David Gilmour (2) (1952–)

An interesting, though rather revisionist, history of Italy from the earliest days up to around 2010. The author sets out specifically to explain Italy in terms of its regions, its peoples, and the political divisions that these have caused all the way through history.

Our present thinking about politics, in terms of the almost automatic acceptance of the concept of the nation-state, conditions us - especially in Britain - to see the unification of Italy in 1861 as the high-point of Italian history, the thing everything else was leading up to. Gilmour's thesis is rather different; Italian unity was the result of a particular power-grab by Piedmontese politicians, and there remain great divides in Italian life and politics today because of it. Attempts to build national identity in the years following the Risorgimento resulted in the growth of belligerence in the years running up to the First World War; and following it, to the rise of Fascism. Gilmour also shows the rise of Communism in Italy in the post-war era as an attempt to rehabilitate the country that would not otherwise have been achieved because of the nation's change of direction with the ousting of Mussolini.

Many feel that this book is too critical, though I find the idea that Italy is a land of regional cultures and the civilisation primarily of cities on a human scale quite appealing. Gilmour also does not neglect the culture of Italy and its achievements in the arts, although near the end he does divert into a detailed discussion of Bertolucci's film Novecento which takes over the book for more than two whole pages, far more than is devoted to any other single work. That discussion is also more than a little biased - perhaps the one point in the whole book where I found the author's own biases showing.

Critical blurbs on the cover of my edition talked at length about the author's "witty" writing. I wondered when this was going to start; but as the story progresses from medieval times into more contemporary ones, the wit quotient increases, probably because we have access to more contemporary accounts of the players, not only their deeds but their personalities.

Also, Gilmour deserves a demerit for levelling accusations against Italian railways for being slow and employing old engines and rolling stock, when the first high-speed line opened in 1977 between Milan and Turin and similar lines have been developed as an ongoing project.

So: a useful book as long as it doesn't step too hard on your preconceptions.… (mais)

This is a great book on Italy. I think it is worth reading by Italians themselves too. A historical book as it should be. It is a very balanced account of country’s history and a very fair assessment of its key figures and events. Nor is his book a collection of iconoclastic provocations. You see real people, not lacquered and embellished saints or demonized beastly villains. He calls events and processes precisely by their correct names and not just recites glorious titles. A certain character could be a hero though, but that doesn’t necessarily imply you should worship him or that he lived a flawless life of conviction. It’s not a typical book of fables fed to adult kids, it’s a serious conversation that invites you to think. I wish the author wrote similar books on histories of other controversial states like mine (Russia), where so much glazing was put on so many historical figures that they actually sainted XVIII century admiral Feodor Ushakov as recently as in 2000s, never mind his actual temporal achievements. Especially poignant are his chapters on Risorgimento and Mussolini years. You’ll see how trivial skirmishes and untalented commanders are raised on marble pedestals and positioned in the central places of cities and kids’ textbooks.

It was never easy to go against the grain as this excerpt below shows:

“Italian soldiers used to enjoy the reputation of being brava gente, good fellows, ‘the good soldier Gino’ who remained good even in uniform. Italians claimed they were not like the nazis. Nor were their generals, whose decency is supposed to have been certified later by the fact that none of them faced a trial like the leading nazis at Nuremberg. Yet in recent decades an Italian historian, Angelo del Boca, has gone through the colonial records and painstakingly compiled, in volume after volume, evidence that the generals committed horrific atrocities in Africa and later the Balkans and that ‘the good soldier Gino’ is a myth: the brava gente were as adept at massacring as anyone else. The Italian army reacted by trying to have Del Boca prosecuted for ‘vilifying the Italian soldier’.”

- but I am sure you and me are grown ups enough to decide for ourselves what to make out of competing historical narrations, rather than uncritically bow to Legend, created with many different intentions, not all of which were benign.
… (mais)

An accomplished and heartfelt account of the people who ran the British Raj in India during the 19th and 20th centuries. It portrays how the original martial approach gradually gave way to a more reformist administrative system that strove to provide modern institutions and services to the masses in the sub-continent. Perhaps the most moving chapters are those that describe the loneliness of the colonial officers, especially those working in isolated posts in the districts, and the travails of life threatening diseases, separation from wife and children for long periods, and the difficulties of adjusting to a humdrum middle class existence back in the UK after retirement. First published in 2005, this was later followed by the author's "The British in India" (2018), a more detailed account.… (mais)