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c o n t r i b u t o r s This month’s pulpit is written by Carole Angier. She has just retired from teaching creative writing at Oxford Brookes University. David Annand is a freelance writer and editor. Ariane Bankes has been researching an exhibition on the life and work of David Jones. Michael Berkeley is a composer and broadcaster. He presents Private Passions for BBC Radio 3 and is currently writing an anthem for the enthronement of the next Archbishop of Canterbury. Vernon Bogdanor is Research Professor at the Institute of Contemporary History, King’s College, London. He is working on a political history of Britain in the 20th century. Piers Brendon is the author of The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997 (Cape). Linden Burleigh is a freelance reviewer. Michael Burleigh’s Small Wars, Faraway Places: The Genesis of the Modern World 1945–65 is published by Macmillan in April. John Burnside’s new collection of short stories, Something Like Happy, was published last month by Jonathan Cape. Michael Bywater is working on a musical about Oscar Wilde. David Cesarani is writing on the fate of the Jews from 1933 to 1949 for Macmillan. Robert Chesshyre is a former chief US correspondent of The Observer. His latest book is When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain. Rupert Christiansen has been the dance critic for the Mail on Sunday since 1995. Richard Cockett is the Southeast Asia editor of The Economist. Anthony Daniels is a retired doctor. Oliver Dennis is a violinist and violin teacher, living in Melbourne. He reviews regularly for journals in Australia and the UK. Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer. Steve Fuller’s latest book is Humanity 2.0: What It Means to Be Human Past, Present & Future (Palgrave Macmillan). David Gelber is treasurer of the Society for Court Studies. Josh Glancy is a feature writer at The Sunday Times. George Gömöri is Emeritus Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. He has published numerous books of poetry both in Hungarian and English. His collection of essays, The Polish Swan Triumphant, is being published this year by Cambridge Scholars. Robert Gordon teaches Italian literature and cultural history at Cambridge University. His latest book is The Holocaust in Italian Culture 1944–2010 (Stanford, 2012). Simon Heffer’s history of mid-19th-century Britain, High Minds: The Victorian Pursuit of Perfection, will be published in the autumn by Random House. Christopher Howse is assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph. Sophie Hughes works in publishing and is a freelance writer. Maya Jaggi’s cultural journalism and criticism gained her an honorary doctorate from the Open University in 2012. She is chair of the Man Asian Literary Prize, to be awarded in Hong Kong in March. Kevin Jackson’s most recent book is Constellation of Genius – 1922: Modernism Year One (Hutchinson). Jonathan Keates’s most recent book is The Siege of Venice (Chatto & Windus). Paul Lay is editor of History Today and is writing a book on Cromwell and the Crown for Head of Zeus. Ursula K Le Guin’s most recent novel, Lavinia, won the Locus Fantasy Award in 2009. The Wild Girls, a book of assorted fiction and non-fiction, was published in June (PM Press). Fleur Macdonald is editor of The Omnivore, and organises the Hatchet Job of the Year Award. Jessica Mann’s polemical memoir, The Fifties Mystique, is published by Quartet. Peter Marshall is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. Jonathan Meades’s The Joy of Essex was transmitted on BBC4 in January. Pamela Norris is a freelance writer and critic. Richard Overy’s The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 will be published in September. Seamus Perry is a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, where he is tutor in English and Fellow Librarian. Catherine Peters first became fascinated by the stranger aspects of Victorian life when researching her life of Wilkie Collins. John Pollard is a fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. His book, The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914–1958, will be published by OUP in 2014. Lucy Popescu was Programme Director of English PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee from 1991 to 2006. Hannah Rosefield is a writer living in London. Peyton Skipwith, a writer and fine art consultant, is a contributing author to British Murals and Decorative Painting, 1920-1960 (ed) Alan Powers (Sansom & Co), published this month. Norman Stone’s World War Two: A Short History (Allen Lane) was published last month. John Sutherland’s most recent books are The Lives of the Novelists (Profile, 2011) and The Dickens Dictionary (Icon Books, 2012). Bharat Tandon teaches at the University of East Anglia. His annotated edition of Emma was published by Harvard University Press last year, and he was one of the judges for the 2012 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. J W M Thompson was editor of the Sunday Telegraph from 1976 to 1986. George Walden is a former diplomat and Conservative Minister for Higher Education, now a writer. His latest book is China: A Wolf in the World? (Gibson Square). Kaite Welsh is an author and journalist whose fiction has been shortlisted for several awards, including the Cheshire Prize for Literature. Tom Williams is a stand-up comedian. Literary Review | f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 3 4
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f o r e i g n p a r t s p i e r s b r e n d on Baiting the Tigers Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan By William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury 567pp £25) As William Dalrymple shows in this definitive study, Britain’s first invasion of Afghanistan in 1839 bore marked resemblances to the war currently being waged in that unforgiving land. Then as now, the conflict was based on ‘doctored intelligence about a virtually non-existent threat’. Getting into Afghanistan was relatively easy but the infidel occupation provoked a fierce resistance that made getting out hideously problematic. The same tribal rivalries and alien stupidities bedevilled the campaign. Atrocities occurred on both sides and the cost in blood and treasure was inconceivably greater than any benefit that the invaders might have gained. When the present British forces withdraw, David Cameron will undoubtedly proclaim victory, as the governor-general of India did in 1842. But, Dalrymple observes, the Herat Museum that displays the detritus of other abortive attempts to subjugate Afghanistan, ranging from Victorian cannon to Soviet helicopter gunships, will undoubtedly be able to add shot-up American Humvees and British Land Rovers to its collection. much of the fresh evidence seems to be of more poetic than historical significance, the stuff of Afghan mythology. But Dalrymple employs it discriminatingly, providing a rich new dimension to a familiar story. He embellishes that story with personal impressions gleaned from journeys through the Himalayan badlands, where he braved dangers not commonly encountered in the course of academic research. He pens deft portraits of a large cast of characters, and includes a host of recondite details, noting for example that Afghanistan grew 44 different varieties of grape, the finest being khaya-e ghulaman (‘young man’s testicles’). Of course, as Dalrymple acknowledges, history does not repeat itself exactly. The first British assault on Afghanistan was unique in important respects, not least in being the opening gambit in the Great Game against Russia – the Lion’s centurylong struggle to secure India’s northwest frontier against the Bear. It is Dalrymple’s achievement to elucidate this distinctive initial episode through a treasure trove of original sources. Many of them he unearthed abroad, mining archives in Kabul, Lahore and Delhi (even finding first-hand material in Moscow) and somehow coping with the languages involved. Admittedly Afghans prepare to ambush the British cantonments outside Kabul And he writes elegantly, appreciating, like all masters of his craft, that history should aspire to the condition of literature. Long though it is, Return of a King is less sprawling than his earlier White Mughals and, like a great classical tragedy, it grips the reader’s attention from start to finish. The king of Dalrymple’s title is Shah Shuja, who was toppled from his Kabul throne by a hostile clan in 1809 and spent the next thirty years trying to regain it. He failed thanks largely to Dost Mohammad, who came to dominate Afghanistan, a ‘kaleidoscope of competing tribal principalities’ in which even tribal allegiance was uncertain. Behind every hillock in that vertiginous terrain, it was said, lurked an emperor. Shuja lived in exile in India, stripped of the Koh-i-Nur diamond and attended by a retinue of mutes and eunuchs (he liked to deprive unsatisfactory servants of their tongues or genitals). Dalrymple plays up Shuja’s intelligence, sophistication and courage but admits that he was arrogant even by royal standards. Pathologically determined to maintain his sovereign status, Shuja described his countrymen as a ‘pack of dogs’. The best-informed British observer in Afghanistan, Alexander Burnes, thought Shuja hopelessly unpopular. And when a Russian mission arrived in Kabul, Burnes urged the governor-general of India, Lord Auckland, to counter it by clinching an alliance with Dost Mohammad, who was willing. But Auckland, a smug, ignorant mediocrity, allowed hawks in his administration, such as William Macnaghten, to persuade him to return Shuja to his kingdom as a British puppet. It was a calamitous decision, on a par with the 1956 invasion of Suez, which was masterminded by another member of Auckland’s family, Anthony Eden. In fact Tsar Nicholas I, though anxious about British probing into his empire’s soft underbelly, had no designs on India. The subcontinent was, in any case, protected by the greatest natural rampart on earth – Disraeli said that those who worried about the Russian menace consulted only small-scale maps (though there were as yet no largescale maps of central Asia). Auckland, however, succumbed to the widespread paranoia about the security of the recently consolidated Raj. He disregarded Russian back-pedalling, which removed Britain’s casus belli, a circumstance disguised by the selective publication of Burnes’s dispatches – the ‘dodgy dossier’ of its day, as Dalrymple says. And Auckland ignored prescient warnings from Afghan experts about the impossibility of sustaining Shuja f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 3 | Literary Review 5

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c o n t r i b u t o r s

This month’s pulpit is written by Carole Angier. She has just retired from teaching creative writing at Oxford Brookes University. David Annand is a freelance writer and editor. Ariane Bankes has been researching an exhibition on the life and work of David Jones. Michael Berkeley is a composer and broadcaster. He presents Private Passions for BBC Radio 3 and is currently writing an anthem for the enthronement of the next Archbishop of Canterbury. Vernon Bogdanor is Research Professor at the Institute of Contemporary History, King’s College, London. He is working on a political history of Britain in the 20th century. Piers Brendon is the author of The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997 (Cape). Linden Burleigh is a freelance reviewer. Michael Burleigh’s Small Wars, Faraway Places: The Genesis of the Modern World 1945–65 is published by Macmillan in April. John Burnside’s new collection of short stories, Something Like Happy, was published last month by Jonathan Cape. Michael Bywater is working on a musical about Oscar Wilde. David Cesarani is writing on the fate of the Jews from 1933 to 1949 for Macmillan. Robert Chesshyre is a former chief US correspondent of The Observer. His latest book is When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain. Rupert Christiansen has been the dance critic for the Mail on Sunday since 1995. Richard Cockett is the Southeast Asia editor of The Economist. Anthony Daniels is a retired doctor. Oliver Dennis is a violinist and violin teacher, living in Melbourne. He reviews regularly for journals in Australia and the UK. Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer. Steve Fuller’s latest book is Humanity 2.0: What It Means to Be Human Past, Present & Future (Palgrave Macmillan). David Gelber is treasurer of the Society for Court Studies.

Josh Glancy is a feature writer at The Sunday Times. George Gömöri is Emeritus Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. He has published numerous books of poetry both in Hungarian and English. His collection of essays, The Polish Swan Triumphant, is being published this year by Cambridge Scholars. Robert Gordon teaches Italian literature and cultural history at Cambridge University. His latest book is The Holocaust in Italian Culture 1944–2010 (Stanford, 2012). Simon Heffer’s history of mid-19th-century Britain, High Minds: The Victorian Pursuit of Perfection, will be published in the autumn by Random House. Christopher Howse is assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph. Sophie Hughes works in publishing and is a freelance writer. Maya Jaggi’s cultural journalism and criticism gained her an honorary doctorate from the Open University in 2012. She is chair of the Man Asian Literary Prize, to be awarded in Hong Kong in March. Kevin Jackson’s most recent book is Constellation of Genius – 1922: Modernism Year One (Hutchinson). Jonathan Keates’s most recent book is The Siege of Venice (Chatto & Windus). Paul Lay is editor of History Today and is writing a book on Cromwell and the Crown for Head of Zeus. Ursula K Le Guin’s most recent novel, Lavinia, won the Locus Fantasy Award in 2009. The Wild Girls, a book of assorted fiction and non-fiction, was published in June (PM Press). Fleur Macdonald is editor of The Omnivore, and organises the Hatchet Job of the Year Award. Jessica Mann’s polemical memoir, The Fifties Mystique, is published by Quartet.

Peter Marshall is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. Jonathan Meades’s The Joy of Essex was transmitted on BBC4 in January. Pamela Norris is a freelance writer and critic. Richard Overy’s The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 will be published in September. Seamus Perry is a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, where he is tutor in English and Fellow Librarian. Catherine Peters first became fascinated by the stranger aspects of Victorian life when researching her life of Wilkie Collins. John Pollard is a fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. His book, The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914–1958, will be published by OUP in 2014. Lucy Popescu was Programme Director of English PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee from 1991 to 2006. Hannah Rosefield is a writer living in London. Peyton Skipwith, a writer and fine art consultant, is a contributing author to British Murals and Decorative Painting, 1920-1960 (ed) Alan Powers (Sansom & Co), published this month. Norman Stone’s World War Two: A Short History (Allen Lane) was published last month. John Sutherland’s most recent books are The Lives of the Novelists (Profile, 2011) and The Dickens Dictionary (Icon Books, 2012). Bharat Tandon teaches at the University of East Anglia. His annotated edition of Emma was published by Harvard University Press last year, and he was one of the judges for the 2012 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. J W M Thompson was editor of the Sunday Telegraph from 1976 to 1986. George Walden is a former diplomat and Conservative Minister for Higher Education, now a writer. His latest book is China: A Wolf in the World? (Gibson Square). Kaite Welsh is an author and journalist whose fiction has been shortlisted for several awards, including the Cheshire Prize for Literature. Tom Williams is a stand-up comedian.

Literary Review | f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 3 4

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