The TLS blog

Politicians, historians and the Holocaust

DAVID HORSPOOL

Do you know about Godwin's law? You may not know it's called that, but the gist of it is:  "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches". Not only online, of course. There was an example of it this week, when the Prime Minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu,  speaking on Iran, held up a historic correspondence from 1944 between the US War Department and the World Jewish Congress, in which the Under Secretary of War gave reasons for his government's refusal to bomb Auschwitz.

Surely Godwin's Law doesn't apply to Israel and its Prime Minister? If anyone has carte blanche to invoke Nazi crimes, the perils of appeasement and to keep alive the memory of victims of the Shoah, is it not the leader of the country which rose from the ashes of those crimes? Absolutely, but that is no reason for listeners to Mr Netanyahu's speech to forget that when politicians use history, it is rarely in the way historians do. That is, they use those bits of the historical record that assist their argument, rather than sifting the evidence and seeing where it all leads them.

I do not presume to go into the case Mr Netanyahu was making for potential military action against Iran. I am ignorant of the details and TLS history editors are probably not the best people to pronounce on matters of international current affairs. But history is another matter. So let's concentrate on that.

Marie Colvin: she went, she saw, she verified

By PETER STOTHARD

Being with Marie Colvin was always a reminder of why to be a journalist might be important.

Even to see her black eye-patch across a crowded party was reminder that journalism mattered.

Whatever happens to our trade in these so unnecessarily turbulent times, the requirement to go, to see and  to verify will remain at its core.

Marie Colvin went to Homs for The Sunday Times to see and to verify - and she has been killed by a shell.

So much more to be said - but that is the summa rerum on this sickening day.

 

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From the TLS archives: Marie Colvin's Letter from Kosare, published in 1999.

The unseen Jane Austen?

© Paula Byrne

Is this Jane Austen? On Boxing Day at 9pm, BBC2 broadcasts Jane Austen: The unseen portrait?, in which the biographer and Austen scholar Paula Byrne suggests, with the support of art historians and costume experts, that it is.

Other authorities on Austen have suggested that this could be an “imaginary portrait” or a “memorial portrait” of the novelist, but Byrne can counter such objections:

Worth a new Mass?

By RUPERT SHORTT

 

How should seminal texts from the remote past be translated or otherwise recast in a contemporary idiom? When it comes to liturgy, the matter is of much more than academic interest. British readers, especially, will be familiar with the ferocity of quarrels between Prayer Book traditionalists and modernizers in the Anglican Church. Now, though, the rumblings are coming from English-speaking Catholics, whose own services have been changed by the new translation of the Missal introduced earlier this month.

 

Poppy wars

 

Rarely does Fleet Street speak with one voice, but on the vital matter of the poppy and the England shirt, there seems to be consensus. In case you missed it, or assumed that what England and Wales footballers wore on their shirts was a matter of overwhelming triviality, I’ll fill you in. At a couple of international friendly matches to be played over this weekend, the governing bodies of English and Welsh football have requested that the world governing body, FIFA, allow the players to appear with poppies embroidered into their shirts. FIFA have refused the request, on the grounds that their rules specifically stipulate that players’ shirts should not carry political or religious messages, and that to make an exception would “jeopardise the neutrality of football”.

Cue outrage.

The TLS on the Man Booker shortlist

After the accusations of dumbing down and the announcement of an “uncompromising” rival to the Man Booker Prize, which novel is going to win tonight?

Ladbrokes will tell you that while The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes is the “hot favourite”, paradoxically, “The favourites have had a tough time historically and we wouldn’t be surprised to see a shock result”. So much for being the “favourite”. 

The TLS has reviewed all six shortlisted novels over the past ten months. Here’s what we made of them:

Tomas Transtromer: Accept no imitation

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2011 has today gone to the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer. Transtromer is the first poet to win the prize since Wislawa Szymborska in 1996, and the first Swedish recipient since 1974.

The Nobel Academy already stood charged of Eurocentrism, making Transtromer something of a defiant choice. Many TLS readers will associate his name with another controversy not of his own making.

Saving libraries

As anyone following the fate of UK libraries will know, the judicial review hearing about the planned closure of libraries in Somerset and Gloucestershire finished last Thursday. It may be some weeks before we know the outcome. The review inspired an article by Caitlin Moran in The Times about the library she used when she was a child (which “allowed a girl so poor she didn’t even own a purse to come in twice a day and experience actual magic”). In turn, a little survey here at the TLS reveals, unsurprisingly perhaps, that libraries were an important feature in the childhoods of many of the staff.

Paris cannot abandon Balzac!

Balzac was always changing addresses in Paris, but he did spend seven years (1840–47) at an address in the rue Raynouard in the sixteenth arrondissement. In that time he produced such masterpieces as Une Ténébreuse Affaire, La Rabouilleuse and La Cousine Bette. The house is described by Graham Robb in his wonderful biography of the author (1994) as a “little eighteenth-century house in the suburban village of Passy”, where “the landlord filled the empty apartments . . . with a colony of launderers who brought with them the greatest enemy known to writers: noisy children”. It has for several decades accommodated the Maison de Balzac, one of apparently only three literary museums in the capital – the other two being the Maison de Victor Hugo and the Musée de la Vie Romantique. The Maison de Balzac receives more than 50,000 visitors a year.

In 2001 the Parisian city authorities bought three houses adjoining the property, with a view to extending the cramped museum space. According to Gonzague Saint Bris, writing recently in Le Figaro, the Mairie is looking to sell the three houses, to take advantage of the buoyant property market in the city. He points out that “these three houses . . . full of charm if dilapidated, could easily be replaced by a building that would crush the maison de Balzac, that ancient ‘folly’ which, alone, bears witness to what was once the village of Passy, with its terraces going down to the Seine where, at the bottom of his garden, the writer would flee his creditors by taking a riverboat to the centre of Paris”. Saint Bris reminds us that the house in Passy is one of only two surviving Paris addresses associated with the writer, the other being in rue Visconti where he set up his printing press (since converted into apartments).

Gonzague Saint Bris is president of the Société Honoré de Balzac de Touraine and the author of more than forty works including the recently published Balzac, une vie de roman, as well as biographies of other nineteenth-century French literary figures. He has also written a book about Michael Jackson, whom he accompanied on a tour of Africa in 1992 (Au Paradis avec Michael Jackson, 2010). He has twice stood as a candidate for the Académie française. In his Figaro piece he makes an eloquent plea to the Mayor of Paris (Bertrand Delanoë – whom he doesn’t name) to rethink his decision and to see through a project initiated by his predecessor, suggesting that he would as a result gain “a place in literary history”. As he says, “Paris cannot abandon Balzac!”

Tagore in Segovia

This just in from our woman in Segovia: the film director Sangeeta Datta holding a copy of the TLS. 

It turns out that the Hay Festival Segovia last week paid tribute to the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, following the 150th anniversary of his birth. This makes more sense of the photo of Ms Datta, who stood in for the actress Sharmila Tagore by reading and singing some of the Nobel Laureate’s poems as part of the celebrations. These also included a bout of Bharata Natyam (a classical form of Indian dance; see below), and several related talks and events.