasing to exist remains a preoccupation of Japanese literature, sometimes solipsistically so. For mine, the most unfortunate expression of this obsession is the work of Yukio Mishima. Thirst for Love – the mercifully short (but very readable) early novel about an affair between an agricultural labourer and an upper class land owner is an example of his quasi-feudal world view tinged by sado-masochism. The very ambitious tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, (which he completed before committing seppuku after a failed right wing coup in 1970) is unfortunately very heavy going. By way of example, in Runaway Horses the series’ protagonist seeks to save a young man (whom he believes to be a reincarnation of a deceased childhood friend) from involvement with right wing fanatics in the early 1930s. He fails and the debate one might have expected about the merits of the militarist’s agenda simply never eventuates. Mishima is a post war writer who glamourizes what most observers now see as an aberration – the ultra-nationalist exceptionalism of the 1930s militarists.
Mishima eventually expressed his disappointment at the new Japan by committing seppuku and, it has to be said, at least had the courage of his fascistic convictions.  I suspect the reason for his high profile in translation has a lot to do with Confessions of a Mask, a semi-autobiographical early work which deals with the protagonist’s crypto-homosexuality and seemed to promise a radical critique of Japanese culture. Mishima was a radical but not in the way most of us had hoped. There is however an excellent movie about his life Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters which is definitely worth seeing.
Mishima’s suicide seems something of an over reaction. Post war Japanese fiction, has lost none of it vigour, nor its unique voice. Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes – about an amateur entomologist abducted by coastal villagers to assist in their fight against encroaching sand - is an early example of the tendency to the surreal and is reprised in spades in the work of Haruki Murakami.
Murukami’s novels are enormously popular and with good reason. He treads the border between speculative fiction and literature. His disengaged, hedonistic but ultimately decent protagonists guilessly act as vectors for their more driven and damaged counter parties. Norwegian Wood gives meaning to the cliché achingly beautiful and is one of the great doomed love stories this reviewer has read. Hard Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World on the other hand is just really strange and seems to be a kind of metaphor for the use of computing memory. I could be wrong. South of the Border West of the Sun is another doomed love story and Dance, Dance, Dance will make you think twice about your next spontaneous visit to a country hotel.
Some might say that Murakami is a little slick. He found a winning formula and keeps pumping it out. The more heavy weight literary contender post war is Kenzabaro Oe. He has indeed won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His work can be difficult to find in English but the recently published  The Changeling is an attempt to understand the suicide of his real life brother in law Juzo Itami (the director inter alia of Tampopo and Marusa no Onna) and is set in immediate post war Shikoku.  As such it deals with many of the recurrent themes of his work  - his father’s quixotic death at the end of World war Two;  his life as a literary author of international standing; his brain damaged son, Hikari; his hatred of the militarists who led Japan into World War Two. It is both irritatingly narcissistic and episodically profound.
Much less well known in the West but extremely famous in Japan is Yasushi Inoue. Inoue was a prolific writer especially of historical novels which were meticulously researched. His The Samurai Banner of Furin Kazan is an accurate recreation of the “sengoku jidai’ warring states period in the 16th century. Fans of the Japan Total War real time strategy game will be impressed.
Banana Yoshimoto is a “younger” writer (relatively speaking) who writes about the generation disaffected with the values that made the economic miracle of the 60s and the bubble economy of the 80s possible. K.P. and Daidokoro are tales of disaffected twenty something trying to break out of the expectations of their elders.
The next big thing in Japanese literature has been a while coming but make no mistake it will arrive. I say this notwithstanding a somewhat depressing popular culture inhabited by supercilious panel show hosts food programmes (sound familiar?) and simpering “tarento” (of both genders). Having reached the third stage of acceptance of Japan you know that still waters run deep.
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Sense and Nonsense in Australian History

By John Hirst

You cannot spit in the CBD without hitting a right wing economist. Right wing historians are a rarer breed; a matter which John Winston Howard occasionally adverts to in his rare moments of leisure. Even rarer still is the intellectually respectable right wing historian – Keith Windschuttle does not count – and this makes John Hirst a figure of considerable interest.

Sense and Nonsense in Australian History  is a collection of Hirsts essays from the mid seventies. They are published in Robert Manne’s Black Inc. Agenda series. The collection has the merits and vices of the essay form: clear arguments produced at convenient length but often tendentious and inadequately substantiated. The latter vice is made worse by Hirst’s decision not to reproduce the references from the original essays. Generally speaking, the longer his pieces are the more thoughtful and interesting they become.

Hirst is at his best in his area of specialisation: convict and colonial  Australia. His insight into the limitations on the power of convict masters and the humanising consequences for the society engendered by the convict system are not now as startling as when they first came out, largely because the perspective has been popularised with some gory embellishment in Hugh’s The Fatal Shore.

He is at his weakest when trying too hard to be controversial. To this end he has an annoying tendancy to erect straw men so as to knock them down. In his essay Australia’s Absurd  History he attacks  multiculturalism by positing a form of it that is unrecognisable (unbridled cultural relativism). And yet Hirst clearly welcomes immigration; his concern is that the so called ‘Anglo’ contribution be properly acknowledged.

In How Sorry Can We Be he asserts that it is ‘morally impossible’ for the beneficiaries of the dispossession of the aborigines (ie all of us) to regret or apologise for the conquest. This is mere word play and rather unhelpful. More to the point the variety of settlement experiences in Australia (which largely explains the widely varying demographic fate of different indigenous populations even in closely settled areas) does not support Hirst’s premiss: that  dispossession was always and everywhere accompanied by the same atrocities. We cannot regret that we live here; we can apologise for arsenic in waterholes and the systematic practice of ‘dispersal’.  And yet Hirst is not a fan of Windschuttle’s sanitised version of our history. His views on the nexus between contemporary aboriginal culture (outside areas where traditional society survived somewhat intact) welfare and the intractable problems in health and other outcomes experienced are worth serious consideration. They prefigure the views expressed by Aboriginal leaders such as Noel Pearson in more recent times.

The first duty of a historian is to be sceptical of conventional wisdom in all its forms. That includes the holy cows of chardonnay sipping basket weavers. John Hirst has spent the last thirty years discharging that duty. Sense and Nonsense in Australian History is essential reading for anyone interested in the ongoing history wars and, properly considered, everyone else too.

   A History of Denmark

Knud J.V. Jespersen

As the Danes are quick to point out Denmark is a small country now, but it used to be a very big one. A thousand years ago the king of England was a Dane and until as recently as the mid 17^th century a large chunk of Southern Sweden as well as all of Norway and the Schleswig peninsular were ruled from Copenhagen. But from about that time on the Danes proved very adept at losing wars: first to Sweden – goodbye Skaane; then to Britain – goodbye Norway; then to Prussia – goodbye Schleswig Holstein.

This should have been a story of national disaster but the curious thing is that Denmark did not go the way of Poland, Ireland or the Balkans.  In A History of Denmark, Jespersen gives a concise thematic survey of the transformation of a multi-ethnic empire into an ethnically homogenous nation state. This is not a book for those who enjoy a telling anecdote. Jespersen focuses on the major institutions of the Danish state: government, Church, law and land ownership. His high level analysis makes fairly dry reading but it is well designed to reveal the structural continuities between the absolutist renaissance state and the constitutional monarchy which evolved from it. Both derived legitimacy from the consent of the governed and operated in opposition to the interests of the landed nobility.

Jespersen makes the point well that the land reform of 1780s which abolished villeinage and created the class of independent small farmers who set the tone of the country for over two centuries was an extraordinary achievement, given that not a drop of blood was shed in the process. This class of small holders were not peasants; they quickly adapted to commercial farming and created the agricultural basis of Danish prosperity. Similarly the adoption of a constitution in 1849 which conferred the vote on all adult males (women got the vote in 1915) was achieved without violence.

So while the Danes were not very good at winning wars they were remarkably good at nation building. The great vice of the Anglophone world-view is its lack of interest in how things are done elsewhere. This leads to a misplaced belief in the inevitability of certain historical processes. A History of Denmark is a useful insight into another path to modernity as well as an explanation of why there are no Danish republicans. 

The Peloponnesian War

By Thucydides

The Peloponnesian War is the name given to the conflict between Athens and Sparta and their respective allies fought between 431 and 404 BCE. As wars go in the impressive record of human mayhem it was nothing much; dwarfed by the Persian wars that preceded it and the conquests of Alexander and then the Roman Republic to follow. And yet the record made of it by an upper class Athenian who participated in the war as a fairly unsuccessful general – Thucydides - has become the template for all subsequent historical enquiry.

This is a book whose influence and ambition are truly staggering. Thucydides himself said his work “was done to last forever” and rarely has reach and grasp coincided as satisfactorily. The reasons for the success of the book tell us a lot about the cultural enterprise to which we are all heirs.

For a start you have the theme of democracy versus oligarchy. Thucydides was a luke warm democrat but so honest an observer that two and a half thousand years later we can still feel for the Athenian democracy as it struggles to balance self-interest and morality.

Then there are the debates. These are very Greek, in the classical sense. Probably reconstructions in detail but they repeatedly confront the reader with the real moral questions that confront politicians and soldiers and certainly confronted Thucydides’ peers. You hear the Plateans pleading for their lives with their laconic Spartan judges; you hear the debate in the Athenian assembly about whether to execute the male populace of the rebel city of Mytilene. And in the Melian debate you have a profound examination of the ethics of the exercise of power and its inherent capacity to corrupt.

On top of that there is some great narrative history. The account of the defeat of the Athenian Sicilian expedition is one of the greatest stories of hubris and nemesis ever told.

So do yourself a favour. The Penguin Classics translation by Rex Warner cost $3.50 back in 1977 and I’m sure is still a bargain.

History and Biography: Mad bad and dangerous to know.

Historical biography – the narrative recounting of the life of a person considered to be of historical significance or interest - has been around for a long time. The Romans seem to have been the originators of the genre and pretty well mapped out the boundaries. Suetonius’ Twelve Ceasars (from Julius Caesar to Domitian) gives us biography as expose - sex and violence in doses high enough to satisfy the somewhat jaded early second century palate. Plutarch’s Lives (covering famous rulers and generals of the Hellenistic and late Republican eras) on the other hand uses biography as a tool of  moral improvement.  Then there is eulogy – such as   Tacitus’ Agricola (his admiring account of the  1^st century Roman general who happened to be his father in law) and propaganda masquerading as biography as in the Augustan History (about the 2nd and 3^rd century emperors). To this day the genre exhibits the same split personality: trashy but entertaining versus serious and worthy; hagiography versus hatchet job.

The problem with historical biography is that great men and women demonstrably almost never make history without an awful lot of help. The explanatory power of the genre is questionable. Alexander may have been bisexual with a fraught relationship with his father and a mother from hell but this explains very little about the conquest of Persia.  Napoleon was vertically challenged and a Corsican but I doubt this is why he invaded Russia.

Biography may not be the most valid analytical tool for the historian but it is one of the more interesting. As Robert Lane Fox remarks in his tremendous Alexander the Great (which claims not to be biography but quacks and waddles like biography) ‘I am bored by institutions and do not believe in structures.’  The fascination of a life lived elsewhere is irresistible.  And the past offers some radically different elsewheres. A well written biography provides an accessible and rewarding entry into a another world.

Approaches however differ, as Suetonius and Plutarch illustrate. If you are not familiar with these authors do yourself a favour; they are available in inexpensive translation (copyright has long lapsed) and provide the source material for much of the contemporary perception of the ancient world. Be warned however that this is strong meat: the products of a pagan culture with a morality superficially familiar but  fundamentally different from our own. My favourite Suetonius life is his Caligula which is a blue print for every psychopathic tyrant since. While sensational (and totally uninterested in historical causation) Suetonius is considered fairly reliable.

                                                 

Modern biographers of the ancients struggle with the scarcity and bias of their sources. Seutonius for example wrote during the rein of Hadrian at least two generations after the last of the lives he documents. By this date it was almost a public service to dump on the Julio-Claudians. The best surviving source on Alexander -  Arrian  -  was written over 400 years after his subject’s death (albeit with access to contemporary accounts that do not survive).

As a result the task of the biographer of ancient lives much resembles a forensic detective, always mindful of the hidden agenda of their informant. Robert Lane Fox in his Alexander the Great manages to overcome these difficulties and produce an utterly plausible picture of an extraordinary individual. Christian Meier’s Caesar on the other hand, while packed with information, remains as dry as his epigraphic evidence.

After the end of Roman world biographical pickings are mainly confined to modern reconstructions of the careers of  better known monarchs such as W.L.Warren’s King John (which attempts to rehabilitate the much maligned Plantagenet). Certainly until the late medieval period, exotica such as the Alexiad of Anna Comnena (a biography of a 12^th century Byzantine emperor by his daughter) apart, there is a shortage of medieval writers with a real interest in exploring character in biographical form. By the Tudor period however the sources have expanded to provide a choice of subjects as  rich as the ancients.

And here the pickings are rich indeed. Henry VIII is the subject of innumerable accounts ranging from the scholarly to the fictional. Alison Weir’s Henry VIII King and Court places Henry’s life in a context that  makes him more explicable if not likable. Her account of Henry’s relationship with Anne Boleyn is both dramatic and chilling as she tracks the King’s progress from passionate suitor to loving husband to executioner.

After the Tudors the Stuarts.  For mine they provide more interesting biographical material than the Tudors (who in matters other than matrimonial were just too ruthlessly efficient to charm) precisely because they were brilliantly flawed. Antonia Fraser has made a career of writing royal biographies and her King Charles II is a balanced and well researched account of a complex and underrated monarch. She is particularly interested in character and her focus is on the individual subject rather than the historical events in which they figure.  Restoration England is sometimes presented as rakes in big wigs but it was also a time of religious turmoil and major scientific and artistic achievement . While paying due regard to Charles’ active social life Fraser also conveys his tolerance and rationality and the disadvantage of having such an outlook in an intolerant age.

At about this time, the field of biography begins to open up. Hitherto only royals, politicians, saints and generals led lives well documented enough to permit a biographical treatment. From about the 16^th century however artists, writers and scientists begin to become the subject of biography.

Perhaps the first such work is the Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects by Giorgio Vasari which appeared in about 1550. Vasari’s work remains an indispensable source for the artists of the Italian Renaissance and Counter Reformation. That mere artisans could be considered worthy of biography reflects a major cultural shift and, for the reader, a welcome change in subject matter.

The great artist is almost as problematic as the great man in history, and the connections between life and art are not, thankfully, easily defined. But biographies of artists, of all types, present a particularly fertile field for the biographer with a personal vision. Peter Robb’s M for example is on one level a well researched reconstruction and critique of Caravaggio’s brilliant art and sleazy life. On another level there is obviously a certain identification between the author and subject, which the author draws on to vivify his remote subject matter. The result is arguably misleading: Caravaggio’s sexuality for example, while clearly important to his art, probably cannot be elucidated from a 20^th century gay perspective. But so what; sometimes the life under consideration is just as interesting for the speculation it engenders about our own time as it is for what it explains about the past.

The most famous if not greatest biography of all is Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson. I confess to having been satisfied with the abridged version edited by Christopher Hibbert. But this work is undoubtably the best example of the curious symbiosis that can arise between biographer and subject. Boswell’s vision of Johnson as a kind of eccentric secular saint but devastatingly witty withal is compelling. And such is its force that Boswell himself has become a major subject of biography; assisted by the discovery in the early 20^th century of his extensive personal journals which detail with unflinching honesty his clinical depression, his addiction to prostitutes and alcohol, and his acute observations of his well connected social circle.  Peter Martin’s  A Life of James Boswell is a sympathetic account of  the life of a man who, like the young Augustine, wanted to be good, but not just yet.

Lord Byron on the other hand never wanted to be good at least as that term was understood by his contemporaries. Fiona MacCarthy’s Byron Life and Legend offers a fresh assessment of Byron’s bizarre life and considerable talent for both poetry and self promotion. This is a scholarly work but its subject matter would catch the interest of Suetonius. As Byron himself put it, ‘I have been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan War.’

While Byron was at Harrow, acquiring the vices that would sustain him until his untimely death from excessive application of leaches in the embattled Greek port of Missolonghi twenty years later, the future of Europe was being decided. Byron was an extreme case but this period abounds with striking personalities. Horatio Nelson for example could easily be mistaken for a manic depressive. Christopher Hibbert’s Nelson A Personal history tends to think not but does not offer any alternative explanation apart from extreme patriotism compounded by ambition and genuinely insane personal courage. Nelson is a rare figure: a military man who is yet personally vulnerable; his highly unorthodox relationship with Emma Hamilton, with whom he lived together with her husband when not with the fleet is the focus of Hibbert’s book.

James Cook on the other hand had no time for mistresses. There is no shortage of accounts of Cook’s life but none of them have dug up anything salacious. The fascination of Cook lies in his unremitting dedication to tasks that by today’s standards were unbelievably difficult. Richard Hough’s Captain James Cook is a solid conventional telling of the great sailor’s career.

By the mid 19^th century, the number of potential subjects for the historical biographer explodes.  We are also approaching the edges of living memory (our grandparents’ grandparents). The relationship between the author and a near contemporary subject (particularly one who is still alive and has access to the law of defamation) changes. The scope for imposing a personal vision without engaging directly in current debates and serving current agendas is diminished. At that point biography ceases to be primarily historical  - a way of engaging a past reality - and becomes a way of exploring our contemporary culture. And that is a subject that will be around for ever.