Book reviews: The Watchers | The Bride and the Dowry | Commander

By MICHAEL KERRIGAN
Published on 08/09/2012 00:00

Michael Kerrigan reviews the latest book releases.

The Watchers

by Stephen Alford

(Allen Lane, £25) * * * *

It’s some time now since serious historians bought into the cult of Queen Elizabeth I, “Gloriana”, and her Golden Age – was it just too painful before, in an age of post-imperial decline? In recent years, the period has been rediscovered – and more or less completely reinterpreted, as a time of turmoil and trauma. It wasn’t just that Elizabeth herself had “found treason in trust” and been schooled in suspicion – there really were constant plots against the Queen. Beset by (far stronger) Catholic powers, England was stalked still more menacingly by a Popish enemy within. Priests slipped in to the country under cover of darkness; mobilising local resistance; coups were planned, assassination-plots hatched. The edgy atmosphere – and the brutal reaction of the state – strike a chord for us in the age of al-Qaeda. Stephen Alford’s study brings a fascinating period back to febrile life.

The Bride and the Dowry

by Avi Raz

(Yale, £25) * * * *

Israel’s territorial conquests were the “dowry”; the Palestinian people the “bride”: Israeli PM Levi Eshkol coined the metaphor after 1967’s Six Day War. But the bride was not only unwilling but unwanted; Israel hoped to have its wedding cake and eat it, hoped to hold the West Bank but (as Moshe Dayan put it) “empty” it. This position was maintained through what Raz describes as a “foreign policy of deception” – years of lies and prevarication on a heroic scale. The West, with its own Cold War agenda, was happy to buy into the idea of Arab intransigence. The reality, as it emerges here, could hardly have been more different. Combing official archives in Jordan, Israel and elsewhere, Raz has found a way through the propaganda to the sort of facts which have been in startlingly short supply. His conclusions may be radical, but his case is set out with the utmost scruple, and in damning detail.

Commander

by Stephen Taylor

(Faber, £20) * * * *

Rum, sodomy and the lash may have been what made the Royal Navy great in Napoleonic times, but office politics also played its part. Edward Pellew, 1st Viscount Exmouth, was acclaimed in his lifetime as the “First Seaman of the Age” – but since it was an age that also featured Horatio Nelson, he’s been pretty much forgotten. Taylor doesn’t begrudge the Hero of Trafalgar his celebrity. Neither, for that matter, did Pellew: Nelson’s talents were real, his skills contrasting instructively with those of a commander who had difficulty dealing with the service hierarchy and with public presentation Pellew, who worked his way up the ranks, never quite felt he had “arrived”, though he brought many of his troubles on himself with his abrasiveness and poor judgement. A revealing portrait of a great seafaring man.