1947: When Now Begins by Elisabeth Åsbrink, tr. Fiona Graham

This short popular history book, translated from Swedish, was longlisted for the second (2018) Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Whilst I'd been quite interested in the book anyway, it was the longlisting that prompted me to take it up at this time. I mostly listened to it as an audiobook, narrated in the UK version by Joan Walker, and I also read some bits of the text while listening. Åsbrink's thesis, as may be guessable from the title, is that 1947 is when the contemporary world 'began',because, during that year, a number of developments which continue to be pertinent today emerged in global politics and culture.

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A mostly enjoyable and interesting light popular history that feels like hearing or reading news from 71 years ago (if it were in the style of contemporary broadsheet news with a culture section).

I haven't read any others of the crop of popular histories named after individual years, but I understand that this one is different from the usual, because it concentrates not on a specific discovery or person, but on news and events from countries around the world during one year. It has month-by-month chapters, with one interlude in the middle about the author's family history. The book's underlying argument is that many aspects of later 20th-century and contemporary western life have their roots in the events and cultural products of 1947. It highlights these items in a news-magazine style, but Åsbrink does not give a counterargument to her thesis: this is history in the style of creative non-fiction rather than academia. There is an extensive bibliography and sources list, but there are no footnotes.

The countries most frequently discussed are Sweden (Åsbrink is Swedish), Britain, Palestine, India, France, the USA, Germany, Hungary (the author's father was Hungarian-Jewish), Poland and Egypt. Several cultural figures recur, and the narrative episodically follows George Orwell (writing 1984 on the isle of Jura) and Simone de Beauvoir (started The Second Sex) throughout the year, as well as making less frequent mentions of many others, such as Tolkien finishing The Lord of the Rings, computer scientist Grace Hopper who coined the term 'bug' (the first bug was a moth that had got into the computer) and was later involved in the development of COBOL, and Christian Dior and the waves made by his New Look. The quotes from Dior have a camp charm which contrasts with the serious topics making up the rest of the book, and give a flavour of the aesthetic relief from wartime austerity his designs brought to the fashion-conscious. I've never been a fan of it as a style, and prefer earlier 1940s looks, but these phrases and his personal frivolities made me grok it more than I ever had before. There is more about women here than one would probably find in an older popular history by a man, and fashion is treated with a cultural seriousness it wouldn't necessarily have been (the book also notes that Hennes, later H&M, was also founded this year), but 1947 remains a general history of predominantly political world events, at a time when the vast majority of politicians were men, rather than a history of women. Eleanor Roosevelt is the most politically powerful woman here, involved in drawing up the UN Declaration of Human Rights - that cornerstone of modern secular morality - with a working-group surveying and quoting philosophy texts from across the world, including Confucian philosopher Mencius and (unspecified) Hindu thinkers.

I'm not rating the book because I haven't checked most of the facts in it which I hadn't heard before, and with this being a translation as well as a popular history by a journalist, there are no English reviews by academics available. I didn't hear anything which I knew to be wrong, and in the one instance I did find online pointing out a mistake (an Amazon review mentioning Operation Black Tulip, in which the Dutch planned to expel German civilians from the Netherlands) it was simply the case that Åsbrink hadn't included the conclusion of the episode via events that happened after 1947, rather than being wrong per se.

The book was at its most engaging when it stuck to month-by-month events, newslike, rather than breaking the spell with accounts of later developments going into the 1950s as it did for a few topics.

Åsbrink devotes too much space to developments in European fascism in the early 1950s - this is the reason for that 'mostly' in the first sentence. It is depressing to hear about, but it is an important part of the post-war story that fascists were still active and internationally networking with one another after 1945 (a lot of people seem to assume that apart from Germany, and the Nazis hiding in South America, they disappeared in a puff of smoke, or were merely isolated figures of ridicule) but the amount of material about them in the book dwarfs the other topics predominantly because of the history of fascism in Europe extending beyond 1947. However, it will be a new idea to readers who've had little contact with history of the period, and who base their assumptions on more recent politics, that these postwar fascists were - at a time when internationalism was the prevailing trend across the political spectrum - in favour of a united Europe.

Among the other biggest international stories here are the partition of India - its borders shockingly delineated by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, considered by the Lord Chancellor a good man for the job due to "his brilliance as a lawyer and his ignorance of India". Gandhi is later quoted decrying violence against women during the aftermath of partition, without reference to his dubious personal behaviour which has become better known in recent years.

Also ongoing throughout 1947 were efforts to address the Holocaust, its survivors and perpetrators. The Nuremberg Trials were initially halted, but restarted as new documentary evidence of Nazi atrocities was uncovered. Public boredom with news of the trials is commonly mentioned, as many people wanted to be able to move on from the war. Raphael Lemkin is here too, a figure who seemed to be rarely mentioned in the past (and a lonely, impoverished crusader at the time, for official recognition of the crime of genocide) but one who seems increasingly well-known recently, perhaps since British barrister and law professor Philippe Sands' award-winning East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity".

The most complex issue of all, and one I'd, rather appalings, barely heard about in reference to this period in history, was Palestine - its difficulties also, in part, a legacy of the Holocaust. Åsbrink implicitly indicates similarities to the current decade's refugee crises, with accounts of the illegal immigration of Jewish survivors from all over Europe, heading to Palestine: waiting in camps for visas or boarding clandestine ships, such as one the the British (in their last days of colonial power in the area) sent back to France, despite disagreement by the US. There is a widespread sense that Jews no longer want to live in the countries where mass crimes against them had been committed, and many wanted to go to Palestine or the US. A UN delegation with members from neutral countries - some of whose levels of competence may have been questionable - was set up to find a solution. It was clear that Britain could no longer hang on to Palestine, so the question was how to find a plan that met the needs of both Zionist Jews and Arab powers in the region.

The background to the tension in Palestine in 1947 is a politically sensitive topic that really needs comment from someone who's studied the history in depth: it is the type of issue where selection of facts may be as significant as the accuracy of what is stated. I will try to delineate what Åsbrink says, or what I picked up from it, although I know it won't be the full story. There had once been a anti-colonial, anti-British, pan-Arab tendency that was inclusive of Jews, but in the 1930s, following the foundation of the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928 - a revival of the idea of jihad after hundreds of years - this shifted. A key figure in the Palestine Region was the Grand Mufti, Amin al-Husseini, who had links to Hitler's regime and who appears to have supported the Holocaust; he later opposed Zionism and Jewish immigration. There were also moderate Arabs who considered that their people should not have to lose land as a knock-on effect of the actions of Hitler, who was nothing to do with them. There was active terrorism from both sides, including an incident in 1947, in which Zionist paramilitaries killed two British soldiers; this was followed by a week of anti-Semitic riots across British cities, with smashing-up of shops that echo East European pogroms. Åsbrink notes, with foreshadowing, that various sources in 1947 predicted a bloodbath in the Palestine region, if a suboptimal plan (was there an optimal one?) were chosen for the area's borders. Åsbrink heavily implies that the roots of ongoing problems in Israel and Palestine lie in the decision-making of 1947. (This has to be a factor, although other causes such as British colonialism itself, or hundreds or thousands of years of religious history, are not thoroughly explored here.)

Although I can't say how exact all of this history is, overall 1947, carrying the perspective of a writer from another European country, seems like an instructive book for the British reader or listener, who is probably unused to hearing about their country's history as just one among several, discussed without any hint of specialness. It does not go out of its way to make Britain seem bad, but it does not try to gloss over negatives as a lot of UK popular historians (even the less conservative ones) seem to do by reflex.

The book has short subchapters, making it an ideal read/listen for commuting, waiting, cooking and so forth. I hadn't really noticed before that Metro - the free newspaper commonly found on buses and in city centres - had 'Books of the Year' but it seems fitting that this would be one of them, as highlighted in one edition's blurb.

This was a lovely audiobook reading - the narrator had a light, airy timbre which worked perfectly for the more literary and descriptive sections as well as for the more news-like episodes; some of the descriptions would not have worked as well read out in a matter-of-fact radio-announcer tone.

I found the first two episodes of this short Radio 4 series, The Death of the Postwar Settlement a great follow-up to 1947: When Now Begins. The first episode discusses the UN and the foundational assumptions, and the programmes then go on to explain how things changed from the fall of Eastern Bloc Communism onwards.

(listened and reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (audiobook)

[4.5] I listened to the UK audiobook read by Jeremy Northam.

How else could this have been written? The central narrative of Homage to Catalonia was like glimpsing a platonic ideal of non-fiction reportage: the definitive, the default - which must be because Orwell has become an (the?) exemplar of good English style, filtered into countless other things I've read, from books to below-the-line newspaper comments. (Sometimes I can see the lineage: a friend whose writing sometimes sounds like Hitchens, and Hitchens was inspired by Orwell - but mostly it's just everywhere.) I hadn't read a full book of Orwell's since my teens, either, so in that way too, it was revisiting something so familiar it must have been resident, quiescent in my subconscious.

It seemed to have the perfect balance between being about the writer, and about the 'important things' the book is supposed to be about. And of course he is a first-hand participant, by actually fighting in the war, in a way that few modern non-fiction writers are - and he was an experienced writer before he set out, unlike most memoirists. He mucks in, yet mentions human frailties: a dislike of mountains and a sensitivity to cold (linked?), and a loathing of rats that grows and, as millions will have realised before me, must have inspired Room 101. (A term which unfortunately makes me think of Paul Merton and the TV series first, and 1984 second.) He is sometimes very thoughtful - making an apology to readers who'd written to him about his last book, and whose letters had been taken during a raid on his hotel in Spain before he could reply - yet no paragon. He occasionally enjoys writing graffiti like a teenager, not a man of 33. His account of being hospitalised with a 'poisoned hand' is intriguing in its reflection of another time's attitudes and processes, in the way he doesn't consider it terribly serious, although it does require hospital, and is in outcome, a correction to those who assume that the death toll before antibiotics was 100%.

Political analysis is mostly in the long appendices at the end, about 25% of the book, which even Orwell advises skipping if you are not interested. These appendices have not stood the test of time, as explained here by a contemporary historian - and the level of detail is beyond what most readers will need now if they are not taking a course about the historiography of the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, I found it impossible not to respect Orwell's intention to explain, and to be loyal to the group he had fought with. (And his negative experiences of the Spanish communist party also help make sense of his writing Animal Farm at a time when many British socialists were still enamoured of the Soviets.) Even if the analysis of the Barcelona fighting has its problems, his intimations of international war turned out to be right. His sense that Spain could only have a dictatorship after the civil war, even if the republicans won, cannot be tested, but it’s eerie to read now.

The main book was more of a narrative memoir than I had assumed, with most analysis left to the end. And there was unexpected dry humour - although such may be the way of war stories, humour as coping mechanism - and Northam's reading brought this out without ever overplaying it.
They impounded all papers, including the contents of the waste-paper basket, and all our books into the bargain. They were thrown into ecstasies of suspicion by finding that we possessed a French translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf. If that had been the only book they found our doom would have been sealed. It is obvious that a person who reads Mein Kampf must be a Fascist. The next moment, however, they came upon a copy of Stalin's pamphlet, Ways of Liquidating Trotskyists and other Double Dealers, which reassured them somewhat.
During the same episode, among the driest, darkest sentences of humour I've ever encountered: This was not a round-up of criminals; it was merely a reign of terror.
Another favourite subtly gave a fascinating picture of British political alignments of 1936:
the News Chronicle-New Statesman version of the war as the defence of civilization against a maniacal outbreak by an army of Colonel Blimps in the pay of Hitler.
That harks back to a time when appeasement policy was forseeable (and in effect was already being used towards Spain, under the guise of neutrality) - but less so Winston Churchill as PM and war leader, and Powell & Pressburger's refashioning of the Colonel Blimp stereotype into a patriotic wartime drama, no longer just the military Gammon of his day.

Orwell’s first-hand experience gives the potential for humour alongside serious coverage in a way that a political book of the day, or a history book, would not. And it also means more emotional involvement. His accounts of life in the trenches were occasionally harrowing to an extent for which I was not prepared. For the first time I understood what this - admittedly sponsored – study about audiobooks and emotion was getting at. I’ve also been listening to long audiobooks about Russians under Stalin, and British women in the Second World War, both of which quote individual testimonies, but here the duration of involvement with one account gave it a different dimension. (It was good to have experienced this, but I am not looking for such an emotive experience with audiobooks, so I will be careful about whole-book first-person narratives in future.) His bursts of anger, about men he knew who had died, didn’t always flow perfectly with the rest of the narrative, but they made it all the more human, and even better for it.

Being there on the ground, and writing in book form months later rather than a news reporter’s regular dispatches, meant he could give a medium-term overview of a type rarely heard by the general public about events this long ago. Of, for instance, the changes in manners and atmosphere in Barcelona in the months either side of his frontline service: he arrives to a remarkable experiment in socialism in which formal forms of address have been dropped and the attitudes of waiters are not deferential; and only months later, in a city that had been surprisingly comfortable and insulated away from the front, more traditional ways have begun to reassert themselves. Six months earlier, looking like a proletarian was what made you respectable and kept you safe; later it could be a risk.

The contrast between England and Spain - and especially that between the life a ‘lower upper-middle class’ Englishman (as Orwell elsewhere described his social standing) had been prepared for, and the conditions of the Spanish Civil War – is a recurring theme explored with a greater self-awareness and openness than plenty of contemporary popular travel writers would manage, who wouldn’t explicitly warn: beware of my partisanship, ... and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. I wondered if to some foreign readers he seemed to go on about England and Englishness too much, but to me it seems a necessary part of his exploration of why he finds things different, and of how he works out how to behave and survive under these conditions. He refers more than once to grappling with, and learning to disregard, an underlying belief that “they couldn’t arrest you unless you broke the law”, as happened in England. (Or perhaps as applied to men like him in England. It reminded me a little of a sheltered posh student discovering that drunk and disorderly was something that could actually apply to him too – although Orwell, being rather older and wiser, twigs well before it’s too late.) This being the 1930s, one can’t entirely escape essentialism and the idea of national characteristics, but what there is of it is based on real experience and observation, explained in detail. And any disgust at ‘backwardness’ is about the conditions people have to endure, for example in jails whose conditions were, he considers, last seen in Britain in the 18th century, or for peasants having to make do with a harrow made of wooden boards and flint, like something out of the later stone age, and which makes him look more kindly on industrialism.

Something in Homage to Catalonia, perhaps this observation of conditions and necessary behaviour, and awareness of one’s own position without spending excess time on deprecating it, gave me the sense that this would have been a good book to have absorbed before going on a student gap year to some troubled part of the world. (Perhaps more so before the social media boom where one hears about everything anyway.) There is some deep sense of how to cope and how to think in here, and immersion in a book narrating thought processes can inculcate them in a way a couple of sentences of direct advice can’t - a book about things that are almost certainly far worse than what you’d ever encounter, but which, similar to Ivan Denisovich could seem like a sort of toolkit for surviving things that seem difficult after a sheltered early life. I suppose the way I keep referring to students reflect my feelings that this is a book that should have been read earlier in life. Not that it doesn’t still have a lot to interest someone older as a memoir of immersion in historic events, and of another time, 80 years ago, when it was even more the case that “You could not, as before, 'agree to differ' and have drinks with a man who was supposedly your political opponent”, but the adventure and bravado, and realism and dumb luck of it all seem not merely interesting, but actually potentially illustrative and useful for teenagers and twentysomethings.

But what a thing this is to read in autumn 2018:
And then England - southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way… to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface … all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by…
There are different concerns now about what is looming, but loom it does, and the safe, ensconced plushness, the feeling it's impossible bad things could happen, is part of why.


The reading, too, worked excellently. Northam was a recognisable name, an actor whom, in my teens, I saw in a stage play and, to stave off potential boredom rather because of any overwhelming interest, decided to fancy for the duration and a few weeks afterwards. In the past ten years or so, I'd noticed that he had been in various things on TV, but I was never interested enough to watch them. Here, like, or perhaps because of, Orwell's words, he seemed to be nothing at all to do with that actor from my teens, but a definitive/default male Radio 4 voice. (An anonymous one, rather than a recognisable classic like Brian Perkins.) A voice that could have been on there 20 or 30 years ago announcing the time and imminent programming, rather than someone you'd notice for their accent and as a mark of modernisation. It is an RP accent which does not tend towards the distractingly old-fashioned (now heard as affected) Mr Cholmondley-Warner type (which the real Orwell, for all I know, may have had, what with being born in colonial India in 1903) but which is classic and un-modern enough that it fused with the narrative until I felt I was hearing a story told by an Englishman who'd actually been in Spain the 1930s. (Really, though a voice of an actor who, when I was growing up, might have played a young man in some drama set in the 1930s.) The reading was practically faultless and strangely believeable as the voice of someone who'd written the words; the only slip I noticed was one of emphasis in mentioning Penguin Library books: the stress fell as if they had been borrowed library books, rather than purchased paperbacks, published by a particular imprint. I only really remembered I was listening to an actor when the Irish accent put on for brief conversation with a comrade was better than I think the average author would have done, and in the highly entertaining shifts of tone and volume in one scene in which a succession of people whisper to, and outright tell, Orwell that he must "get out" of a hotel where he has been staying, due to a raid. I must try and listen to Northam's reading of The Road to Wigan Pier as this is now what George Orwell sounds like in my head, and there is no good reason I never finished that book.


(listened and reviewed Sept 2018; the review on Goodreads.)