Harvard University Press Blog

The Lecture: Bringing to India the Best and Brightest on Ideas and Issues That Matter

 

HarperCollins and Harvard University Press have a new collaboration– The Lecture, a series of talks by writers and thinkers from around the world brought to Indian audiences. 

  The inaugural lecture –‘Vivekananda, Guru to the World’– by Professor Ruth Harris will take place at Delhi’s iconic India Habitat Centre's Stein Auditorium, on Friday January 27, 2023, 7.00 p.m.  The lecture will be based on Professor Harris’s definitive biography of Vivekananda, the Indian monk who shaped the intellectual and spiritual history of both East and West. Professor Harris is Senior Research Fellow at All Soul’s College, University of Oxford; Fellow of the British Academy; and Professor of European History at the University of Oxford. 

In her book, published by Harvard University Press, Professor Harris offers an arresting biography, showing how Vivekananda’s thought spawned a global anticolonial movement and became a touchstone of Hindu nationalist politics a century after his death. The iconic monk emerges as a counterargument to Orientalist critiques, which interpret East–West interactions as primarily instances of Western borrowing. As Vivekananda demonstrates, we must not underestimate Eastern agency in the global circulation of ideas. 

  George Andreou, Director, Harvard University Press, remarked, ‘We are thrilled at the opportunity to bring Ruth Harris’s important book to a wider audience in India and to expand our critical partnership with HarperCollins.’ 

Speaking on the initiative, Ananth Padmanabhan, Chief Executive Officer, HarperCollins, said, ‘At HarperCollins we believe in the transformative power of words and as a publisher, through our books, we have endeavored to create a platform for ideas that spark conversations. We are delighted to partner with Harvard University Press, and begin this new series where we will host talks by some of the world’s brightest minds writing about people, ideas and issues that matter.’ 

Marking the 75th Anniversary of Independence from British Rule

August 14 and August 15 mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of independence from British rule for Pakistan and India, respectively. Inextricably linked to the birth of these two South Asian nations is the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent that tragically accompanied the end of British colonialism.

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, described the moment of independence as a tryst with destiny. “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance…” he said in his famous speech on August 15, 1947.

The world-renowned Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, wrote in “Subh-e-Azadi” (“Dawn of Freedom”):

These tarnished rays, this night-smudged light —
This is not that Dawn for which, ravished with freedom,
we had set out in sheer longing.
(Translated from Urdu by Agha Shahid Ali)

The volumes below illuminate the lives of individuals, the politics, and the literary traditions that shape the rich histories of both nations. They are in the spirit of Nehru’s midnight and Faiz’s dawn alike.

Pakistan

Aqil Shah, The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan
Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea
Ayesha Jalal, The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics
Ammara Maqsood, The New Pakistani Middle Class
Bullhe Shah, translated by Christopher Shackle, Sufi Lyrics: Selections from a World Classic

India

Manan Ahmed Asif, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India
Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire
Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence
William Elison, Christian Lee Novetzke, and Andy Rotman, Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation
Edited by Ramachandra Guha, Makers of Modern India 
Ruth Harris, Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda
Ramin Jahanbegloo, The Gandhian Moment
Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History
Madhav Khosla, India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy
Neeti Nair, Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India
Dinyar Patel, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism
Mircea Raianu, Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism
Rabindranath Tagore, edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, The Essential Tagore
Ananya Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India
Steven I. Wilkinson, Army and Nation: The Military and Indian Democracy since Independence

Q&A with Jacqueline Mitton, coauthor of Vera Rubin: A Life

While astronomer Vera Rubin made significant contributions to our understanding of dark matter and championed the advancement of women in science, she is not that well known outside of the scientific community. HUP Executive Editor for Science, Janice Audet, spoke with Jacqueline Mitton, coauthor (with her husband) of  Vera Rubin: A Life, about Rubin’s remarkable life and work and the writing of the book.

Vera Rubin: A Life is the first official biography of Rubin, even though many astronomers are familiar with her scientific findings and as an advocate for women in science. Why do you feel her work and leadership should be known by more people outside of scientific circles? 

There aren’t many celebrities who achieve their fame through science. The number of women who do is tiny and Vera Rubin is one of them.

People who don’t know much about her might have a preconception that the life of a scientist can’t be very interesting to a general reader or have any relevance to the everyday lives of other women and men. After all, her name is usually spoken in the same breath as that totally baffling concept “dark matter.” But when she died in 2016, Rubin was described as “a national treasure” and no one gets that kind of accolade for being dull or ordinary.

Rubin persevered against the odds to achieve the dream of being an astronomer she’d cherished since her teens, while at the same time raising four children. How she managed it, with the support of her family, especially her husband Bob, is an inspiration to anyone. She was possessed of a certain stubbornness and capacity for hard work, and yet it was her warm personality, kindness, and willingness to give unstintingly of her time and support to others, especially aspiring female astronomers, that endeared her to all who knew her. And with persistent doggedness, she led the way in the battle to improve the status of women in astronomy. She was funny, literate, and passionate about trees, nature, and old astronomical globes.

To Rubin, almost everything she did was “fun.” Her sense of joy in her work was so palpable that one of her young sons once asked her if she had to pay to be allowed to do it. Her astronomer daughter, Judy, described her mother’s life as a “love story”: love of astronomy, love of learning, and love of family and friends. We agree, and that’s the story we set out to tell.

I greatly appreciate how clearly you explain astronomy for the reader, allowing even those readers without scientific background to understand Rubin’s findings. How did you balance the personal and scientific sides of Rubin’s story?

A biography is a special kind of book. You are writing not just about a person, but also about their world—what they did every day—as well as charting events in history. And the challenge is to weave all that together into an interesting read. With Rubin, it wasn’t difficult because she never compartmentalized her science and her personal life. They were always inseparably entwined into one colorful fabric. So we took the lead from her. It really wasn’t about balancing two aspects, but trying effectively to capture the whole person and what made her the remarkable woman she was.

Between us, Simon and I felt very well equipped to do that. We both have many years of experience bringing astronomy to a wide range of audiences. We’ve written popular books, worked with the media, taught outreach classes, and talked to community groups. And we’ve found that getting people interested in astronomy is nearly always like pushing on an open door because it is so fascinating, amazing—inspiring even. Many of the ideas and discoveries are not really difficult to understand when someone explains them properly. It’s all a question of putting yourself as a writer in the position of the readers, though, of course, we have had to make some assumptions about our readers’ knowledge. On the other aspect, writing about people and history, Simon brought considerable expertise to our joint project, having taken up a new career as a historian of astronomy since retiring as a publisher. He’s written a book-length biography of the cosmologist Fred Hoyle and has been researching and writing on the lives of other 20th century astronomers.

What aspects of your own lives inspired this book?

Although I did not go on to have a research career, I strongly identify with many of Rubin’s feelings and experiences, both positive and negative. Like Rubin, I became fascinated by the stars as a child and had formed the ambition of making astronomy my life by my mid-teens. Like her, I had a small backyard telescope and read as many astronomy books as I could get my hands on. For me it was always a “calling” rather than a job. I know from personal experience what it is like to pass a long night observing in a cold dome, to spend hours at a measuring machine poring over a spectrum on a glass plate. And I remember very well just how difficult it was to be a woman in the male-dominated world of physics and astronomy.

Like Vera, I met my future husband (and coauthor) when I was just 18—unsurprisingly, perhaps, at an Oxford University Astronomical Society meeting. Like Vera Rubin and her husband Bob, we have enjoyed a long marriage, which has also been a supportive partnership in which we share our mutual passion for astronomy, and—in our case—our equally strong commitment to reaching out to others so they can share our enthusiasm.

When I became the first woman President of the Oxford University Astronomical Society, my first move was to look for women speakers. There were so few women astronomers in the United Kingdom at that time it was a real challenge, but I succeeded in finding two. One of them, Carole Jordan, went on to be the first female President of the Royal Astronomical Society. I was a student at Somerville College at the time. That connection with the greatest woman scientist in 19th century Britain, Mary Somerville, later became one of my inspirations for doing all I could to make women astronomers and scientists more well known. How could I have resisted the opportunity to be the first biographer of Vera Rubin?

What do you hope readers take away from this book?

We hope our readers will feel they have come to know Vera Rubin as the remarkable scientist and human being she was. And we’d like them to remember what Rubin herself would often repeat: “There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that can’t be solved by a woman,” and “half of all brains in the world are in women.”

We hope, too, that our readers may learn some science they didn’t know before and something about how the advancement of astronomy works, partly by diligent hard work and partly through serendipitous discovery. Above all, we hope readers will feel they have been entertained as well as informed, and maybe even persuaded that a life in science really can be—in Vera’s own word—“fun.”

A Very Hippo Holiday with Edward Lear

Edward Lear wrote some of the best-loved poems in English, including “The Owl and the Pussycat,” and has captivated the imagination of readers, young and old, for generations. As a holiday treat, we asked Sara Lodge, author of Inventing Edward Lear to reflect on Edward Lear as a Christmas poet.  

Edward Lear is an apt character to think about at Christmas-time. His nonsense books, most famously Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets (1871), which contains ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’, were published in December to catch the Christmas gift market. And Lear associated himself with the spirit of the season. Lear’s first, anonymous book of illustrated limericks for children, A Book of Nonsense (1846) announces on its title page that:

There was an old Derry down Derry, who liked to make little folks merry;
So he made them a book, and with laughter they shook
At the fun of that Derry down Derry.

As Vivien Noakes points out, Derry down Derry was ‘one of the fools of the traditional English mummers’ plays’. Mummers’ plays were a practice dating from at least the eighteenth century and probably linked to much older festivals and masques – they were traditionally staged at Christmas time by itinerant groups of actors who were not professional players but were drawn from the local community and were often raising funds for food and drink to celebrate the season. In the Buckinghamshire mummers’ plays, ‘Hey Down Derry’ or ‘Don Derry’ has a particular function. He is the announcer of the performance whose arrival signals its beginning. He calls on the assembly to make room for the entertainment, sometimes also pretending to sweep bystanders back with a broom that he carries for this purpose. In some versions he is the Fool, but in others he is Father Christmas.

It is telling that Lear invokes this figure on the title page of his Book of Nonsense, dancing with an audience of children who are jumping in the air or turning handstands. He is announcing his own entertainment at its commencement, like the Christmas mummer of old. In fact Lear in 1846, when he published A Book of Nonsense, was only thirty-four. He was not an old Derry down Derry at all. But as a figure who promised mirth to children, like Old King Cole, Old Mother Hubbard or Old Mother Goose, Lear was placing himself within a tradition that was extremely old. It is noteworthy that Lear refers to his authorial alter ego as ‘making’ children a book. This book is a hand-crafted object. Lear has ‘made’ it in a sense that only an artist-author can claim to do who has both written the text and drawn the illustrations. It has the hallmarks of a personal gift, even when sold in a commercial bookshop. Lear’s persona as the dancing Derry down Derry is part of that gift. Lear places his alter ego in the midst of his nonsense not as an author in the commercial sense but as a figure for the emotional transaction, beyond words, that the season invites.

James T Fields of Boston in his collection of sketches of eminent contemporaries Underbrush (1877) described Edward Lear, ‘Nonsense-Poet’ thus:

if you chanced, a few years back, to go to Farringford about Christmas time you would have been likely to find a tall elderly man, in enormous googles, down on all fours on the carpet, and reciting in the character of a lively and classical Hippopotamus new nonsense verses to a dozen children, amid a roar of laughter…

It is easy to picture the sixty-something Edward Lear, with his super-strength glasses to combat myopia, larking about at Christmas on all fours in Alfred Tennyson’s home on the Isle of Wight. One imagines that this ‘classical’ Hippo, inspired by its Greek name, may wallow in the Hippocrene, spring of the Muses. Most of Lear’s poetical works, from his nonsense verses to his illustrated alphabets, started their life as gifts: sung or recited at friends’ houses, enclosed with letters, or laid on a hotel table at lunchtime to delight bored holidaymakers. They have never lost the quality of gifts: and Lear’s comic persona ­– needy, funny, anxious, boisterous ­– is an integral part of the offering he presents.

 

Lear sketched endless caricatures of himself in letters to friends. In them, his body is always risible. In his twenties, he depicts himself as a lanky, blundering string-bean, blown away with his umbrella in a high wind. In later life, his self-caricature is small (he is the same size as slugs, snails and frogs), bearded, myopic with a plum-pudding belly and thin legs that stick out like a bird’s. Often, he is off the ground. Like Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, he gets into comic scrapes. One of the most important things I realised, in producing an account of Lear, was that – just as Charlie Chaplin is not identical with his most memorable character, The Little Tramp – Edward Lear is not identical with his self-caricature. The small, ‘minor’ figure who consorts with molluscs is a performance. The real Lear was tall, a well-read intellectual with serious ambitions and an extraordinarily large and varied social, cultural and political network. In tracing Lear’s intellectual life, I was constantly surprised by the strength and depth of his connections. He set Swinburne, Shelley, and his friend Tennyson’s verse to music; he was a self-elected member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with strong views on John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Ford Madox Brown. He was influenced by American artists including Frederic Church and Alfred Bierstadt. And, as a naturalist and natural history painter, he moved in scientific circles that included Charles Babbage, Joseph Hooker, and the Darwins.

When living in San Remo, which he did from 1871 until his death, Lear preferred a quiet Christmas, often refusing invitations. Raised a dissenter in religion, he valued simplicity in expressions of faith and his sensitive ear and mind disliked the ‘bother’ of big parties. Lear’s ‘sudden reversions’ from gloom to cheer, his equal and opposite desires for lively company and silent solitude, are to me the essence of December and the contradictory moods it can inspire. In appreciating this complex man, who so ardently seeks the reader’s sympathy and was all his life committed to greater tolerance amongst ‘humanbeans’, I gained greater understanding of my own frequent switchbacks as a writer from delight to despair and back again. One of Lear’s early limericks features a lady ‘Whose folly/ induced her to sit in a holly’. She tears her dress and grows ‘melancholy’; but the limerick is designed to amuse, converting her tear or tears into a smile we can join in. Whether you are approaching the holiday season with a grin or a groan – or both at once – Edward Lear has his arm in yours.

Julian Jackson on Charles de Gaulle (part 2)

Julian Jackson's  De Gaulle draws on unpublished letters, memoirs, and papers in the newly opened de Gaulle archives that show how this volatile and inspiring leader put his broken nation back at the center of world affairs. Following up on our last post, we had just a few more questions for Professor Jackson.  

Moral leadership is a hot button topic, especially here in the US. What can we learn from de Gaulle’s conception of political greatness and from his understanding of the qualities that make a great leader? 

JJ: Before he was a political leader after 1940 de Gaulle was a soldier but also a soldier intellectual. He wrote extensively about leadership in the inter-war years, and had reflected deeply and in a very cerebral way on what makes a great leader. In some sense he wrote the ‘script’ of leadership which he then acted out after 1940. His vision of leadership and political action was much influenced by the French philosopher Bergson. This is what he told an American journalist in the 1960s about his philosophy of action: “I was much influenced by Bergson particularly because he made me understand the philosophy of action. Bergson explains the role of intelligence and analysis. He saw how necessary it is to analyze questions in search of the truth, but intellect alone cannot act. The intelligent man does not automatically become the man of action. Instinct is also important. Instinct plus impulse; but impulse alone is also not sufficient as a basis for action. The two, intellect and impulse, must go together … Great men have both intellect and impulse. The brain serves as a brake upon pure emotional impulse. The brain surmounts impulse; but there must also be impulse and the capability for action in order not to be paralyzed by the brake of the brain.”

So for de Gaulle leadership was a balance between critical intelligence, intuition and moral courage. By moral courage he meant that it was necessary sometimes to break with all established authority: to disobey. In his book on leadership in 1932 he wrote about one British admiral of the First War: ‘He has all the qualities of Nelson bar one: he does not know how to disobey!’

In 1940, by deciding to defy the most revered figure in France, Marshal Pétain, and to take the decision to go alone to France to continue the combat, de Gaulle was taking an act of extraordinary moral courage but it was underpinned by that capacity for rational reflection that he also believed to be an essential ingredient of leadership: his ‘reason’ told him that the battle of France was only the first stage in what would become a world war which the Allies would win. But it is one thing to analyse events correctly; it is another to act on that analysis – as de Gaulle did in 1940.

You dive into the little-known fact of de Gaulle’s deep Catholic faith. How did his religious values guide his beliefs and his actions? Do you think his Catholicism played a role in his principled rejection of Nazism and of accommodation?

JJ: De Gaulle’s Catholic faith was indeed profound but it was also very personal. One must be careful about reading this into his political action. It is true that he developed a moral rhetoric in opposition to Nazi Germany and to the Vichy regime, and it true that as a Christian humanist he was revolted by Nazism. His thinking about totalitarianism in general was influenced by ‘social Catholicism’ which rejected the supposedly soulless materialism of both capitalism and socialism. But I would not want to exaggerate the importance of this in his opposition to Nazism. In the 1930s it was Germany that de Gaulle opposed because, as a conservative nationalist, he believed German expansionism was a threat to France. There is almost nothing about Nazism in de Gaulle’s warnings against Germany in the 1930s. De Gaulle was a kind of existential nationalist who believed that the struggle between nations was the eternal motor of history, and that when nations adopted certain ideologies they were always just a cloak for national ambition: so he believed that Communism was only a cloak for the traditional interests of Russia – he always preferred to talk of Russia not the Soviet Union – that Roosevelt’s liberal internationalism was just a cloak for the interest of the United States and that Nazism was just a new avatar of German expansionism. So when he opposed the collaborating Vichy regime he did in due course oppose the domestic politics of that regime – its anti-Semitism, its suppression of liberty and so on – but in the end the key to his opposition to Vichy was that it has betrayed France’s national interest by accepting German domination.

You write very movingly about de Gaulle’s relationship with his daughter Anne, who had Down’s syndrome. Tell us a bit about that relationship, and what it tells us about him.

JJ: It was indeed a strange and moving relationship. On the surface de Gaulle seemed to many people to have a certain quality of inhumanity, an inability to show his feelings. When one of his aides during the war bemoaned the fact that de Gaulle seemed incapable of showing a more human face, the reply was ‘it is impossible to make someone who is tone deaf appreciate music any more than it is possible to ask de Gaulle suddenly to develop human contact’. But his relationship with Anne shows another side to the personality – a human being under the carapace. She was very severely handicapped, unable to talk or to feed herself. But there was never any question that she would be put in an institution: for the twenty sad years of her life she was always with them – in France before 1940, in London during the war, in Algiers after 1943 and so on. And de Gaulle seemed to form an extraordinarily tender relationship with her, singing her songs, telling her stories, taking her on walks. Perhaps she was one of the few people not frightened by him.  Of course this relationship was also a testament to his deep Catholic faith. He wrote of Anne: ‘Her birth was a trial for my wife and myself. But believe me, Anne is my joy and my strength. She is the grace of God in my life … She has kept me in the security of obedience to the sovereign will of God.’  After Anne’s premature death he wrote to her elder sister: ‘Her soul has been liberated.’

When France pulled out of Indochina, America stepped in. What did de Gaulle think America should have done differently in Vietnam?

JJ: He had originally hoped to hold on to Indo-China, and the French finally abandoned the region in 1954 after a costly war. De Gaulle was no longer in power at that time. But he had learned the lessons of that conflict. As he told a visiting American in 1964: ‘I do not believe that you can win in this situation even though you have more aircraft, cannons, and arms of various kinds … I do not mean that all of the Vietnamese are against you but they regard the United States as a foreign power and a very powerful foreign power.’ An American Senator was told a year later: ‘Ho Chi Minh is a Communist but he is also a national figure, the one who expelled the French and will do the same to the Americans. This is what he is using his Communism for. He did it in the past against us, he is doing it now against you, he will do it perhaps in the future against China.’

In private he was even more brutal: ‘when they start sending thousands of boys, people will start to notice. When the coffins start coming back that will make people think. And once that combines with their problems with the Blacks and with the dollar, it will create a context of discontent which will get worse with their dirty war.’ When President Nixon (a great admirer of de Gaulle) visited Paris in March 1969, a few weeks before de Gaulle left power, he received a long lecture on the need for the Americans to give up their unwinnable war.

In all this de Gaulle was applying the lessons of his own experience. But of course all this gave him a certain Schadenfreude: he enjoyed the chance to occupy the moral high ground, to teach the Americans lesson and to use the war to position himself as a hero of the Third World.

De Gaulle continues to influence French politics. What role does he play in President Macron’s policymaking? In his stance on Syria? While the two leaders belong to very different ages, there seem to be some likenesses. Do you consider Macron to be a neo-Gaullist?

JJ: Yes, Macron is of another era and one should be careful of comparisons. But in some sense what makes Macron possible is the constitution that de Gaulle created in 1958 and which now almost all the French accept. Previously the French Republican tradition was suspicious of ‘strong’ men because of the precedents of Napoleon and of his nephew Napoleon III. So the French preferred a model of weak parliamentary politics. De Gaulle, who came from a monarchical tradition, completely changed that. He possibly even had a certain nostalgia for the monarchy while realizing – again his sense of realism! – that monarchy was impossible. What he did instead was to create what he himself on one occasion called a Republican monarchy: the directly elected French President is one of the most powerful heads of state in the world, and Macron is glorying in the possibilities that such power gives him. Macron talks of the ‘verticality’ of power and of his ‘Jupiterian’ style of leadership. All this is very Gaullist and it is surely no coincidence that Macron’s official portrait as President has him posing in front of a copy of de Gaulle’s War Memoirs!

Having said that, in many other ways Macron could hardly be more different from de Gaulle: Macron is an economic liberal and de Gaulle believed that the State needed to play a role in the direction of the economy; Macron is also a convinced ‘European’ arguing for greater European integration while de Gaulle’s vision of Europe was very different: he was viscerally opposed to European federalism.  So it is in his style of governing that Macron is most ‘Gaullist’. But Macron should also remember what happened to de Gaulle after 10 years of the jupiterian exercise of power: he was faced with the revolutionary events of May 68 which signaled the beginning of the end. France in 1968 was like a pressure cooker ready to explode. That could happen again.

 If de Gaulle could only be remembered for one thing, what should that be?

JJ: He saved the honor of France in 1940.

Julian Jackson on Charles de Gaulle

Julian Jackson has written the definitive biography of the mythic general who refused to accept the Nazi domination of France.  De Gaulle draws on unpublished letters, memoirs, and papers in the newly opened de Gaulle archives that show how this volatile and inspiring leader put his broken nation back at the center of world affairs. We asked Professor Jackson about de Gaulle and his process in writing the book. 

It’s been more than 25 years since a major biography of de Gaulle has been written. Why has he been ignored for so long? Why is now a good time to take a new look at this titanic figure?

The last major biography of de Gaulle was published in French in 2002 but since then the de Gaulle archives have been opened. While the English speaking world has been far less interested in de Gaulle than in Churchill, it is certainly not true to say that he is ignored in France: books come about him literally every week, of varying quality. In France he is a figure revered on an even greater scale than Churchill in Britain.

It is a good time to re-visit de Gaulle for many reasons. One of these is that many of the questions he posed are still relevant today, and indeed possibly more relevant than ever: He governed at the height of the Cold War but was convinced that the Cold War would not last and that it was necessary to work to achieve a stable and balanced post-Cold War order, and we are still trying to achieve that; he was seen as anti-American but in reality he was looking forward to a time when the US would not necessarily see its interests bound up with those of western Europe and NATO, and felt that Europe must organize its own affairs and its defense. In the era of Donald Trump that seems more relevant than ever. For the British, who are in the process of leaving the EU, de Gaulle’s views about Britain and Europe seem prescient in the extreme, as do his comments on the consequences for the Middle East of Israel’s occupation of the territories it conquered in 1967.

That is not to say de Gaulle was always right but the questions he posed still matter today. For me the interests in reading about him lies in exceptional nature of his career. He led a truly fascinating life at every level.

De Gaulle was, with FDR and Churchill, one of the three great leaders of the second world war. Both FDR and Churchill found him deeply difficult to work with and their opinions of him – as aloof, egotistical, prickly to a fault – have largely defined his reputation in the English-speaking world. Is that fair? Or was Churchill’s de Gaulle a terrible caricature?

De Gaulle was indeed a prickly and aloof personality who found it hard to show his feelings. But this was exacerbated during the Second War by his sense of humiliation at the defeat of France and by his ambition to re-assert France’s role as a great power. One way of doing this was to be almost obsessively vigilant in defense of France’s interests even if this meant opposing his own allies. He often bit the hand that fed him because he wanted to show that France still had teeth. In this way, he turned his own personality into an instrument of policy.

In the case of Roosevelt, de Gaulle felt justifiably bitter that the Americans continued to gamble – mistakenly – that the collaborating Vichy regime would in the end rally to the Allies. De Gaulle said this would not happen; and he was proved right. He was not an easy personality but in the end Roosevelt’s attitude towards him was almost unhinged whereas for all their quarrels Churchill did appreciate de Gaulle’s stature. I am a great admirer of Roosevelt but his treatment of de Gaulle was not one of the more glorious or perspicacious aspects of his career.

You write that during his thirty years in politics, de Gaulle was brutally divisive. Why and how?

De Gaulle found himself at the heart of two bitter civil wars and for this reason it was inevitable that he would be seen as divisive: civil wars are by their nature divisive. His ambition was in fact to unite the French – it was his obsession – but this was simply not possible.

The first of those civil wars occurred between 1940 and 1944 over whether or not to collaborate with, or resist, the Germans. Some people afterwards reproached de Gaulle for creating a national myth that all the French had resisted except for a few traitors. He knew this was false but he invented the myth to bind the French together again. The second conflict was over the independence of Algeria: de Gaulle was never forgiven by the one million white Europeans in Algeria for conceding that Algeria would be independent. It is true that de Gaulle moved towards Algerian independence in a rather zig-zag manner which led many of these people to feel he had betrayed them. But however he had done this he would have faced their bitter hatred – leading to several assassination attempts against him. One of the guiding mantras of all his political action was the need to accept reality, however painful. But these were people living in a denial of reality. De Gaulle had tried to be a teacher but they were unwilling to listen to his lesson.

What did previous biographers get right, what did they get wrong, and what new revelations does your book introduce?

Previous biographers have tended to oversimplify de Gaulle whereas my biography shows his complexity and ambiguity.  There are some new documents revealed in my biography: for example, an amazing telephone conversation between him and his ministers negotiating with the Algerian independence fighters. The conversation, which I cite in its entirety, shows de Gaulle’s desperation to end the Algerian conflict at almost any price. But overall my book is not offering lots of new revelations – the basic facts of the story are confirmed by my research in the de Gaulle archives – but more about offering a more nuanced and complex interpretation. Good history is not about ‘scoops’ but about explaining and interpreting the past.

De Gaulle is perhaps most famous in France today for his decision to pull out of Algeria. Tell us about that decision. As the leader of the Free French, he had called on the French empire to support the resistance. Was that a difficult decision for him? Why did he do it? What do you think he would make of the Iraq war—or the war in Syria?

The decision to leave Algeria was a painful one for him because it represented a defeat for France even if he tried to dress it up as a decision that he had taken of his own free will. He did it because he believed that the Algerian war was poisoning French politics and that decolonization was a necessity. He could see that the war was also turning France into a pariah in the Third World and impeding his ambition to give France a role of moral leadership against the United States. That is why he decided that Algerian independence was necessary.

There was also a rather cynical side to this. The defenders of so-called French Algeria argued for what they called ‘integration’: that Algeria should be fully integrated into France and its Muslim population become fully French citizens. This was a bit hypocritical on the part of Europeans who had done all to deny rights to Algerian Muslims for decades. But de Gaulle’s objection was a pragmatic (one might even say racist) one. As he put it once to one of his Ministers: ‘Have you seen the Muslims with their turbans and their djellabas? You can see that they are not French. Try and integrate oil and vinegar. Shake the bottle. After a moment they separate again. The Arabs are Arabs; the French are French. Do you think that the French can absorb ten million Muslims who will tomorrow be twenty million and after tomorrow forty? If we carry out integration, if all the Berbers and Arabs of Algeria were regarded as French, how would one stop them coming to settle on the mainland where the standard of living is so much higher? My village would no longer be called Colombes-les-deux-Eglises but Colombey-the-two-Mosques.”

But de Gaulle came to his views about the Empire slowly. In 1940 he did indeed hope that the Empire would rally to him, and was disappointed when it did not. He did all he could to hold on to the Empire after 1945 and part of his resentment against the British was that he believed (wrongly) they were trying to oust the French from the Middle East. He had tried to hold on to French Indo-China after 1945 and was opposed when French forces pulled out. In other words, he was not really, as he later claimed, a prophet of decolonization, but he was ultimately a realist.

It is dangerous to try and make any historical figures speak from the grave and I cannot say what de Gaulle would think about the current Syrian situation. But one thing is certain: he would not have allowed France to be dragged into the Iraq War in the wake of the United States. He would have seized the opportunity to assert France’s independent policy. When the French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin went to the United Nations in 2003 and refused any French participation in the Iraq War he sounded almost like de Gaulle speaking from the grave. De Gaulle could also have moments of really prophetic intuition which came from his deep immersion in history. This is what he said about Iraq in 1964: ‘The Sunnis with the Shias and the Kurds. These are countries destined to be divided because they contain altogether different peoples who do not have the same religion, the same past.’

(This is the first of a two-part interview) 

Alcibiades in the Shadow of Achilles

Alcibiades—the famously handsome Athenian, ward of Pericles, friend and pupil of Socrates, and charismatic general infamous for serial disloyalty—was one of the most remarkable figures of the Golden Age of Athens. In Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens, David Stuttard gives us a riveting account of the man and his age, “bringing to singing life,” per Paul Cartledge, “the mercurial, magnetic, passionate, and persuasive personality of this still hugely controversial Athenian aristocrat of the fifth century BC.” In what follows below, a slightly condensed version of his recent British Museum presentation on the book, Stuttard introduces us to one of ancient Greece’s most fascinating and slippery characters.

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I want to take you back just over 2,400 years to the high Anatolian plain of central Turkey. It’s the year 404 BC; it’s Autumn; and it’s the dark hours of the night. Alcibiades, perhaps the most controversial Greek of his generation, is living in exile in a compound at Melissa—probably modern Afyonkarahisar—where strange rock formations erupt out of the rolling plain, near the fabled Royal Road that runs from Sardis in the west to Susa, capital of Persia’s Empire, in the east. For now, everyone inside is sleeping, but then something awakens them. Perhaps the barking of a dog. Or perhaps the acrid smell of burning creeping through the rooms, or the ever-louder crackling of fire as brown smoke pours in beneath the door, and through the cracks beside the doorposts.

Here, from my book, is what happened next:

Fully awake now, fully alert, Alcibiades leapt out of bed and threw the door wide open. Outside, stacks of dried wood had been piled high, and the flames were already tearing through them. Shouting to the people in the house to help, he dragged out rugs and mattresses and blankets, and flung them on the fire. The flames were smothered. At least for the time being. But now the smoke was bellying, and tongues of fire were licking at the edges of the blankets, and the orange heat was growing more intense. And then the arrows came. From all directions. Thudding into walls and roof and earth. Anonymous and deadly. The only warning of their approach a soft sighing of air.

The household was panic-stricken as Alcibiades, his instincts kicking in, reached for his weapons. But they had disappeared. Somehow in the night someone had taken them. All that he had now was a short knife, which a comrade pressed into his hand. But no shield. No armour. Just a blanket wrapped around his left arm as he stood, poised on the threshold. And then, calling to his friend to follow him, he bellowed his war cry and ran, naked and exposed, out into the darkness. Silhouetted against the burning house, he made an easy target. From all around him javelins rained and arrows thumped like hail as first one, then another, then another found its mark. All Alcibiades could do was run into the night, and run, and keep on running while he could, until the night engulfed him.

That description’s based meticulously on ancient sources, but all seems so theatrical, so filmic, so larger than life. But political assassinations can be larger than life, and Alcibiades’ life was every bit as complex and nail-biting as any modern political thriller.

Alcibiades was born bang in the middle of the fifth century BC, in 452 in Athens, a city that nearly sixty years before had expelled a hated ruler and established the most radical participatory democracy the world had ever seen. His mother’s family and his father’s were wealthy aristocrats from powerful families whose members numbered famous politicians, winners in Olympic chariot races, decorated war heroes—and, go back far enough, even Homeric heroes of the Trojan War. And when Alcibiades’ father, Cleinias, was killed in battle, the five-year-old boy was looked after by the most powerful politician of his day, the equally aristocratic Pericles, whose policy shaped democratic Athens, whose dream inspired the Parthenon, whose ambition was for the Athenian Empire to rule the waves.

Billy Graham’s Vietnam

The passing of the Rev. Billy Graham, who spent more than six decades as the nation’s most prominent Christian evangelist before retreating from the public spotlight in recent years, has occasioned both glowing appreciation for his life’s work and fierce condemnation of the social and political movements he led. One particular point around which that condemnation has clustered has been Graham’s support for America’s wars, and specifically the tactics he encouraged in Vietnam. In his authoritative account of Graham’s personal evolution and public significance, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation, historian Grant Wacker writes that Graham “displayed an uncanny ability to adopt trends in the wider culture and then use them for his evangelistic and moral reform purposes,” but that he also “brought to the table a long list of liabilities: conventional beginnings, serious mistakes of judgment, mordant criticism from others, shifting public identities, and elusive mythic dimensions.” In the following excerpt from America’s Pastor, we see evidence of both in Graham’s views on communism and the Vietnam War.

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One of the most durable conventions about Graham is that he was a hawk of the fiercest kind. The convention bears a large measure of truth for the Graham of the late 1940s, 1950s, and most of the 1960s. To a great extent the early Graham defined himself not only politically but also culturally and even theologically as a warrior against communism. As with millions of Americans, Graham’s hatred and fear of communism was palpable, profound, and pervasive.

The story is long and complex. Before plunging into it, however, four generalizations are helpful. First, Graham’s attitudes toward communism not only changed but also zigzagged. The changes unfolded in different ways in different times and places. Second, Graham did not do it alone. The culture changed—and zigzagged—right along with him. Third, Graham and the West did not do it alone, either. The Soviet Union changed at the same time, and so did the Eastern Bloc nations, and, to a lesser extent, so did China and North Korea. Finally, Graham’s star remained high long after the Cold War died. The Cold War helped propel him into public visibility but it did not keep him aloft. Other factors, including the culture’s needs and his personal skills, did.

In the early years of his career Graham hammered the communist threat constantly. Next to the gospel message, by his own recollection, he preached about it more than anything else. In 1953 the Chicago Daily News dubbed Graham “Communism’s Public Enemy Number One,” a view echoed by Soviet newspapers. Graham famously ridiculed “the pinks, the lavenders and the reds who have sought refuge beneath the wings of the American eagle.” The alarmist words on the front page of a “News Letter” of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, mailed to listeners of the Hour of Decision in July 1953, represented hundreds if not thousands of paragraphs in Graham’s preaching and writing of that era. “This is no time to be lulled by the constant talk of ‘peace’ by the Communist spokesmen,” he cautioned. “Their program of world conquest is moving ahead at a steady pace.” British Guiana and Guatemala effectively have fallen, Graham warned. Communists intend “to bring Japan to her knees economically,” then all of the Far East. “Other countries are to follow. We are being gradually encircled.” Many of the most memorable lines Graham ever preached targeted the communist enemy: “Stalin’s fixed purpose is to holster the whole world for communism”; “They have knifed their way across Laos”; “Communism is a fanatical religion that has declared war upon the Christian God.” Communism framed his image of the world, aroused his listeners’ anxieties, and prompted them to take action.

Roger B. Taney, Slavery’s Great Chief Justice

Included among the Confederate statues whose removal has provided white supremacists with thin cover to parade hatred in the feeble guise of heritage have been several monuments to U.S. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. Most remembered for his painfully racist and staunchly proslavery opinion in 1857’s Dred Scott v. Sandford, Taney is one of three Supreme Court Justices whom legal scholar Paul Finkelman considers in his forthcoming Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court. Placing Taney alongside Chief Justice John Marshall and Associate Justice Joseph Story, Finkelman documents how this trio—whom he calls the most important Supreme Court Justices before the Civil War—repeatedly upheld the institution of slavery.

From Finkelman:

These jurists almost always failed to consider liberty or justice in cases involving slavery and race. To the contrary, with only a few exceptions in their many years on the bench, they continuously strengthened slavery in the American constitutional order. They cast opposition to slavery as unpatriotic, undermined the possibility of a political solution to America’s “peculiar institution,” and helped set the stage for the final antebellum crisis that ultimately led to secession, the Civil War, and the death of some 630,000 young Americans. Out of that carnage came an end to slavery and what Abraham Lincoln called “a New Birth of Freedom.” But this outcome would surely have surprised these justices, and at least two of them—the two chief justices, John Marshall and Roger B. Taney—probably would have found this outcome outrageous and wrong. They certainly would have emphatically opposed the post-war constitutional amendments making blacks citizens of the United States and giving them the right to vote on the same basis as whites.

Taney, whom Finkelman calls “Slavery’s Great Chief Justice,” of course left no room for doubt as to his position. His assertion in his Dred Scott opinion that black Americans, even when free, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” shocked many Americans even in 1857. But, as Finkelman shows, this most memorable case was neither the first nor the last time Taney expressed the view that the U.S. Constitution simply didn’t apply to black people. In 1832, as Andrew Jackson’s attorney general, Taney told the president that blacks in the United States had only those rights which they were able to “enjoy” at the “sufferance” and “mercy” of whites, and that blacks, “even when free,” were a “degraded class” whose “privileges” were “accorded to them as a matter of kindness and benevolence rather than right.” Later, during the Civil War, Taney did all he could to obstruct Lincoln’s attempts to hold the Union together, and even drafted an opinion in anticipation of an opportunity to strike down the Emancipation Proclamation.

Supreme Injustice, which stems from material prepared for the prestigious Nathan I. Huggins Lectures, has origins in Finkelman’s realization that serious consideration of slavery is often avoided in discussions of the jurisprudence of Marshall and Story, and downplayed even in the case of Taney. The role of slavery in their private lives, too, is overlooked, though Marshall and Taney were lifelong slaveowners, and the former was personally involved in buying and selling significant numbers of human beings. “Slavery does not fit comfortably in the narrative of the Supreme Court,” writes Finkelman, “but slavery does not disappear just because scholars ignore it. Support for human bondage and persistent hostility to the rights of free blacks were important components of the Court’s jurisprudence from 1801 until the Civil War.”

He continues:

The United States Supreme Court was certainly not responsible for secession or the War. But it was responsible for helping to create and nurture a culture of hostility toward liberty and justice for all, and for constantly supporting slavery. Through their jurisprudence, these justices encouraged southerners to attempt to create their own nation, based on the proposition that all men are not created equal, and that all people are not entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

As emboldened white supremacists rally around Confederate statues and declare intentions to create their own “ethno-state,” it’s as clear as ever that this history hasn’t gone anywhere. But monuments to the likes of Taney need to go.

A Life of Miłosz

Andrzej Franaszek’s Miłosz is the first full biography of Polish poet, essayist, and Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz. Miłosz was born in 1911, died in 2004, and was a witness to and participant in almost all of the crucial events of a century full of pain. Indeed, what comes across strongly in Franaszek’s account is how constantly Miłosz was confronted by upheavals within the political and social landscapes he inhabited, first in Lithuania, next in Poland and then in France and the United States, in each of which he experienced periods when he felt utterly alienated from his surroundings. The book puts Miłosz’s outsider status at the center of his life and work, and gives us a moving account of the writer’s difficult personal odyssey and the appalling history through which he lived.

In Aleksandra and Michael Parker’s English-language edition of Franaszek’s original Polish, the book is a feat of immersion, combining biographical narrative and critical insight with generous excerpting of Miłosz’s poetry and prose. Miłosz wrote prolifically but also thought without end about the role of the writer and the work of the intellectual, and his feelings on these things evolved over his long life. Franaszek interweaves it all, such that on nearly every page you’ll learn about an event in Miłosz’s life or in the world he watched so closely, then read a bit of a poem or letter he wrote about it at the time, followed by quotes from his reflections decades later.

Altogether, Franaszek gives us a remarkably intimate sense of Miłosz’s complicated life, wrapped in an emblematic portrait of the twentieth century. During the first eleven years of Miłosz’s life, his family was caught up in the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian-Polish War. In his late twenties and early thirties he witnessed the catastrophe of the Second World War, lived through the hell of Nazi occupation, and witnessed the beginning of a new chapter in European history. Finally, he settled down in the California of the 1960s, and for a long time was safe and stable, but still largely unknown to readers of English. This sense of his own obscurity weighed on him tremendously, as Franaszek describes:

It is easy to dwell on the latter, happier years of his life, when he was constantly honoured. From 1951 until he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1980, he had a small readership, and could count on the fingers of one hand the number of articles written about him. For almost three decades after his defection from Poland in 1951, Miłosz was a writer who had resigned himself to the fact that he had failed and would be forgotten.

He hadn’t, of course, and he wouldn’t be.

The Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago has spent this entire month celebrating Czesław Miłosz and highlighting the work University Presses do to help keep poetry in play. Day by day they’ve shared lines from Miłosz’s 1978 poem “Notes,” and this week they published a wonderful consideration of Milos’z “The World: A Naïve Poem” from Michael Parker, who describes how the poem explores concerns that Miłosz would address throughout his literary career. His treatment of the poem offers a way into one of the great lives of the twentieth century, which Franaszek’s landmark biography now presents in such vivid detail.