New Books in Western European Studies

During the 1960s attendance fell at cricket grounds across England. Just as the Church of England lost members in droves in the same period, it appeared that this other pillar of English tradition was becoming irrelevant amidst the social and cultural developments of the times. Making the situation worse were the guardians of the sport, who were reluctant to respond to the changes around them. The men of the Marlyebone Cricket Club and administrators of county sides held to the old class division, preferring amateur gentlemen to serve as their captains, even when there were few Oxbridge graduates with enough money or free time to devote themselves to the sport–or enough talent to merit a captaincy. And while other governing bodies of international sport were cutting ties with apartheid South Africa, the MCC still saw that country’s side as a legitimate competitor and made plans for tours. As Guy Fraser-Sampson shows in his history of English cricket in the late Sixties and early Seventies, these obstinate positions led English cricket into one controversy after another. When the professional Brian Close, son of a weaver, became captain of the England side in 1966, he went on to lead the team to successful series against the West Indies, India, and Pakistan. But the following year the MCC stripped Close of the captaincy on feeble charges that he had violated the code of the game. And when South African cricket officials warned the MCC that a team which included Basil D’Oliveira, a “colored” native of Cape Town, would not be welcome in the country, the talented D’Oliveira was excluded from the England side. Both decisions brought scorn from English cricket fans. But as Guy explains in our interview, the MCC was not an institution responsive to public mood. Cricket at the Crossroads: Class, Colour and Controversy from 1967 to 1977 (Elliott & Thompson, 2011) tells the stories of the Close and D’Oliveira affairs, along with the successes achieved on the field by Ray Illingworth’s side in the 1970s. The book concludes with Kerry Packer’s creation of World Series Cricket and the challenge that it posed to the English cricket establishment. But even more significant, in Guy’s treatment, is the turn toward aggressive bowling in the 1970s, which left batsmen battered and ushered in what he terms “a dark age” for cricket. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Not long ago I had a discussion (prompted, I think, by a poll in The Economist) with my colleague about which city on earth could boast that it was the true ‘World City’. We threw around a couple of ideas – it seems obligatory to mention something connected to China these days – before deciding that the city where we both sat was the true holder of that title. London has its frustrations, and as somebody who recently moved out of London I am acutely aware of some of them: the crowds, the transport system, the sheer expense! But it is also a quite remarkable and exciting place (as the Olympic games seem to have demonstrated), full of energy, history and a sense of occasion that belies its location in the corner of a slightly damp island off the north west coast of the Eurasian landmass. How this place became a real World City is the underlying story at the heart of Robert Bucholz and Joseph Ward‘s London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2012). England and London in 1550 were slightly peripheral places, and certainly in the shadow of some of the true great cities of Europe and beyond. By 1750, however, London had been transformed into a place of innovation, wealth, power and progress, and England was well on the path to becoming a nation that was to shape much of the history of the world over the next two centuries. The story is also deeply human and very colourful, involving lashes of gin, some terrible smells, lots of sex, and countless accounts of amazing lives and shabby deaths. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book and talk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The story of Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor is more often than not presented as a great love story: she is the woman for whom the King gave up the throne. It’s precisely this oversimplification of the facts that Anne Sebba seeks to correct in her excellent new biography That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (St. Martin’s Press, 2012). The first woman to write a full biography of the Duchess, Sebba provides a much-needed rehabilitation of this polarizing figure. The bite of the title succinctly captures the bitterness and antipathy directed towards Wallis Simpson- during her life and after- but Sebba’s impeccable research illuminates a woman far more complex than the popular imagination has allowed. This is myth-busting to the nth degree. With access to previously undiscovered letters, Sebba creates an account of the Duchess’s life that is, at times, downright revelatory. For instance, Wallis Simpson didn’t intend to marry the Prince of Wales. Who knew?! As Sebba writes: “She was not in love with Edward himself but in love with the opulence, the lifestyle, the way doors opened for her, the way he made all her childish dreams come true. She was sure it was a fairytale that would end, but while it lasted she could not bring herself to end it herself.” Ultimately, this was the stuff of tragedy rather than fairytale, but the story is riveting nonetheless. “That Woman,” an American woman who captivated a Prince to the point of obsession. As Sebba writes: “Few who knew them well would describe what they shared as love.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

It seems safe to say that the guillotine occupies a macabre place in the popular imagination among the icons of France’s transition to modernity–perhaps stashed somewhere in between idealized barricades or lurking on one chronological flank of the Eiffel Tower. The guillotine’s mechanization of official killing was instrumental in carrying out the thousands of executions that made the Terror what it was. Depictions of the revolutionary period often put the guillotine at center stage: atop a platform with a raucous audience at its feet and some noble man or woman about to put on–with the executioner’s aid–the finale to their ordeal. The guillotine is also often taken as a token of France’s human rights enlightenment. It made execution swift and supposedly painless. Such characterizations miss an essential point: The guillotine was meant to make execution disappear. France’s republican founders sought efficiency and discretion in carrying out what they saw as a necessary evil. They had come to view execution as a sort of ultimate banishment, and not as an opportunity for an object lesson. It was a tool for getting rid of people–the quicker and quieter, the better. In fact, the French government finally put an end to public executions in 1939 when one particular guillotine collided with photo journalism. No matter how speedy the blade, the shutter was faster. Historian Paul Friedland concludes his rich and expansive new book, Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Punishment in France (Oxford University Press, 2012), by drawing back the curtain on this aspect of the guillotine’s past. Even more importantly, moreover, Friedland demonstrates that modern preoccupations with exemplary deterrence as a justification for punishment have led to distortions in how we understand public executions as they happened in the past. He begins his study in the medieval period, where he observes that public executions functioned mainly as rituals for repairing damage to the social fabric. He then follows the thread over half a millennium, tracing many evolutions in attitudes and practice, but never finding deterrence theory at work quite as some commentators have. Paul Friedland is an affiliate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University and a fellow of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University (2011-2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

One chilling statistic relating to 1945 is that more German soldiers died in that January than in any other month of the war: 450,000. It was not just the military that suffered: refugees poured west to escape the brutality of the Red Army’s advance through the historic German lands of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia; and civilians in the cities bore the brunt of the Luftwaffe’s failure to stem the allied bombing campaign of the RAF at night time and the USAAF during the day. The staggering scale of losses during those last months of war also hints at why 1945 is such a grimly fascinating one from a historical perspective: Nazi Germany faced an inevitable end, yet continued to fight grimly until the bitter end, achieving a total defeat that was unprecedented in modern history. In doing so it created a ‘zero hour’ for the German people, who then set about rebuilding their lives, economic activity and ultimately Germany itself, with the Nazi era firmly in the past. The legacy of the Nazis, of course, was all around – not just in the sheer scale of destruction and suffering, but also in the survivors of Nazi camps, both Jewish and otherwise, and the foreign labourers, all of whom found themselves freed in a defeated nation. The country was divided into zones of occupation, each with their own character, their own challenges and their own solutions. In the midst of this a new Germany was born -or more accurately, two new Germanys). Much of the eventual political, economic and social achievements of West Germany were founded on the peculiarities of 1945, in particular the totality of the Nazi defeat and the yearning for stability after chaos and destruction. There was also – and this sounds peculiar to us looking back at the crimes of the Nazis – a distinct sense of victimhood. Richard Bessel‘s Germany 1945: From War to Peace (Harper, 2009) is an excellent guide to that tumultuous and difficult year, from the military reverses of the early months to the immense challenges that rose in the wake of defeat. It was a book that I came across almost by chance, in a shop in Doha airport that frustratingly failed to provide me with a copy of The Economist to read on a flight back to London. I was already fifty pages in by the time we lifted off, and – once home – I got in touch with the author, hoping for an interview. I hope you enjoy listening to the results!   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

As Elizabeth Goldsmith writes in The King’s Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin (PublicAffairs, 2012), the Mazarin sisters were “arguably the first media celebrities.” Upon their arrival at Louis XIV’s Court of Versailles, the sisters made a splash when Marie and the young King promptly fell in love. Ultimately, the couple’s relationship– which climaxed with a forced separation and Marie’s confinement in a convent– reads like something out of Shakespeare. Forced into advantageous mismatches that were, at turns, oppressive and abusive, the sisters jumped back into public view when Hortense, donning men’s clothing and making use of the new post coach service, left her husband and took to the road. Marie promptly joined her. At a time when it was borderline scandalous for women to travel unaccompanied by men, much less divorce them, the sisters darted about Europe, seeking refuge from the husbands who actively pursued them. The story of their escape seemed like something out of a novel and, for years, the whole of Europe was riveted. As Goldsmith writes, the sisters were “admired by libertines, feminists and free-thinkers but viewed by others as frivolous at best and threats to civil society at worst.” Both women penned memoirs, with that of Hortense being the first memoir written to which a woman signed her name. What is perhaps most striking about the sisters now is how brazenly unapologetic they were. As Hortense writes: “I know that a woman’s glory lies in her not giving rise to gossip, but one cannot always choose the kind of life one would like to lead.” She and her sister landed lives of adventure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role–yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especially true with the modernists, in particular T.S. Eliot. After graduating from Harvard University in 1910, the young Eliot spent a year in Paris, a year that had a lasting and profound effect upon his work that has gone largely unexamined until now. In her riveting intellectual biography, T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, Nancy Duvall Hargrove, the William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Mississippi State University, revisits that single year in the poet’s life to mine it for later influences. While this period is often interpreted to be typical of the early 20th century post-graduate foreign study experience, Hargrove invites us view it as extra-ordinary. Linking Eliot’s work to the Ballets Russes, the music of Stravinsky and the intellectual tension ofLaNouvelle Revue Francaise, she demonstrates the rare coming together of an artist and the art of his time to form “un present parfait.” It was a year that influenced not only his poetry but also his prose. As Hargrove writes, the theater Eliot encountered while in Paris “may have been the inspiration for the difficult dramatic goal which Eliot later set for himself: to write verse drama in an age conditioned to prose and to write of spiritual and moral concerns in an age largely devoid of and unsympathetic to them.” But perhaps most impressive- especially to any lover of Paris- is Hargrove’s meticulous recreation of the city as it was then. Through chapters on sport, popular entertainment, transportation, etc., she elegantly situates the young poet amid a city so alive it seems to strain against the page. The end result is a book that leaves the reader longing for both the poetry and Paris. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The second-longest reigning British Monarch, Queen Elizabeth II has always remained an elusive figure, a monumental accomplishment given the media attention focused upon her family. In her new book, Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch (Random House, 2012), Sally Bedell Smith peels back the layers of mystique to reveal the very shy woman who is the current Queen. It isn’t so much a dismantling as a reevaluation, an effort to appreciate a figure who– though part of an institution that is seen by some as vestigial– is nonetheless deeply impressive and truly beloved. Smith interviewed over 200 people, 160 of whom are on the record as the queen’s relatives and friends–a fact that suggests that the 40 individuals who opted for anonymity are even grander higher ups. Though the book is not “authorized,” it carries significant clout. Buckingham Palace also offered Smith limited access to the Queen, so the author could see her subject in action and play witness to her quiet charm. That’s the biggest stamp of approval for which a royal writer can hope. Like many royal biographies, Elizabeth the Queen is filled with small, gossipy tidbits. We learn what the Queen eats for breakfast and what she carries in her ubiquitous handbag. But Smith also offers substantive insight into the less examined areas of the queen’s life, in particular her religious faith, her life pre-ascension and her relationship with the Queen Mother. The end result is a lively portrait of a hard-working woman who, in her own way, has represented “a new Elizabethan age.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

I love reading, I love reading history, and I especially love reading history books written by authors who understand how to tell a good story. In addition to being beautifully written, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (University of Chicago Press, 2008) does a wonderful job of keeping readers engaged with the story of Joseph Hooker – his travels, his personal and professional battles, his friendships – while offering a thoughtful account of the practices of Victorian science that sustained his life and work. You will not just find texts in this story. It is also full of paper and lenses, leather and wood, paint and pencils, arguing for the importance of a material history of science, and of botany in particular. Jim Endersby ranges with the characters in his book from the Antarctic to Kew Gardens, and helps us understand how the consequences of empire shaped the emergence of a scientific profession in Hooker’s lifetime. This will be required reading for scholars of Victorian science, of natural history, and of the history of imperial science, but it will also reward any reader interested in a compelling story written by a writer’s writer. It was a pleasure to read, and equally a pleasure to talk with Jim about it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

It’s springtime in the American Midwest. The playoffs for the NBA title and hockey’s Stanley Cup are moving into the later rounds, and the new baseball season has already produced history-making performances and rising stars. But the students in my sports history class don’t want to talk about any of that. Instead, the subject of sports talk among these red-blooded Americans is . . . the Champions League! European football, unlike the American variety, is a sport of global reach and increasing popularity. In the weeks ahead, hundreds of millions of fans around the world will watch the final match of the UEFA Champions League and the group stages and knockout rounds of 2012 UEFA European Championship. To mark the occasion, we take a break from our normal slate of interviews to bring together a team of scholars and experts who look at European football in its various dimensions. In this special double episode, we talk about the economic and business side of soccer with Simon Chadwick and Brad Humphreys, contributor to the blog The Sports Economist. Director of the CIES Football Observatory, Raffaele Poli, discusses the movement of players in the European labor market, while David Ranc, manager of the research project Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, explains how football fans have responded to the arrival of foreign players to their clubs. We welcome back sociologist Peter Millward, who talks about his work on the club, national, and European identities of soccer fans Historians Jean Williams and Manfred Zeller speak to us about women’s football in Europe and the history of soccer in Ukraine, one of the co-hosts of Euro 2012. We chat about football shirts with one of the bloggers at the sites Football Shirt Culture.com and Design Football.com. And the BBC’s Tim Vickery offers his views, as a removed but certainly knowledgeable observer, on the Euro tournament and European football’s worldwide appeal. Whether you are also a distant fan, or a supporter of your local club, hopefully you’ll learn something new from this podcast seminar. At the very least, our guests have plenty of suggestions of football books for your summer reading list. And watch out for another special episode of the podcast, later in the summer, as we’ll gather another team of experts to help us understand the Olympics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies