In Churchill's Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain [Hardcover]

David Cannadine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2003 | ISBN-10: 0195219260 | ISBN-13: 978-0195219265 | Edition: 1ST

David Cannadine is widely regarded as one of the most insightful historians of modern Britain--and certainly one of the most witty and entertaining. His most recent book, Ornamentalism, a provocative argument about the role of class in the British Empire, was hailed as "vigorous, stimulating, and bursting with ideas."(The Spectator) Now, with In Churchill's Shadow, Cannadine looks at the contradictions of Britain's twentieth-century hero and of its twentieth-century history.
Here is an intriguing look at ways in which perceptions of a glorious past have continued to haunt the British present, often crushing efforts to shake them off. The book centers on Churchill, a titanic figure whose influence spanned the century. Though he was the savior of modern Britain, Churchill was a creature of the Victorian age. Though he proclaimed he had not become Prime Minister to "preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," in effect he was doomed to do just that. And though he has gone down in history for his defiant orations during the crisis of World War II, Cannadine shows that for most of his career Churchill's love of rhetoric was his own worst enemy.
Cannadine turns an equally insightful gaze on the institutions and individuals that embodied the image of Britain in this period: Gilbert & Sullivan, Ian Fleming, Noel Coward, the National Trust, and the Palace of Westminster itself, the home and symbol of Britain's parliamentary government. This superb volume offers a wry, sympathetic, yet penetrating look at how national identity evolved in the era of the waning of an empire.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Noted British historian Cannadine (Class in Britain, etc.) gathers a dozen essays on modern British history, covering the era from 1875 (the zenith of British power) to the present (when that power is far diminished). Several of these essays, such as "Statecraft: The Haunting Fear of National Decline," deal with Britain's reaction to her own global decline. In "Statecraft," Cannadine describes how three of Britain's leading modern politicians, Joseph Chamberlain, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher (all "heroic egotists, possessed of a powerful, obsessive, unreflective sense of messianic self-identity") struggled unsuccessfully against diminishing national power. Each had a glorious view of Britain's past and tried to reconcile that past with a less glorious present. Cannadine is especially fascinated by Churchill, devoting one essay to the great man's use of rhetoric. As Cannadine points out, Churchill's speeches were always magnificent, but often ignored (except during WWII, when "[t]he drama of the time had suddenly become fully equal to the drama of his tone"). There is also a fine essay on the Chamberlain family, Joseph and his sons, Austen and Neville, and how they dominated politics in Birmingham for nearly 80 years. The final part of this collection deals with cultural icons, from Gilbert and Sullivan and No‰l Coward to Ian Fleming, and describes their reactions to national decline. Each, as Cannadine delineates, was patriotic, harking back to the glorious age of British power. Cannadine's collection gathers together a group of sometimes provocative, always accessible and thoroughly researched essays that are sure to enlighten those devoted to British history.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"A group of sometimes provocative, always accessible and thoroughly researched essays that are sure to enlighten those devoted to British history."--Publishers Weekly

"It is a tribute to Cannadine's gifts that while mining a relatively small, well-dug territory, he can continue to turn up large, near-flawless gems.... Apart from the solid good judgment, the expert marshalling of resources, the sheer professionalism, there is something special that does distinguish all of Cannadine's work and it's on magnificent display here. It is an almost anthropological feeling for the way in which people construct themselves and perceive their place in the world--their nation, region, city, class, gender--by reference to the past."--Financial Times

"Cannadine is actually presenting us with a selection of essays rather than a meditation on the Churchill legacy, but he justifies the notion by a shrewd choice of subjects that do, indeed, mark the passing of the Churchillian epoch.... In an excellent analysis of his political rhetoric, Cannadine shows how often the old boy was rightly written off as a demagogue and an alarmist.... Elsewhere in this enjoyable assemblage are solid background essays on the Chamberlain dynasty, and two particularly clever pieces on the contrasting careers and works of Ian Fleming and Noel Coward."--Christopher Hitchens, Washington Post Book World

"Zestfully and gracefully written, compulsively readable, and full of sagacious insights about big questions."--Fred Leventhal

"Cannadine makes a number of worthwhile forays, and his best chapters display his well-earned reputation for lively writing and provocative thinking."--Boston Globe

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1ST edition (January 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195219260
• ISBN-13: 978-0195219265
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,435,633 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The difference between realism and complacency, January 16, 2003

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[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Churchill's Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain (Hardcover)

Historians, if they are unusually lucky and popular, sometimes publish collections of essays between major monographs. David Cannadine is lucky enough to do this is two distinct genres. The first are the collection of reviews and journalism "The Pleasures of the Past," and "History in Our Time." The second are the collections of more scholarly essays "Aspects of Aristocracy," and this book. Unfortunately for the reader, this voume is the most disappointing of the four books.

Notwithstanding the title and the prominent photograph of Churchill on the cover page, this book is not really about Churchill, who is the subject of only three of the book's twelve essays. Already this book does not have the coherence that united "Aspects of Aristocracy," with its intimation of aristorcratic power and decline. What do we have? The book consists of three quartets of essays. The first one supposedly deals with Churchill, but the first essay is really a history of Parliament, and the second discusses Churchill along with Margaret Thatcher and Joseph Chamberlain. The third essay is more informative, as it deals with Churchill's ambiguous relationship with the monarchy, and its actual unimiginative rulers. The fourth essay is even better, as it discusses both the strengths of Churchill's remarkable oratory, but also its weaknesses, such as its lack of nuance or pitch, so that Hitler and Gandhi appear to be equally dangerous to Britain. The next quartet is less interesting. The essays on the decline and fall of the Chamberlain dynasty in Birmingham and the success of Stanley Baldwin's emollient pseudo-rural imagery tell nothing particularly new. An essay on Josiah Wedgewood tells how he wanted to produced a history of parliament, ignored all the historians, and got a work of limited historical value or accuracy. The chapter on correspondence between two historians, one English, one American, which led to a letter of somewhat limited importance being sent to FDR, seems like filler.

The last quartet is most useful. True, the chapter on the National Trust is somewhat disappointing. Cannadine describes it as it moves from a group with liberal and radical origins to a pilar of the establishment whose main purpose is to allow indebted aristocrats to keep their country houses by opening them to the public. I cannot help but point out that the late Raphael Samuel's "Theatres of Memory," was much more stimulating about this topic. The other three chapters are much better. Cannadine discusses the success of Gilbert and Sullivan in the context of its rather conservative, chauvinistic and increasingly unsatirical style, while benefiting from the invention of traditions in the last quarter of the 19th century. Cannadine also produces a useful chapter on the decline of Noel Coward, whining endlessly about the decline of the empire and the end of the welfare as his talent dribbled away on sentimental pieces. (It is alarming that Cannadine quotes so much, and that none of it is funny.) Finally there is Cannadine's fine essay on Ian Fleiming and James Bond, which is better than Alexander Cockburn's essay in "Corruptions of Empire" and much better than recent commentaries by Christopher Hitchens and Anthony Lane, and really shows how childish the whole James Bond phenonemon is. Cannadine is excellent on the double side of Fleming/Bond: on the one side "apolitically" conservative, xenophobic, chivalric and so patriotic as to laud British cooking above all others. On the other side both Fleming and his creation are promiscuous, they drink and they gamble and they show an alarming infatuation with consumer goods.

Ultimately though, this is a disappointing volume. Many of his reviews and articles in the past were unusually vigorous and vital in pointing out the flaws and mediocrity of the British royal family. So it is most disturbing to find on the chapter of parliament that Cannadine thinks it would be too radical for the Prime Minister to give "the speech from the throne," let alone call for an actual republic. Likewise, the chapter on Stanley Baldwin does not really dissect the Uriah Heep like quality of the way Baldwin promoted his reputation for moral conduct. The fact that Baldwin and Chamberlain were the worst British prime ministers of the 20th century, that they nearly led Britain to defeat in the one war that it could not afford to lose, does not really get sufficient emphasis, or disgust, from Cannadine. Finally on the chapter on Joseph Chamberlain, Churchill and Thatcher and the prospect of British decline, Cannadine produces a workmanlike effort on their failed attempts. But in closing when he states that the relative decline was not so bad, he shows a weakness of many British historians. Whether what happened was inevitable or not is a complex questions. But even if nothing could have been changed, much of the recent work on Germany, Russia, Israel, Spain or the United States is based on the belief that things SHOULD have been better. There is no such feeling in most Briitsh historiography, and one suspects that here realism is confused with complacency and quietism. It is disturbing indeed, that Cannadine cannot discern the difference.