Eggs Thrown in 2024: A Round-Up

🥚🥚🥚

In 2024 I have written approx. twenty-five reviews, articles, and essays, scattered across approx. half a dozen publications, so I thought it might be beneficial – for myself if not for others – to gather them all in one place. Here they are, loosely arranged by theme.

***

I. The History Wars

My first article to appear in the Critic’s print magazine, adorned with a beautiful front-cover back in June 2023, concerned the debate over the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’. I had thought, with a naïve hubris, that the debate had subsided, at least in Britain. But then the prestigious journal Anglo-Saxon England was rechristened with the clunky name Early Medieval England and its Neighbours, provoking my short and bitter follow-up (‘The End of “Anglo-Saxon”?’).

Aside from my return to the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ debate, my major interventions in this year’s History Wars concerned the legacy of the British Empire. This, too, set me thinking along familiar lines, which had coalesced in the summer of 2023 in my essay for Engelsberg Ideas, ‘Imperial Miasma Theory’. Sathnam Sanghera was one of the figures in my firing-line: his popular book Empireland, I wrote back then, ‘isn’t history; it’s word-association’. Empireworld, the sequel which I reviewed for UnHerd (‘The Empireland Delusion’) wasn’t much better. (For a response even more withering than my own, see Pratinav Anil’s in Engelsberg; more reviews, I think, should begin with clerihews.)

My ‘Imperial Miasma’ analysis was taken further in another summer essay for Engelsberg, ‘Unpicking Imperial History’ (for what it’s worth, these are the two essays I’m proudest of). There I examined the furious debate between Nigel Biggar and his many critics, who had been marshalled by one Alan Lester much as Nick Fury assembles the Avengers. Lester’s edited volume, The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of Colonialism, carries a foreword by none other than Sathnam Sanghera. The book has attracted a flurry of comment of late, thanks to Yuan Yi Zhu’s characteristically incisive review for the Washington Examiner and – perhaps more to the point – Lester’s undignified and unedifying response. The Twitter fisticuffs hinged, in part, on Lester’s misrepresentation on the chapter in his book by Liam Liburd on the history of parallels between the British Empire and fascism, with which I took greatest issue in my own review. In retrospect, perhaps I was too generous to Lester, and too critical towards Nigel (soon to be Lord) Biggar – even though in the end my sympathies clearly resided more with the latter. I shall let readers make up their own minds.

Of course, History Wars are nothing new. I spent much of this year preparing my Masters dissertation on the contested œuvre of the German historian Percy Ernst Schramm (1894-1970). (I wrote about my itinerant Masters experience in ‘Essay on My Odyssean Education’, my first and (I suppose until now) only piece of original writing for The Art of Throwing Eggs.) It was largely out of that research that I spun an essay for UnHerd (‘How the Nazis Won their Campus Culture War’). An essay in Engelsberg assessed one specific manifestation of broader intellectual conflicts within academic historiography in Nazi Germany (‘How the Nazis Weaponised Charlemagne’). That might provide a fruitful complement to the recent Rest Is History series on the ‘Father of Europe’.

II. Jews, Israel, and antisemitism

When I first dipped my toe into the writing game, I swore that I wouldn’t allow myself to be typecast as a writer on ‘Jewish issues’. There are more than enough such writers active in Britain as it is – some of them are even good. Still, post-7 October it’s been hard to avoid; and I can just about justify indulging in ‘Jewish issues’ if I can at least lay claim to a historical angle. So it was with my article for the Spectator on Jonathan Glazer’s much-discussed Holocaust film, The Zone of Interest (‘The Real Problem with Jonathan Glazer’), and a sequel of sorts some months later on the state of Holocaust education in modern Britain, sparked by Sir Keir Starmer’s musings on the matter (‘Britain Doesn’t Know How to Remember the Holocaust’).

My own tortured and conflicted thinking on Israel can be sensed in my review in the February 2024 issue of the Critic of two books, one of which (by Jonathan Glover) I liked, and the other (by Dan Senor and Saul Singer) I did not (‘Postcards from Before the War’). The latter painted all too rosy a picture of Israeli culture and society. As far as this analysis goes, I elaborated the other side of the coin in another article for the Critic a short while later, warning against hysteria over antisemitism in Britain (‘Britain Is Still Safe for Jews’). This was also the subject of my discussion at the Living Freedom Summer school with Fraser Myers and Claire, Baroness Fox of Buckley (‘Tolerate it or ban it? Antisemitism on Campus’), where I laid out my opposition to what the great historian Salo Baron termed ‘the lachrymose conception of Jewish history’.

Zionism, holding that Jews cannot feasibly exist in diaspora, is in effect a corollary to the ‘lachrymose conception’ – hence my general sense of alienation from that tendency of Jewish thought. Nonetheless I felt some inklings of the pull of Israel when I reviewed Jodi Magness’s archaeological history of Jerusalem for the Critic: it really is a place like no other (‘Digging the Holy Land’s Past’). And however sanguine I am now about the position of Jews in England, we haven’t always been so fortunate – as Ivan Marcus lays bare in his insightful history of medieval antisemitism, which I reviewed in Engelsberg (‘The Medieval Roots of Modern Antisemitism’).

III. Profiles

Given my research and reading, I spent much of 2024 in the company of Nazis, so to speak. So it was nice to take a break from them and celebrate one of those genuine intellectual heroes of the early twentieth century, the great anti-Nazi Peter Viereck, whose portrait I sketched for Engelsberg (‘Peter Viereck: Psychoanalyst of Nazism’).

My ‘Christmas read’ for UnHerd, published a few days ago (‘Otto Weininger: Godfather of the Manosphere’), was not very festive. Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character is one of the oddest books I’ve ever read. But as I delve ever deeper into nineteenth- and twentieth-century German intellectual history, it’s important that I get a handle on that oddness. And if one takes on Viereck’s view, that Nazism (to put it crudely) was made possible because at some point German thought took a weird turn, books like Weininger’s are impossible to ignore.

For UnHerd’s ‘Summer reads’, meanwhile, I ticked something off my bucket-list by working my way through Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (‘My Summer with Gibbon’). I wholeheartedly recommend this project to anybody with the time and inclination. I now have a habit, whenever I’m sad or bored, of turning to a page of Gibbon at random. He never fails to cheer me up.

Also for UnHerd, I wrote a sardonic but ultimately affectionate profile of William Dalrymple, in the light of his new book, The Golden Road (‘William Dalrymple’s Colonial Complex’). I was genuinely pleased that he was such a good sport about it, sharing it enthusiastically with his followers on Twitter. As it happens I am in India with my family at the moment – I am writing this from Jaipur, where Dalrymple directs the world’s largest literary festival every year. I passed City of Djinns onto my parents prior to our arrival in Delhi. It’s a wonderful book, and he’s a wonderful writer.

2024 marked the centenaries of two historians (both, incidentally, very much on the left), who have influenced me greatly. For Engelsberg I wrote a portrait of the medievalist R.A. Markus (‘R.A. Markus: Historian of the Secular’), whose work captivated me as an undergraduate. For UnHerd I surveyed the life and work of the much better-known E.P. Thompson (‘E.P. Thompson, Marxist Rebel’). I had actually already written a piece on Thompson in 2023, for the New Statesman, on his bizarre 1987 sci-fi novel, The Sykaos Papers (it’s got aliens, AI, awkward sex-scenes, and Margaret Thatcher: I can’t recommend it enough) – but I enjoyed attempting to assess his wide-ranging work as whole. (There has been a flurry of interest in Thompson of late; Madoc Cairns’s essay in the New Statesman is especially beautiful and perceptive.)

Finally, for the Spectator I profiled a fictional character who is no less pivotal to modern culture for that fact: Nicolas (30 ans), from the ‘Social Contract’ memes (‘Why Young Brits Think the Social Contract Is Crumbling’). I cut my teeth at the Spectator on meme-analysis back in March 2023 (that time it was the ‘midwit’ meme), so it was nice to return to my roots. The article itself went down well – even chez Bouli, the world-expert on ‘Nicolas’ – although I irked a few people by suggesting that the British ‘Nick’ would have been a Remainer. Without wishing to poke the bear, this mutated into a surprisingly interesting exercise in meme-semiotics: everything depended on the vexed question of whether Nicolas, in the meme, is self-conscious (I don’t think he is).

IV. Miscellaneous

I have probably written more negative reviews than positive ones this year – which says a lot about me, or the present state of literature, or both. Some eggs have been carefully thrown at unsuspecting faces. I was bored and irritated by Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle with God, which I reviewed for UnHerd (‘Jordan Peterson Wrestles with Meaning’; cf. James Marriott’s glorious skewering). I was even more exasperated by Yuval Noah Harari’s vapid wafflings in Nexus, which I reviewed for the Times (an exciting moment for me, of course, though not, in fact, my debut in Britain’s newspaper of record).

I was able to finish the year, at least, on a more positive note. I found myself charmed by Sebastian Smee’s book on Impressionism, which I also reviewed in the Times, and Alice Hunt’s book on Britain in the 1650s, which I reviewed for the Critic (‘A Tumultuous Decade of Ingenious Novelties’). In both cases, I am a layman: I know very little about the history of art, and somehow, regrettably, the seventeenth century passed me by in my formal historical education. But when those two books were in my hands, I was utterly immersed in their world. I finished my review of Harari’s book with the bold claim that we live in the golden age of popular history – ‘you don’t have to settle for empty calories’. Authors like Smee and Hunt prove me right.

Back in February, for Fusion magazine – my first and, to date, only foray across the pond – I wrote about ‘Anglo-American conservatism’ (‘Atlantic Mirrors’), recently given new life by the ‘NatCon’ crowd (whom I had already criticised in a 2023 article in the Critic). I also had a fun tangent, in that essay, on the idea of ‘mustiness’ in American revolutionary discourse – something I keep returning to, as I think more about the relationship between historical and political thought. That relationship was in fact the subject of my first publication from 2024, which kicked things off on a very highbrow, intellectual note (one which I fear subjects like ‘Nicolas (30 ans)’ may have let down): my review of John Robertson’s edited volume, Time, History, and Political Thought, in the Oxford Political Review (‘The Temporal Turn in Historiography’). I confess that I still can’t shake off my scepticism about ‘time’ as a subject of historical analysis: I am by nature not one for academic ‘turns’ and fashions. But this was a rare case of a collection of essays that were all of an outstandingly high calibre. Alan Lester should take note.

***

So quite a busy year, overall. I thank my friends, readers, and editors, without whom every one of these pieces would have been a good deal worse. I love reading, I love writing, I love writing about what I’m reading, etc. There’ll be more to come, I hope, in 2025.