Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
What is the history of the present?
This is what I do and have been doing for the past 30-plus years – trying to write this strange mongrel genre of the history of the present, between journalism and scholarship, trying to understand very recent events in the way that a historian would, to understand contexts, causes and possible consequences. I’m obviously very interested in how people did it before. The interesting thing is that for much of history the history of your own time was considered to be the best history. It’s a fairly recent idea, only really since the 19th century, that people have thought you need this canonical 30 years before you started writing proper history.
I was interviewing David Cortright recently, and he said that if you want to stop terrorism you have to look at how, historically, terrorists stopped being terrorists, and that it’s always by incorporating them into the democratic process.
Yes, absolutely. It’s like looking at how wars end.
So, we’re starting with Herodotus.
This is the point. The fact that the father of history was, in a way, a historian of the present, of very recent times. He is the father of us all. I read it when I was at school and he’s really the first one who goes around with his eyes and ears and notebook open, recording all these fantastic stories and trying to put it all together to work out what happened and why. Then, famously, he says: ‘I am obliged to record the things I am told, but I am certainly not required to believe them.’ He is the first person who does this business of saying, ‘Well this is what the Persians say about it and this is what the Greeks say about it, so let’s try and work out what’s the truth in between.’
Tell me a bit about the histories themselves. What could someone expect to learn from reading them?
I think they could expect to learn a lot about the ancient world, the Greeks and, to a lesser extent, the Persians, but they could also learn a fair amount about how history happens – the interplay of individuals, personalities and larger forces like economics, geography, technology and, of course, chance. It’s all there in Herodotus, along, it has to be said, with a lot of fantastical details, like ants the size of dogs, flying snakes and stuff like that. It’s also a lot of fun and there’s vigour in the prose.
Do you have favourite passages?
Well, as I say, I think the passage where he is weighing up the Greek and Persian accounts for the origins of what the Greeks call the Persian Wars, that really is what we are still doing 2,500 years later.
The essayist Macaulay is your next choice.
Yes, the greatest historical essayist in the English language, in my view. This Everyman edition is two volumes of his essays from The Edinburgh Review, which, as you know, was The New York Review of Books of its time, or maybe I should turn that the other way round. It had long critical review essays of the kind people are still writing. Although Macaulay was a teeny bit dismissive of his own work in the genre they are actually models of their kind, full of wonderful insight. The essay on Frederick the Great in volume two will just have you rolling in the aisles.
Why, why? What does he say?
Well, you know that Frederick the Great as a young man had this dalliance with Voltaire, and Frederick the Great showed Voltaire his poems, at which Voltaire famously said: ‘See what a quantity of his dirty laundry the King has sent me to wash.’ Voltaire offered advice on the conduct of diplomacy of which Frederick the Great was equally contemptuous. The essays are just full of wonderful detail of that kind. A lot of them are actually biographical. One of the other things I love about it is that quite a lot of my work is on the frontier between literature and politics, and Macaulay is absolutely there. He writes a wonderful essay on Milton.
When you say literature and politics, are his subjects actually politicians or is he writing a kind of journalism?
Well, Milton is Milton. He was deeply engaged in politics, but on the other hand you have Pitt, who was a writing and magnificently speaking politician; John Bunyan, a highly political writer – he’s got Machiavelli in there. It’s often what we might now call public intellectuals. But if you did a search you probably wouldn’t find Macaulay being mentioned more than once a month these days, but he’s an absolute master of the genre and I think many people are still in his debt without quite knowing it.
Let's move on to Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.
The finest model of how to write about a foreign conflict, a war or a revolution. Anyone who wants to go off and write about Egypt, Tunisia or Libya today should pack a copy of Homage to Catalonia.
Timothy Garton Ash is the author of nine books of political writing or ‘history of the present’ which have charted the transformation of Europe over the past 30 years. He is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford; Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays appear regularly in The New York Review of Books and he writes a weekly column in The Guardian, which is widely syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas.
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