Historian Francois Furstenberg compares the Bush presidency to the French Revolutionary period in The New York Times (“Bush’s Dangerous Liaisons”). Regardless of the political implications I think it is noteworthy the way that the French Revolution continues to be a lens through which contemporary politics and political clashes are understood.

Much as George W. Bush’s presidency was ineluctably shaped by Sept. 11, 2001, so the outbreak of the French Revolution was symbolized by the events of one fateful day, July 14, 1789. And though 18th-century France may seem impossibly distant to contemporary Americans, future historians examining Mr. Bush’s presidency within the longer sweep of political and intellectual history may find the French Revolution useful in understanding his curious brand of 21st- century conservatism.

Among the many carry-overs of the French Revolution that Furstenberg mentions is the original usage of the word “terrorist.”

A terroriste was, in its original meaning, a Jacobin leader who ruled France during la Terreur.

The Daily Telegraph gives a brief overview of the history of royal scandals as a background to the current instance of alleged blackmail against a royal.

The most prominent instance mentioned in the article is a prior case of blackmail against a member of the Royal Family:

In 1891, the Duke of Clarence, son of the future Edward VII, discussed the possibility of paying off two prostitutes he had met, in exchange for the return of two letters he had sent to them.

The rest of the article consists of descriptions of instances when royals were part of legal proceedings:

In 1870, his father the Prince of Wales - later King Edward VII - voluntarily appeared as a witness in a divorce case when Lady Mordaunt falsely accused the heir to the throne of being one of her lovers.

Again, in June 1891, he appeared as a witness in the Tranby Croft case to testify on a slander accusation arising from a card game.

King George V, Edward VII’s son, was accused of bigamy by a republican newspaper early in his reign and sued for libel.

Although he did not appear in court to give evidence, the King sent a statement making clear that he was innocent of bigamy and was legally married to Queen Mary.

Five years ago, the Princess Royal became the first member of the royal family to be convicted of a criminal offence when she admitted a charge under the Dangerous Dogs Act after one of her pets bit two children in Windsor Great Park.

The previous year, the Princess was fined £400 and given five penalty points after admitting driving her Bentley at 93mph on a dual carriageway in Gloucestershire.

The Daily Telegraph article, “History of royal scandals”

This weekend The Guardian publishes two reviews of Piers Brendon’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997.

The first review, by Maya Jasanoff, argues that the book:

is a compelling and spectacularly detailed retelling of imperial “rise” as well as fall, from Yorktown to Hong Kong. Not since Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica trilogy has anyone recounted these events with such sustained panache. Brendon’s empire is a ramshackle affair, managed for decades out of a Colonial Office that boasted “an assortment of rickety chairs and old, baize-covered tables,” a basement “so damp that it had to be pumped out twice a day” and an attic that doubled as a fives court. Virtually every page offers up some memorable observation.

In addition Brendon emphasizes the peculiar characters of the British Empire. Jasanoff writes:

All told, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire presents a glittering panoply of decadence, folly, farce and devastation. Brendon’s characters alone could fill a pantomime stage many times over.

Jasanoff claims that this strength of the book simultaneously suggests its weakness.

This touches on the chief casualty of Brendon’s descriptive approach: the relative absence of explanation and analysis. After so much rich narrative, one is left craving synthesis - particularly comparison across regions, for such interconnections help make an empire what it is. How, for example, did the use of partition in Ireland in 1921 influence its subsequent application in Palestine and south Asia? How might British counter-insurgency tactics developed in one domain - South Africa or Ireland, Palestine or Malaya - have been replayed in others? (To say nothing of their influence on the Americans in Vietnam, or the French in Algeria.) To what extent did imperial personnel carry policies from region to region? What kinds of networks of influence existed among anti-colonial leaders, such as the black nationalists inspired by Gandhi, or advocates of non-alignment? Brendon nods in these directions, but readers looking for deep answers will want to turn elsewhere.

The second review, by Robert McCrum, emphasizes different aspects of the book. McCrum dwells more on the larger themes than in the individual personas (although the latter are sometimes indistinguishable from some of the more notable episodes of the Empire).

Piers Brendon’s prodigious volume is a brilliant account of acts two, three and four in this swelling drama of imperial themes from Yorktown to Goose Green. Despite his title, he knows he is not Edward Gibbon and is the first to concede that Decline and Fall casts a long shadow. While he has resisted ’setting up as a rival’ to the choleric county colonel and his rolling Augustan narrative of Roman decline, the awesome scale of a subject that includes Africa, the Far East and the Antipodes compels the faithful narrator into an enthralling mini-series of colonial adventure from Plessey to Omdurman, via the Zulu wars (Rorke’s Drift) and Baden-Powell’s defence of Mafeking.

Brendon’s empire, about which he has mixed feelings, is a liberal enterprise dedicated, however hypocritically, to the principle of liberty. Although its antecedents trace back to the 16th century and beyond, this empire was inspired by the loss of the American colonies and the ancient rivalry with France. It was made possible by the supremacy of the Royal Navy, by Britain’s industrial revolution, and by the relative weakness of rival European powers in the 19th century.

McCrum argues that the weakness of Pearson’s work is his lack of attention to the role of the United States during the twentieth century period of the Empire’s decline.

If Piers Brendon has a weakness, it lies in his insufficient attention to the role of America in Britain’s decline. Dean Acheson’s famous claim that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role’ is both a statement of fact and also a boastful assertion of late 20th-century American supremacy, however brief. Ironically, 1963, the year of Acheson’s comment, was the year of the Beatles’ first American tour and the beginnings of a new kind of Englishness, a global phenomenon but one unintelligible without an understanding of the empire. By 2007, Britain’s role in the world seems to have become more loosely cultural than political. But that’s another story.

Maya Jasanoff’s review in Saturday’s edition of The Guardian: “Last post for the oddball empire”

Robert McCrum’s review in Sunday’s edition of The Guardian: “From Empire to Oblivion”

The London Times reports on a new British memorial to those who have been killed following the Second World War. The article notes that there is no monument like it on British soil, because the Commonwealth War Graves Commission stopped burying soldiers after the end of the Second World War.

The new memorial reminds me of the fact that the process of commemoration in Britain is still an ongoing one. Although my dissertation research focuses on the war memorials of the First World War period, the tradition of memorialization that they inaugurated remains.

Another interesting part of the report is the fact that this new memorial includes space for another 16,000 or so names in anticipation of future needs. Compared with the 1920s when architects and engineers struggled to find room on the Menin Gate for all of the names it had to contain, building a memorial in part to anticipate future needs is something relatively new.

Since the end of the Second World War 16,000 British servicemen and their auxiliary forces have lost their lives in a variety of circumstances. Yesterday the Queen opened a national memorial to them, where relatives and friends of the lost can reflect before a carved list of their names.

There is nothing quite like it, and there has long been a call for a memorial to take over from where the Commonwealth War Graves Commission closes its books at 1948. There are memorials around the world to particular regiments, campaigns and even individuals, but no national shrine on home soil.

Public subscription, National Lottery funding, and a modest £1.5 million government contribution from the sale of a Trafalgar commemorative coin, have enabled completion of the £7 million National Armed Forces Memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum in Alrewas, Staffordshire, near the geographical centre of England. Trustees still need to raise a further £1 million to ensure that the memorial is properly maintained.

The names carved in the Portland stone walls span age, class and ethnicity. They include Earl Mountbatten of Burma, killed by an IRA bomb in the Irish Republic in 1979, and Jabron Hashmi of the Intelligence Corps, killed in Afghanistan last year, the first Muslim in the British Armed Forces of recent times to lose his life.

The complete article from The London Times: “A monument at last for the fallen of modern times”