h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thomas

Actually that extract is very relevant to what I have just been writing this morning - using quite a lot of extracts from Stephen Fry's autbiography in particular regarding his observations about Oxbridge and the way that it is quite natural for people to feel very negative about it..

But in his own way he follows E.M. Forster- whom he hero-worshipped- in really seeing so much that is/was bad with the Edwardian establishment- and its continuation right down to 1939, at least.

He particularly quotes Forsters insistance that it is the personal relations of love between individuals that is the most important thing. And he quoted perhaps a piece inspired by Forster's continued correspondence- as I have quoted somewhere in "Towards"- with a German friend that he made in his summer of teaching in Germany, with whom he corresponded throughout both WW. The quote was between betraying a friend and a country he hoped that he would have the courage to betray a country.

Actually Mr Fry- suffering from the mental condition of bi-pollarism- does seem to love an ideal of England and Englishness- and most of his own negative feelings and "cleansing fires" of Cambridge thought seem to be directed at his own sense of lack of worth and his self-loathing.. People like the poster you have quoted externalise it and rubbish and loath a historical Britain. One has to wonder whether he loves this one.

And the answer to juts how we should judge Britain is really the concluding section of my original Towards essay that I am working on to the final final conclusion..

If you are to condemn what I have called "the Great Britain experiment" I think that you have to show exactly where there was a better alternative.. When we are shopping for the things that we need we are confronted with what is currently available or possible.

As we both know Nazism was a German manifestation of a European-wide phenomenon, and it was England that stood alone for human rights against the kind of arbitrary and self-centred power that the writer perceived still in Britain in between the wars.

During the almost 500 year Age of the State power/military power was the only way to prevent that rule of brute force and arbitrary will from gradually prevailing. Britain alone was pioneering the development of effective democratic institutions capable of resisting would be dominant powers with no regard to the interests of the people; and- as I pointed out in my original essay- the Jewish experience of not having a focus and a state, and trying quiet submission to force even unto death did not help them against the Inquisition in Spain, when 28,000 were garrotted: and it did not help them when so many populations in greater Europe set about removing them in a similar way feeding the Nazi death camps..

As far as I know the only places (looking at Tunisia) where peaceful non-violent struggle for progress and improvement have been effective have been places where the government has been based upon English traditions- Great Britain, India, the USA and South Africa.

Now being the best there was is not the same as saying "the best that could have been".. But most of the time we all as human beings fall far short of perfection.

However I have given up trying to ask my wife not to beieve in Fairy Tales. There are people who will not listen

Cass

This post has been removed.

Thomas B

Thanks for your post

I fail to see what made the Mods look at it.. perhaps out of a concern to contain the "malaise" of moaning and negativity.

As for British history, as I have tried to explain, I believe that it is many-layered: but capable of cohesion.. Hence what is looking like four sections of "Towards"..But I am reminded that when I finished my first "book" "English Peace" I could visualise the end product as something like the spirally threads of dna that are interlinked and interconnected to make a genetic blue-print capable of creating and shaping human life.

English Parliamentary democracy used to be based upon property ownership for both voters and MP's in the belief that people with a real stake in the country would make sound decisions. "When you ain't got nothing, you've got nothing to lose." The idea that professionalism was preferable to amateurism- doing things for love and duty- took a long time to get established.. Payment of MP's came in with the desire to get Working Class representation in the Commons, and when the work of the Commons had become more than full-time, making it harder to fit in as a spare-time pursuit.

Unfortunately these days people go straight into politics from university and even before. Tony Benn's diaries for the Nineties include references to a juvenile Ed Miliband coming to help out in his office during his school holidays.. Someone like that from the in-crowd would work as a researcher during university holidays, and hope to be employed in some capacity immediately on leaving University. I believe David Cameron worked at Tory HQ and eventually got his turn to stand for Parliament.. This tends to undermine the whole idea that the people in the Commons are from the "Common People".

The question of condemning Great Britain- which after all was formed largely to prevent Revolutionary France and then Napoleon bringing violence to the whole of Europe- applied to the views expressed by that poster.. Without going into detail, in the twenties Britain was no longer an Imperialist power but one working from Imperialism to a Commonwealth of free self-governing dominions.. But, as you have studied in Irish History- I believe- such changes are not easily or quickly made.

Thank you for the Labour History link.. I will explore as you suggest.. I am still wondering whether to do anything about the general-letter that we have received from our local MP saying that he is going to be in our street the next two days and would be happy to call on his constituents.. As we exchanged correspondence over a piece that I emailed him when he was in the Cabinet (Weathering the Storm) as well as sending him my Labour piece, I feel that he knows where I am, and will either wish to see me or avoid me.

For me Stephen Fry really came into his own in the series that he created with his great friend Hugh Laurie based upon P.G.Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories.. If you do not know PGW his work is a brilliantly crafted sunny version of England in the twentieth century.

As for my wife and Fairy Tales, this goes to the heart of current problems, on which it is best not to dwell.

Regards

Cass

This post has been removed.

Thomas B

Thanks for your post..

Perhaps what I can say is that you might imagine the challenge of our life together in retirement. My wife has no interest in or knowledge of history, current affairs or really the lives of other people- apart from those who directly impinge upon her own.. And, as we had a meeting with a financial advisor and will planner this week, I pointed out to the often astonished man the implications of what my wife had just said i.e. that my death before her would not change her life at all... I think that you might believe that I would tend to see my character profile in very different terms.

Re Ed Milliband- I wonder whether anyone else sees some similarity with a rather goofy and toothy comic from 20-30 years ago who had an act with his more normal and intelligent brother.. As I wrote to Chris Huhne, who I knew as the parent of one of my pupils, when he was standing for the Lib Dem leadership, just as the voting was being counted, he was likely to miss out because Mr Clegg is the kind of taller person who is much better on TV, not least because those of us who are only about 1m80 have a tendency to try to make up in dynamism for what we lack in stature-- and that loses its impact over the process of tele-broadcasting.

I have long considered that the weakness of the Labour Party is that it often allows the heart to over-rule the head, for its heart only has love for those it considers its own, but bitterness and resentment for a much wider spectrum of humanity. Thus I think that there is a real danger that the election of Ed Milliband is yet another Labour retreat to a "heartland" and that Ed may well be another Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock or Gordon Brown- someone who the faithful can love "warts and all" because, like them, they feel that the heart is in the right place.. And that is all that counts.. Then Labour heartlands wonder why they can never create economic momentum, which requires self-discipline and the ability to follow intelligent courses of action.. Things that have served the German economy well in the last century and a half.

Re Churchill and the Empire.. I think that Churchill was committed to the idea of Empire leading to Commonwealth, as outlined by T.B. Macaulay as early as the late 1830's. The whole question was whether other countries were yet ready to take the route to self-governing dominion status pioneered by Canada in the 1830's. You are perhaps more likely than I am to live long enough to know that the precipitate action of the Attlee Government in withdrawing from the Indian sub-continent and Palestine will never be linked directly to nuclear or post-nuclear war following on from the problems that Britain left behind in those regions.. Kashmir is unresolved. Shri Lanka has only a fragile truce. Burma is under repressive military rule. Kuwait triggered the Iraq crisis. And we have both been drawn into the heat and ire of the unresolved question of Israel and the Palestinians.

I made two attempts last night to email the Labour History Group re my Labour piece.. Both emails failed. I will try again. But if I see our MP, who I sent it to last year I may ask him whether he would support its wider dissemination.. Having seen some of the tenor of "preaching to the converted" I am not sure that my possibly too cerebral contributions have been/will be welcome.

Re PGW.. I have returned to him as the antidote that I discovered in him when I was 16-17 years old.. At that time I read one of his books in two days- mostly in idle moments- and got another one out of the Library. As PGW said they were written not as serious literature but as a kind of musical comedy treatment of England, and often its relations with the USA.. In fact PGW ended up as a US citizen. In 1940 he was holidaying in a favourite French Channel town that had become a more accessible and cheaper "British" resort than Monte Carlo. He thus ended up being captured by the Germans.. As a famous British humourist and non-political the Germans offered him the chance to make a broadcast on their English-speaking radio service. PGW- believing perhaps a bit in fairy tales- thought that the folks back home would like to be reassured that he and the other British civilians were OK.. This got him branded as a traitor and a Nazi sympathiser, and after the war he settled more permanently in the USA, where he had worked quite extemsively. I suppose I disovered him in the Sixties when passions were cooling and he was being rehabiliated.

I get the impression Thomas that you tend like me to go in for quite heavy reading.. But PGW short stories especially like the Jeeves and Wooster collections, or the golf stories like "The Clicking of Cuthbert" are excellent quick bed-time material to just take the mind to a happier place. The trouble is that I have read most of them four of five times now.

Regards

Cass

This post has been removed.

Thomas B

Thanks for your post

I presume that you are now "off for the week-end" as far as the net is concerned. Have a good one!

Your post helps to explain your interest in Ireland. I had wondered.

Our "Irish-rooted" neighbour over the road, who had to go back recently to help to bury a brother, commented on the ridiculous prices over there.

Re the German economy:- I think it was in Towards Part Two that I outlined the advantages that the German post-war recovery had in terms of "the only way is up". That is sometimes easier to tackle than confronting "crossroad choices" , especially when the money and overall structure is being promoted and financed by victorious powers.. You were not born yet. But presumably at least in West Germany there must have been an acceptance that this time there had been no "Stab in the back" and that the German people had gone even more than "the extra mile" to give the extreme Nationalistic "Herrenvolk" concept of the way ahead every chance of proving that it had "history on its side". The Anglo-Saxon model of free-allies within a commonwealth kind of concept had prevailed, and there were English lessons to be learned, and time enough to put a German "spin" on things once a working economy providing for basic needs was once again in place.

Re Tunisia-- I am yet to be convinced that this is not still the essentially reactionary wave of student agitation who, instead of confronting the challenge of now, are resentful that they are not sharing in the things that people like them used to enjoy in other times or other places. The trouble with "EducationX3" is that it encourages people to think that they are qualified for at least Middle Class standards of living, but the classic Middle Class was the one that knew how to build up material Capital, not intellectual Capital. Being an "ideas man" and an unpublished writer does little to increase GDP- as I am fully aware.

I made a third unsuccessful attempt to email today.. But I am rather put off by the tenor of some things on that site- notably its heading as a specialist History site with "It is an axiom of all the ages that those who rule industry rule everything"- or words to that effect. It is still the power-struggle and History as Science philosophy of the late Victorian Age where I believe the LP is largely stuck.

Regards

Cass

This post has been removed.

Thomas

What a pleasant surprise!

I understand what you are saying about the deep-deated legacy of Nazi beliefs.. But as I have written in "Towards" the idea of modern Germany was built up by great historians like Ranke etc. Now we may now refuse to accept their "histories", but my thesis is that in disowning traditional histories we have created an age with no acceptable idea of its history.. In other words a power vacuum in an aimless time. I think that the sudden rise of the Nazis in the late twenties when the German economy suddenly stalled with the withdrawal of foreign capital shows the danger of such a vacuum when sensible and intelligent people can not see the way ahead.

When I use the term "Anglo-Saxon", by 1945 it was obvious that the USA was the flowering and fruiting of the Anglo-Saxon tradition transplanted from these islands into lands of greater opprtunity- rather like the rubber plants smuggled by the British out of Brazil were then used to stock the great rubber-plantations of Malaya.. As you say there were German immigrants into the USA but this was OK in terms of the US preference for WASPS- White Anglo-Saxon Protestants- because the AS were teutons who came to Britain... Hence in Towards I mention Cecil Rhodes scheme for creating the new rulers of the world through scholarships to Oxford for people from the British Commonwealth (though not necessarily white) from the USA and from Germany.

As for anti-German feeling in the UK, again as I have written in Towards I think that it is perceptible as early as 1870, when people in Britain could already perceive a very special and even potentially monstrous drive within the German region.. Rather like those adverts for body builders that encourage young men to believe that developing an awesome physique is the answer to their problems of being picked on. If they do not know how to make friends and influence people, they have merely changed the dynamics of fear and uncertainty.

The Victorian British idea was that a gentleman, and in England at least that traditionally meant potentially any man, understood how to lose with good grace. The British image of the Germans still is to some extent that this is an art that they have not mastered.

Enjoy the rest of your week-end.

Regards

Cass

This post has been removed.

This post has been removed.

This post has been removed.

Thomas

Yes.. I was just going to post you with the news..

As h2g2 existed before the BBC took it on I believe, there may be some afficionados like Stephen Fry, great friend and computer collborator of Douglas Adams- who may resist it dying the death

Cass

Thomas

I have read your two posts about the "Work in Progress" pieces and will respond later this evening. Much to work through and as ever I am very grateful for your comments..

Incidentally I seem to have found someone [sunshineand showers] who finds my writing "easily digestible" and has expressed a willingness to look at "TP" - suggesting that I should try to get published, in view of the kind of stuff that does get published.

Hope springs ...

Cass

Thomas

Re Ranke- or von Ranke, it may seem a long time ago but early on in part one "The Value of a View of History" I deal with the importance of Ranke and a whole school of German historians whose work on the Roman Empire and the First Empire did much to inform and encourage the formation of [what you corrected me]the Second Empire.. I can understand that Germans might wish to call only Germany since 1945, or even since 1990, or even since the Government was moved back to Berlin, but I ask you to forgive the fact that to the English whose continuous history goes back a thousand years and whose modern times was very much shaped by the Victorians 1871 was the birth of Modern Germany.. The other ones may not count for you, but they do for us--and we can trace a new worship of power and state dynamism and miltarism from at least that moment.

Re the "vacuum" I can not understand how you say there was no looking ahead, and then give examples of it!! Obviously- as I said for after 1945- there was no point looking too far ahead- but nevertheless the challenge of tomorrow was very real.

Re my apparent championing of England- I believe that I am actually quoting the contempory attitudes, as being the most positive future visions within the realities of the situations and the ideas of the time.. In the case of the general feeling that somehow the American-British leadership and victory in the West should be followed by an assumption that this "Anglo-Saxon model" was the best way-ahead for the post-war world too, I think I quite specifically argue that this was a mistaken idea shaped by a flawed belief in science and progress in line with Darwinian evolution.

And the use of "Anglo-Saxon"- again you may be excused for forgetting from so long back- was part of the reaction to the Franco-Prussian War, the American Civil War and episodes like the Massacre at Wounded Knee. It was used by Historians like J.R. Green to emphasize that if the Germans were a great and fearsome warrior people- a human "Tyranosarus Rex"- so were the Anglo-Saxons too, and in the New World and on the American frontier the Anglo-Saxons were proving that the "race" still and the capacity to match the ferocity of the age.

Regarding anti-English feeling, the work is very much based upon the whole idea of finding inclusive ideas that are intended to be for the good of all mankind.. This is very much in an English tradition which has usually involved struggling for the rights of all people, and not for personal or partial advantage. And many of the people that I have quoted/used were essentially Scottish men who embraced English traditions or possibilities to project the idea of what Britain could do with the amalgam of the various abilities of all who were prepared to consider themselves as part of the English "race" as it was commonly termed in mid-Victorian times- race in this case not being anything biological, but a race as in a sweeping current- a tide in the affairs of men.

Therefore Adam Smith was very much a Scot, but T.B. Macaulay was the son of a Scot and an MP for Edinburgh at least for part of his political life. John Ruskin had two Scottish parents who brought him as far as is possible in South London to be Scottish. The Gladstone family were Scots who moved to Liverpool.

But, as my focus is bringing "all men of goodwill" to work together for the common good, I naturally have given less attention to those who have fought to cut themselves off from a current that might benefit all mankind and focus on promoting wars and conflict for purely national, class, race, gender or other sub-unit of humanity.

Curtis le May, head of the US Nuclear Deterrent during the Fifties allegedly said that, if after a nuclear Holcaust all the Commies were dead ,and there was a Capitalist Adam and Eve to start the world over again, he would regard that as a victory.

The English idea of a gentleman has nothing to do with class or social status.. It is all to do with the way people conduct themselves.. But the changeover from England to Britain introduced people into England who did not have that training, or the experience of having lived within a Commonweal with legal and defendable rights.


The sudden access to unprecedented rights with no relevant tradition of social responsibility did widen and worsen the divides between rich and poor within Wales, Ireland and Scotland- and the poorer regions of England to which both opportunist would be wealthy and would be workers migrated, and there they operated according to the ideas of Scots men like Adam Smith, or Irish men like Feargus O'Connor who adapted the clannish and combative traditions of their native countries to the new industrial areas.. And before that it was the Scottish Lord Chief Justice Mansfield who from the 1760's brought to English Civil Law a new incivility- arguing that rights of ownership should really live people with wealth free to do whatever they willed with it: contrary to the traditional obligations of English society.

Other foreigners like Marx and Engels- ignorant of the very different way that England worked- also chose to interpret what they observed -and were shown- as class warfare.

And you are totally wrong..An Englishman or woman was always entitled to "have their say" just as they were not expected to "follow orders".. English people do not do things because they are ordered to do them, but because they understand/understood that society only works when everybody "does their duty"... and that includes the monarch..

I had that Montgomery book in mind when I wrote my one and only letter to the Queen a few years ago, quoting the way that her father had been called upon to address the nation before D-Day and urge everyone to get behind the forces in every way that they could, practically and in their prayers..But Montgomery also stressed (I can not remember whether I quote this too) that after Dunkerque there was a tremendous need to get the Army fit in body, mind and spirit. There had already been a 3-year fitness drive from 1936: but not enough.

I called upon the Queen to issue a non-political call to the British people- as only she could- to try to address our national malaise. Her last Christmas message a month ago did so.

It was my place to make a suggestion about what the monarch should do.. In fact there is the famous quote from Thomas More to Thomas Cromwell regarding Henry VIII "Always tell his majesty what he should do not what he could do, for if a Lion new his strength no-one would be safe."

A biography of King Edward VII notes how his domestic staff appreciated the way that he would ask them "please" if they would do something, though they were employed specifically for that purpose, and would say "thankyou" too.. As the English say "good manners costs you nothing" so this had nothing to do with money or class.

But if a monstrous British Lion is no longer necessary to protect human rights in this world, perhaps those of us who would like to live in English Peace may get the chance to do so again.

Cass

This post has been removed.

This post has been removed.

thomasb

thanks for your posts..unfortunately my computer broke down two weeks ago and i do not know when i will be back on line

regards

cass

Hi Thomas B

My computer is now repaired, but the break has been doubly useful (A) though yesterday evening when I reinstalled it I did skim over what I had missed on the History Board there was nothing to make me feel like going back: partly because of (B) I had the opportunity to read through the whole "TP", edit and bring to some kind of completion. 370 pages of A4. As you have commented there was some overlap and repetition which this process allowed me to tackle, and in keeping with what you had also said some time ago I went back to the original essay and used it to sum up and go on to produce some perhaps personal conclusions- this took that first essay to c70 pages of A4. In so doing, and seeing the work whole, I decided to call it "History for our own times"- NOT however "A History" or "The History". I also then added an introduction to try to explain how the various parts were related to each other.

I have sent an introductory letter with the introduction to ten publishers about ten days ago, and received my first reply just now, recommending me to go to the "Writers and Artists" handbook to try to find a literary agent, since they only deal with agents.

Picking up on the first of your two unanswered posts, you may well be right about the BBC and cuts. Someone said on the History MB that I would be incandescent with rage over the demise of h2g2, but it has largely been useful and to my mind productive in our exchanges. I have been able to place a great deal of material "lost in space" there, and share it with one or two people. But my wife would say it has all been a waste of my time.

I suspect the "vacuum" to which I was referring was that which I dealt with at the start of section Two- the book "The Way Ahead" printed for the New Millennium- which amongst its 50 "visionaries" had not a single historian with a view of the "shape of history". In my letter and introduction I was able to use some quotes from a 1989 novel by Iris Murdock "The Message to the Planet", especially one from an ex-vicar who tells a historian that the world needs a popular history. History he says just deals with things that actually happen and has no deep foundations.."Human beings live on top of total jumble, mess, chance, they understand nothing, they are surrounded by darkness, they've just got to keep on walking."

In fact I believe as T.B. Macualay wrote c1827 that the deep foundations of human existence are in the lives of the great majority of the people who make up the main thrust and current of human life but they do need an overall vision of "their reality" that makes sense of life and gives meaning to their endeavours. This is the overall theme of the book and addresses the crisis/ crises of 2011 as the global regime thought up during the Second World War based upon Keynesian ideas of the primary importance of money-management is meeting the grass-roots discontent of those who are not willing to sign up for that future- a Future in which our dependency upon money and Financial Institutions imposes the challenges that are being faced by so many countries.

Related to that of course there are plenty of British writers, like German writers such as Marx and Engels, who have not seen things through English eyes. I know this full well because I was brought up within an angry working-class background familiar with the Socialist propaganda aimed at creating class warfare and bitterness. What is interesting, however, as I have noted is that these wider British regions had a long history of hatred, antagonism, warfare and depradation-usually at least a thousand years- before they ever became part of an expanding England.

Irish history is one of the most obvious examples, and it seem very obvious that the real tragedy of Irish history came with the Stuart accession, which was a disaster for England as well as Ireland.

In England it led to our worst period of tyranny, and a Civil War which produced a Protestant/Puritan tyranny. The problems were not fully resolved in 1660, but the revolution of 1688-9 created a system of government that became the model for all subsequent "western" ones. This was all based upon the Anglo-Catholicism rather than Protestantism created by Thomas Cranmer, which minimised England's involvement in the terrible religious wars that were such a blight upon the European mainland and upon Ireland. I suppose the Protestant plantation in Ulster encouraged Irish Catholics to forget the great age of Celtic Christianity, when Ireland kept the gospel of Christianity alive after the fall of the Roman Empire and long before anyone ever thought of a "Papacy".

This week's "Panorama" programme about the current Irish crisis featured yet another flght of individuals from the Irish Republic despairing of seeing any future for themselves there.. And of course this has been quite a regular feature, most notably during the crucial first and second industrial revolutions on the British mainland, when, at a time when "wild" northern parts threw themselves into the exploitation of what I have called "potato-patch economics", large numbers of Irish mostly men came to the British mainland as migrant and casual labourers earning higher wages in an expanding economy, in the time in between the potato planting and the potato harvest. This mono-culture cultivation was used extensively in the areas that embraced industirialism, without the experience of old-established industries and communities in the more prosperous South of England.. In fact as I recently found in an account written by C.F. Farr in 1928, places like his native Lancashire were able to seize the cost-advantage and become industrialised precisely because, like many countries like China and India, the low-cost of production was associated with weakness of society and the lack of any spirit of English "good-naturedness" or "commonweal".

I tackled this in the original essay when I explained how in that crucial early period of "The United Kingdom" after 1801 those English rights were eroded within England, that became "Britishised". William Cobbett, for example, going to Ireland in 1834 as a great friend of Daniel O'Connell, just as the old English Poor Law was being swept away, urged the Irish people, whose poverty appalled him, to agitate for the kind of English Poor Law system that he was still hoping to save. But the kind of social relations that had made this possible in England, particularly the more prosperous South, did not exist in the rest of Britain.

A propos riots- this was a very important element in extra-parliamen tary English democracy. During the eighteenth century England and especially London was famous throughout Europe for the activities of its "mob".. But, and this was largely still the case in the Last Labourer's Revolt of 1830, English rioters were famous for their boisterousness and good humour. They might make "toffs" look ridiculous but they were usually based upon informed matters of principle, and were intended to show public opinion to the governing class. The most serious, and the cause of a "Tory Revolution", was the Gordon Riots of 1780 when the mob took over London for a week, and many buildings were destroyed, including many breweries and distilleries. Along with the defeat in the unpopular American War, it resulted in the major programme started in 1783 and completed in 1832, and the work of that parliament, to tyy to create a better system of government and management public opinion.

Regards

Cass

Thomas B

As I have said in my previous post, I have tried to rationalise my sections.

Section One THOUGHTS ON HISTORY IN HISTORY tried to outline how historians endeavoured to use history as a means of shaping the Present and the Future in an age when Historians were politically active.

Section Two THE VALUE OF LIVING WITH A SENSE OF HISTORY tried to show how those overarching idea about progress, or decline and fall, impacted on the actual history from c1870- to the Present Day. Winston Churchill's sense of personal and national history, for example,was crucial during the Second World War. But crucially he spent ten years in the political wilderness.

Section Three WORK IN PROGRESS tried to show the way that people who had studied some history used it much as earlier generations had used the Classical authors of Ancient Greece and Rome, as a bank of ideas and possibilities that might be adapted and applied especially after the First World War created a "new dawn" or a "new dark age" after "The Deluge". An educated man or woman expected to have some idea of "the lessons of history" or even, as in the case of that Labour web-site, "The maxims of history". These were people encountering the shock of the now and grabbing on to whatever they thought might be suitable and applicable to the Present, as science was increasingly stressing that life is all about survival- not about actually achieving anything worthwhile.


I have not seen more than a few minutes of a TV series called "Scap-Heap Challenge", but what happened after 1918 was rather like that, and even more so after 1940- when much new thinking from the inter-war period was dismissed as part of a failed age. People who felt some responsibility for seeing "the way ahead" picked up bits of history that could serve in the emerging global age. In Section Two I already referred to this 'liquorice allsorts' kind of approach which produced, for example, the anomalies of Nazism with its "roots" deep in Aryan and Nordic antiquity and its future in the "glorious Thousand Year Reich".

But as for "fairy stories"- I have always been aware that my vision of the potential of history was inspired by my Oxford childhood.. As Matthew Arnold said in his inaugural lecture, it is a special place endowed with "sweetness and light".. It was for that reason that I left Oxford to study in Bristol, a city of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, then Cardiff, a late nineteenth century creation, and then to the deprived inner city in South London. Fortunately there I found thousands of pupils over 37 years of teaching who could share my positivism and could be persuaded that they could use the traditional rights that English people have fought for over more than a thousand years to create a life worth living.

Unfortunately in 46 years I have not yet succeeded in convincing my wife. But perhaps it is time to try another course.

Once again thankyou for all your help and encouragement.

Regards

Cass