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contributors This month’s pulpit is written by Douglas Murray. He is a journalist and the author of a number of books, including most recently Bloody Sunday: Truths, Lies & the Saville Inquiry. Christopher Andrew’s next book, The Rise of the Secret World (Penguin), covers the period from Moses to Putin. Nigel Andrew is a happily retired journalist who writes the mostly literary blog Nigeness: A Hedonic Resource. Paul Bailey is Senior Research Fellow at Kingston University. Elspeth Barker is currently working on a novel and a memoir. Stephen Bates’s The Poisoner was shortlisted for the US Malice Domestic Award for best non-fiction crime book of 2014. Alex Blasdel writes on wilderness and the American west. Michael Burleigh is CEO of the City political risk consultants Sea Change Partners and comments on world affairs in The Times and the Daily Mail. Richard Canning is author or editor of nine books, including the Penguin Classics edition of Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory (2012). Robert Chesshyre is a former chief US correspondent of The Observer. Rupert Christiansen writes about music for the Daily Telegraph. Jude Cook’s Byron Easy is published by William Heinemann. Andrew Crumey is a novelist and physicist who works at Northumbria University. His most recent book is The Secret Knowledge (Dedalus). Gillian Darley’s most recent book, co-authored with David McKie, is Ian Nairn: Words in Place. Saul David is Professor of War Studies at the University of Buckingham. Hannah Dawson teaches the history of ideas at King’s College London. Her most recent book is Life Lessons from Hobbes. Tom Fort’s most recent book is Channel Shore. Laura Gallagher is a freelance writer. David Gelber is managing editor of The Court Historian, the journal of the Society for Court Studies. Dominic Green is a historian and critic. He teaches politics at Boston College. Christopher Hart is lead theatre critic of the Sunday Times and is currently reading a lot about pirates. Benjamin Ivry’s poetry collection Paradise for the Portuguese Queen was published by Orchises and his biography of Arthur Rimbaud by Absolute Press. Jonathan Kirsch’s latest book is The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan (Liveright). Sam Kitchener is still writing his first novel. Jeremy Lewis’s biography of David Astor, editor of The Observer, was published earlier this year by Jonathan Cape. Patrick Mackie’s second volume of poems, The Further Adventures of the Lives of the Saints, has been published recently by CB editions. Jessica Mann’s new book is the Stroke of Death (Crowood). Patrick Marnham’s biography of Jean Moulin has recently been reissued as Army of the Night by Tauris Parke Paperbacks. Peter Marshall is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. He is writing a study of Luther and the Posting of the 95 Theses for Oxford University Press. Lucy Moore is the author of Liberty: The Lives & Times of Six Women during the French Revolution (HarperCollins, 2005). Jan Morris’s most recent book is the caprice Ciao, Carpaccio! Richard Overy is writing a global history of the Second World War. Sumit Paul-Choudhury is the editor of New Scientist. Lucy Popescu has edited A Country of Refuge, a collection of writing on asylum seekers, published this month by Unbound. Kevin Power’s novel Bad Day in Blackrock is published by Simon & Schuster. Donald Rayfield is currently translating a collection of Varlam Shalamov’s stories and Hamid Ismailov’s Dance of Devils. Anna Reid is the author of Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine. An updated edition was recently published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Tim Richardson is a gardens writer and poet. His most recent books include Oxford College Gardens and Landscape and Garden Design Sketchbooks (2015). Andrew Roberts’s most recent book is Elegy: The First Day of the Somme (Head of Zeus). Jonathan Romain is a rabbi, writer and broadcaster. He is currently minister of Maidenhead Synagogue. His many books include The Jews of England. Otto Saumarez Smith is currently Shuffrey Junior Research Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford. Miranda Seymour’s books include a biography of Mary Shelley. She is writing about Lady Byron, Ada Lovelace and Victorian reputations. Tom Stern is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at University College London. Norman Stone is Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University in Ankara. Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. His latest book is Any Other Business, a collection of his journalism published by Elliott & Thompson. Hugo Vickers is a biographer, lecturer and broadcaster, with an extensive knowledge of high life in the 20th century. He is currently engaged in putting walkways into Commonwealth countries. Melanie White is editor of Shooter Literary Magazine. Tom Williams works in digital publishing. Frances Wilson’s most recent book, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, was published in April. Philip Womack’s sixth novel, A King’s Revenge, the final part in the Darkening Path trilogy, is published this month. Literary Review | june 2016 4
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biography peter marshall Reforming Spirit Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet By Lyndal Roper (The Bodley Head 562pp £25) Get ready to start hearing a lot about Martin Luther. On 31 October 2017 it will be five hundred years since Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, initiating the Protestant Reformation. In fact, as scholars have long known, and Lyndal Roper immediately concedes, whether Luther ever actually posted the Theses in this way is doubtful. But there is no doubting the momentous consequences of the confrontation with the Papacy sparked by Luther’s disquiet over the theology of indulgences. In Britain interest in the anniversary has so far been relatively muted – a contrast with Germany, where an entire decade of official commemorative events is accelerating towards its climax. But Luther undoubtedly belongs to that relatively select company of eminent dead foreigners of whom nearly all British people have heard, and he enjoys the reputation of being a force for historical good: a prophet of individual conscience and liberty against oppressive structures of power and inherited patterns of thinking. Roper’s beautifully written life is not exactly an exercise in debunking, but she admits that Luther is a ‘difficult hero’. Her publishers’ claim that the book represents the first historical biography ‘for many decades’ is hyperbolic chutzpah, but it is certainly among the most interesting, provocative and original biographies of Luther to appear in recent years – one that tackles head on the challenge of entering into and exploring the interior life of its subject. Half a century ago, the American psychoanalyst Erik Erikson’s book Young Man Luther argued that the trajectory of Luther’s career and the emergent shape of his revolutionary theology were explicable in terms of his troubled relationship with his father, Hans Luder. Among Luther scholars, and historians in general, Erikson’s book has come to exemplify a type of ‘psycho-history’ seen as reductionist and anachronistic. Yet Roper, who has employed psychoanalytical insights fruitfully in previous work on gender and witchcraft, is unafraid to venture back into this disputed territory. She recognises the risk of ‘reducing major ideas to the outcomes of unconscious wishes or conflicts’, but nonetheless believes that the key to understanding Luther lies in his rebellion against the overbearing Luder, a master miner who wanted his son to become a lawyer, not a priest. Luther’s entry into the monastery was a kind of retreat into a matriarchal world of female saints, which ultimately failed to provide respite from crippling Anfechtungen (spiritual doubts and temptations). In the end, having clung to and outgrown a succession of substitute father figures (such as his confessor, Johann von Staupitz), Luther allowed God himself to become his father. The utter dependence expressed in his doctrine of justification by faith alone supplied the resolution to a relentless inner conflict. Luther, Roper thinks, could write compellingly about the ‘freedom’ of the Christian precisely because his own independence of self had been fought for so bitterly and at such great emotional cost. It all makes perfect sense; maybe too much sense. One of the perils of psychoanalytical explanations of motive, in history as in life, is that once the initial hypothesis is accepted, occurrences can readily be made to conform to it. Yet Roper’s approach is consistently stimulating and exciting, serving to open up debate rather than close it down. She can certainly be absolved of one of the besetting sins of psycho-history, that of under-representing the social and cultural context of the subject. Roper paints remarkably vivid pictures of the mining community of Mansfeld, where Luther grew up, and of the university town of Wittenberg, where he was formed as a thinker and lived almost his entire adult life. Rather than the solitary genius of legend, we see a Luther deeply embedded in relationships and the sometimes petty social concerns of a small provincial town. + An Everyman & Playhouse, Abbey Theatre, Citizens Theatre and Headlong co-production OBSERVE THE SONS OF ULSTER MARCHING TOWARDS THE SOMME by FRANK McGUINNESS directed by JEREMY HERRIN Wed 8 Jun to Sat 25 Jun Box Office 0151 709 4776 everymanplayhouse.com Supported by the British Irish Chamber of Commerce and Culture Ireland june 2016 | Literary Review 5

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contributors

This month’s pulpit is written by Douglas Murray. He is a journalist and the author of a number of books, including most recently Bloody Sunday: Truths, Lies & the Saville Inquiry. Christopher Andrew’s next book, The Rise of the Secret World (Penguin), covers the period from Moses to Putin. Nigel Andrew is a happily retired journalist who writes the mostly literary blog Nigeness: A Hedonic Resource. Paul Bailey is Senior Research Fellow at Kingston University. Elspeth Barker is currently working on a novel and a memoir. Stephen Bates’s The Poisoner was shortlisted for the US Malice Domestic Award for best non-fiction crime book of 2014. Alex Blasdel writes on wilderness and the American west. Michael Burleigh is CEO of the City political risk consultants Sea Change Partners and comments on world affairs in The Times and the Daily Mail. Richard Canning is author or editor of nine books, including the Penguin Classics edition of Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory (2012). Robert Chesshyre is a former chief US correspondent of The Observer. Rupert Christiansen writes about music for the Daily Telegraph. Jude Cook’s Byron Easy is published by William Heinemann. Andrew Crumey is a novelist and physicist who works at Northumbria University. His most recent book is The Secret Knowledge (Dedalus). Gillian Darley’s most recent book, co-authored with David McKie, is Ian Nairn: Words in Place. Saul David is Professor of War Studies at the University of Buckingham. Hannah Dawson teaches the history of ideas at King’s College London. Her most recent book is Life Lessons from Hobbes. Tom Fort’s most recent book is Channel Shore. Laura Gallagher is a freelance writer. David Gelber is managing editor of The Court Historian, the journal of the Society for Court Studies.

Dominic Green is a historian and critic. He teaches politics at Boston College. Christopher Hart is lead theatre critic of the Sunday Times and is currently reading a lot about pirates. Benjamin Ivry’s poetry collection Paradise for the Portuguese Queen was published by Orchises and his biography of Arthur Rimbaud by Absolute Press. Jonathan Kirsch’s latest book is The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan (Liveright). Sam Kitchener is still writing his first novel. Jeremy Lewis’s biography of David Astor, editor of The Observer, was published earlier this year by Jonathan Cape. Patrick Mackie’s second volume of poems, The Further Adventures of the Lives of the Saints, has been published recently by CB editions. Jessica Mann’s new book is the Stroke of Death (Crowood). Patrick Marnham’s biography of Jean Moulin has recently been reissued as Army of the Night by Tauris Parke Paperbacks. Peter Marshall is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. He is writing a study of Luther and the Posting of the 95 Theses for Oxford University Press. Lucy Moore is the author of Liberty: The Lives & Times of Six Women during the French Revolution (HarperCollins, 2005). Jan Morris’s most recent book is the caprice Ciao, Carpaccio! Richard Overy is writing a global history of the Second World War. Sumit Paul-Choudhury is the editor of New Scientist. Lucy Popescu has edited A Country of Refuge, a collection of writing on asylum seekers, published this month by Unbound.

Kevin Power’s novel Bad Day in Blackrock is published by Simon & Schuster. Donald Rayfield is currently translating a collection of Varlam Shalamov’s stories and Hamid Ismailov’s Dance of Devils. Anna Reid is the author of Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine. An updated edition was recently published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Tim Richardson is a gardens writer and poet. His most recent books include Oxford College Gardens and Landscape and Garden Design Sketchbooks (2015). Andrew Roberts’s most recent book is Elegy: The First Day of the Somme (Head of Zeus). Jonathan Romain is a rabbi, writer and broadcaster. He is currently minister of Maidenhead Synagogue. His many books include The Jews of England. Otto Saumarez Smith is currently Shuffrey Junior Research Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford. Miranda Seymour’s books include a biography of Mary Shelley. She is writing about Lady Byron, Ada Lovelace and Victorian reputations. Tom Stern is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at University College London. Norman Stone is Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University in Ankara. Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. His latest book is Any Other Business, a collection of his journalism published by Elliott & Thompson. Hugo Vickers is a biographer, lecturer and broadcaster, with an extensive knowledge of high life in the 20th century. He is currently engaged in putting walkways into Commonwealth countries. Melanie White is editor of Shooter Literary Magazine. Tom Williams works in digital publishing. Frances Wilson’s most recent book, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, was published in April. Philip Womack’s sixth novel, A King’s Revenge, the final part in the Darkening Path trilogy, is published this month.

Literary Review | june 2016 4

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