HISTORY TONY RENNELL
DIARY OF AN INVASION by Andrey Kurkov (Mountain Leopard €15.99, 304 pp)
HISTORY is playing out before our eyes — that’s why this very current book on Ukraine’s struggle against Putin’s Russia tops my History list. It’s also because, as we learn from this personal account of the war by one of Ukraine’s leading intellectuals, the past plays a huge part in what is happening today. This is a clash of cultures — individualism and freedom versus meek conformity to whatever the Kremlin dictates — that’s been a long time in the making.
Andrey Kurkov is a writer, not a soldier. His diary does not chronicle battles and air strikes but movingly conveys the soul of a people who never wanted this war but who are more, not less, defiant because of the invader’s atrocities.
‘Heaven and Hell have taken concrete form,’ he writes. ‘Hell is Mariupol, Bucha, Hostomel, Vorzel and the many other destroyed cities, towns and villages. Paradise is these same places before the war. Hell is now a specific place on the map with its own capital — Moscow. It is the greatest misfortune for any state to have a common border with Hell.’
The irony is not lost that Kurkov is Russianborn, Ukrainian by adoption. For the land of his birth he now feels only hate.
ABYSS by Max Hastings (William Collins €17.99, 576 pp)
THE WAR in Ukraine also adds immediacy to this superb re-telling of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, a previous occasion when a madcap Russian leader chanced his arm and, convinced in his own mind the West would back down, took the world to the brink of nuclear war.
Drawing on tapes of the heated discussions between the ‘nuke ’em’ hawks and the ‘softly softly’ doves inside JFK’s White House on how to respond to Khrushchev’s arming of Cuba with nuclear missiles, Hastings shows how terrifyingly close humanity came to annihilation.
And although we know the outcome was benign, you can feel the tension of November 1962 — and just pray it isn’t going to happen again 60 years later. How did that Pete Seeger protest song go — when will they ever learn?
What troubles Hastings (and me) most is the realisation it only takes a minor misstep or misunderstanding by a panicky individual on the front line for the first button to be pressed. The missiles fly, and there’s no turning back.
HEIRESS, REBEL, VIGILANTE, BOMBER by Sean O’Driscoll
(Sandycove €19.99, 288 pp) AN English heiress who devoted her life to the IRA, Rose Dugdale had a fascinating story, which is impeccably researched in this book by Mail reporter Sean O’Driscoll. Presented to Queen Elizaveth as a debutante in 1958, she trained at Oxford as an adacemic economist. She also explored her sexuality there during a love affair with a female professor.
In 1972, she travelled to Ireland and joined the IRA, becoming a committed terrorist. She took part in a major art heist at Russborough, the Wicklow home of Sir Alfred and Lady Beit, when a number of old masters were stolen. She was also involved in a bombing raid on a police and army barracks.
Ending up in prison for the Russborough theft, there she kept a pregnancy secret until giving birth to a son, who she called Ruairi.
Dugdale herself spoke to O’Driscoll for this wonderful insight into her life — particularly the early part, which until now was lesser known. She still lives in Dublin, now aged 81, in care since a stroke in 2014. This is a fascinating read.
COLDITZ: PRISONERS OF THE CASTLE by Ben Macintyre (Viking €35, 384 pp)
THERE is oodles of bulldog spirit in this unputdownable account of Germany’s most famous prisoner-of-war camp. Macintyre has a genius for taking war stories that seem familiar and breathing new life into them. He did it with Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat and he’s done it again, better than ever, in Colditz.
The escapers’ stories are told with great style, verve and brio but there is also something new here, a different perspective, as he pricks the
bubble of unbridled heroism and exposes the other side of life inside the formidable fortress — farce, insanity, tragedy, boredom, bullying. And Douglas Bader.
He was Colditz’s most famous prisoner (thanks to his lack of legs and his own self-promotion), but also a loud-mouthed tartar, an insufferable egotist and a pompous show-off who treated everyone else like dirt. Including the poor Scottish orderly who carried him on his back up and down the castle’s steep stairs every day and got not a word of thanks.
THE WORLD: A FAMILY HISTORY by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Weidenfeld €40.49, 1,344 pp)
THIS IS not just an undoubted book of the year but of many years. You’d be hard put to get through its more than 1,250 pages and 55 chapters (with a bibliography of 125-plus pages online) in one reading so put it on the shelf and dip into it. Why? Because it’s a treasure trove of marvellous stories, brilliantly researched and absorbingly told, fascinating characters who leap off the pages but, above all, the thing missing most in our troubled, selfabsorbed society — perspective.
This is a history of the world, told uniquely through families and dynasties, from the Pharaoh Khufu in 2600 BC to Donald Trump more than four and a half millennia later.
It was Khufu who had the Great Pyramid built at Giza, which at 481 ft high was the tallest building on Earth until the Eiffel Tower. That’s what I mean by perspective — putting us in our place.
There is nothing new under the sun — one of the themes running throughout world history, according to one of the author’s many intriguing footnotes, is ‘the everpresent fear of the world’s end’, felt as strongly back in 2000BC (when floods were the threat in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh) as it is today.
THE IRISH CIVIL WAR IN COLOUR by Michael B Barry and
John O’Byrne (GIll Books €20.99, 272pp)
IT was a defining moment in our history, when the country was torn apart in pursuit of democracy, freedom and stability. Now, for the first time, the Irish Civil War is brought to life in vivid and painstakingly hand-coloured photographs — some of which have never been published before.
Using the power of photographs, The Irish Civil War In Colour brings the complicated conflict to life in a way that is accessible and understandable — a feat rarely managed by historical texts alone.
Each image has been accurately hand-coloured by John O’Byrne. The men, women and children of this brutal war, 100 years ago, experienced it in colour so it makes sense that the pictures of the time should be in colour too.
O’Byrne, a professional photographer and colouriser, kept the cracks, specks and photographer’s inscriptions from the original photographs.
The captions that accompany the images are based on years of research by Michael B Barry — a historian whose books include the bestselling Victorian Dublin Revealed, a trilogy of books on the Irish Revolutionary period, and the critically acclaimed, An Illustrated History Of The Irish Revolution 1916-1923.
Many of the photographs that enliven the pages of The Irish Civil War In Colour are selected from archives and private collections, with some being published for the first time.
The result is an informative, engaging and timely look at the conflict through words and images, from its beginning to the bitter end.
More importantly, it gives the ordinary people who suffered through it the spotlight they thoroughly deserve.
TRAITOR KING by Andrew Lownie (Blink €15.39, 432 pp)
IN 1953, the exiled Duke of Windsor (once, briefly, king) was allowed back into Britain for the funeral of his mother, Queen Mary. To his wife, Wallis, deliberately not invited, back in Paris he wrote: ‘What a smug, stinking lot my relations are; you’ve never seen such a seedy, worn-out bunch of old hags.’
Now this really was a royal family at war — the vituperation so intense and so personal that it reduces today’s spats between princes to a minor squabble over the garden wall.
At war too in the sense that the Windsors had an unnerving liking for Hitler and the Nazis — ‘pretty much fifth column’ was a widely held opinion of them — and were far from averse to seeing Britain defeated if it meant he’d get back his throne and she’d be queen.
For the duration of the war, they were ushered off to the Bahamas — not exactly a hardship posting but, to them, as they plotted and moaned, it was ‘Elba’. And afterwards they wandered the world — exiles with nothing to do but nurse their resentments.
Lownie expertly captures the extravagance (they never travelled with fewer than 73 pieces of luggage), the sense of entitlement, the snobbery, the vanity, the selfpity, the bone-idle laziness, the fundamental uselessness of their lives as outcasts. ‘I never saw a man so bored,’ said one acquaintance. Should this be required reading in a certain household in Montecito, California?
THE GREEN AND WHITE HOUSE by Lynne Kelleher (Black & White €11.99, 336 pp)
OUR neighbours across the water like to boast about their ‘special relationship’ with America. But as is made clear in Lynne Kelleher’s excellent and timely book, The Green and White House, the links to this island are much more powerful.
Sean Donlon, the former Irish ambassador to Washington, points out in the foreword that ‘23 of the 46 Presidents of the US have claimed, or have claimed for them, a connection to Ireland’.
Some, like the current office holder, have worn their Irish roots like a badge. Others were unaware of their ancestry until they were in the White House.
But it’s staggering to think that at least half of the holders of the most powerful office in the world had Irish blood.
It has been one of the quirks of this country’s links to the White House that when ancestry is traced back, it is never to Dublin, Cork or any other urban centre, but it to some sleepy and forgotten part of rural Ireland.
John F Kennedy’s roots went all the way to the Wexford townland of Cloonagh, Ronald Reagan’s forefathers came from the Tipperary village of Ballyporeen, while Barack Obama was traced to Moneygall on the Offaly-Tipperary border.
There is much to enjoy in this wonderful account of a relationship between Ireland and the White House, that stretches back to Andrew Jackson in 1829.
THE TICKET COLLECTOR FROM BELARUS by Mike Anderson and Neil Hanson (Simon & Schuster €10, 384 pp)
NOBODY gave a second glance at the sour-faced ticket collector at busy London Bridge railway station. Nor did he look up from underneath his peaked cap as he ushered the tide of humanity through the gates.
He kept his dreadful secret to himself — that years before, in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe, he had similarly herded people... to their deaths.
Andrei Sawoniuk was an SS auxiliary who had rounded up Jews in his native Belorussia and butchered men, women and children in cold blood before tossing their bodies into mass graves.
After the war he slipped away from the scene of his crimes against humanity, ending up in Britain where he settled into a mundane job and, he hoped, an escape for ever from his guilty past.
This thoroughly absorbing and astonishing book recounts how he lay hidden for more than half a century, until he was eventually tracked down and brought to justice in Britain’s one and only war crimes trial.
He wasn’t an instigator of the Holocaust by any means but he was a willing participant, and for that — Russian soldiers in Ukraine, please note — he was finally held to account.
BERLIN by Sinclair McKay (Viking €22.40, 464 pp)
IF THERE was a focal point for the history of the 20th century, then Berlin was it. The city had a central role in all the century’s defining conflicts: both World Wars and the Cold War. Its citizens endured, in the words of Sinclair McKay, ‘an unending series of revolutions, a maelstrom of turmoil and insecurity’. And yet it survives.
It didn’t look that way in 1945 as Allied bombs reduced it to rubble and Soviet soldiers raped, slaughtered and pillaged, exacting revenge on the ordinary people of Hitler’s Germany for their years of complicity.
With unburied bodies strewn through its streets and mass suicides by Berliners who saw no future for themselves, its fate seemed to encapsulate ‘all the nihilist horror of that sad century — mass death without meaning on an unimaginable scale’.
And then, split in two, it became the pressure point for a new confrontation between Moscow and the West. If the world was going to end with a bang, the first sparks might well be here.
McKay, a stylish writer, tells all this with great understanding, his research extensive, his observations profound.