Michael F. Bishop

Next Friday on @TheRestHistory: an interview with PAUL McCARTNEY! Among other topics, Paul discusses: - the Second World War - midwifery & the Welfare State - dangerous milk floats - the reliability or otherwise of the Bayeux Tapestry as evidence for the battle of Hastings.

A new book about Tolkien, “The King under the Mountain,” by @djtaylorwriter is being published later this year.

It's remarkable that Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) has done what few Englishmen dare: he has looked across the Channel, past the fog of perfidious Albion, and calmly declared himself a British Gaullist. Strong defence, unapologetic patriotism, a robust welfare state, and stubborn national independence all wrapped in one unyielding package. It's extraordinary, he notes, that such obvious good sense is not more common. Hitchens commends the superlative biography of Charles de Gaulle by Julian Jackson. In the grand tradition of historical biography, where the biographer must navigate the Scylla of hagiography and the Charybdis of iconoclasm, Julian Jackson produced a work of real mastery with 'A Certain Idea of France'. Jackson draws upon an immense array of archives - French, British, American - and the newly opened de Gaulle papers to reveal the General in all his towering complexity and grandeur. This includes his granite-like vision of France inseparable from his human flaws, his petulance, his theatrical grandeur, and his occasional ruthlessness. It is, quite simply, the biography de Gaulle deserved: monumental yet humane, rigorous yet readable, a testament to the historian's craft at its finest.

My 2019 review of Julian Jackson’s superlative biography of De Gaulle . As usual, I got there first. There now seems to be a sort of weird cult of ‘Anglo-Gaullism’ which slightly misses the point. ‘A Certain Idea of France firstthings.com/a-certain-idea…