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Articles by Ferdinand Mount
Modest and Misunderstood
We have the king’s own word for the massacre. He ordered it, after all.
Pavilion of Heaven
Revisiting old haunts is a hazardous pastime. The beloved buildings may look smaller or shabbier, the unforgettable view is ruined by the new solar farm, the once fascinating characters in the novel have lost their power to enchant, everything seems blurred or – the verdict from which there is no appeal – dated. Surely Raffles would be the least likely fictional hero to survive the cut. His exploits seem to belong, irredeemably, to the world of gaslight and hansom cabs.
His Very Variousness
In his middle age , during the seventeen years he lodged for long periods at 36 Craven Street, just off the Strand, Benjamin Franklin became addicted to what he called his ‘air bath’. Every morning, he would strip naked, throw open the windows and pass half an hour reading or writing in the nude, before dossing down refreshed for another hour or so, sometimes answering the door in the buff to startled postmen.
Flipping Britain’s Postwar Script | Ferdinand Mount
Controlling the narrative is the name of the game now. We like to think of it as a new game, one that we are smart enough to see through. In British politics, it has been strongly associated with Tony Blair and New Labour. In fact, it was an ambition openly declared by Blair’s Svengali, Alastair Campbell: “We are going to take the initiative with the media announcing stories in a cycle determined by us.” But of course it is not a new ambition at all.
Mr. Popular Sentiment
The Warden was the fourth novel by Anthony Trollope to be published and the first to catch the public eye. It was also to be the first of his enormously popular Barsetshire Chronicles, the tales set in an ancient cathedral close and occupied with the doings of the bishop, clergy, and their families. The warden is the Reverend Septimus Harding, a sweet old boy who likes nothing better than to play his cello and chant the litany in the cathedral.
“Free lies,” by James Bowman
Jimmy Kimmel is back, not only unrepentant but glorying in his new role as the people’s champion of “free speech” against the “un-American” tyrant in the White House.
Soft: A Brief History of Sentimentality
‘What’s wrong with being sentimental?’ Paul McCartney once asked an interviewer. Ferdinand Mount pretends that he was shocked. Here was a songwriter who has been acclaimed as one of the greatest since Schubert questioning an ‘entrenched shibboleth of modern high culture’ – the contempt for all that is emotionally sloppy and intellectually soft. But how delighted Mount must really have been. He opens his book with the quote.
Ferdinand Mount · Biff-Bang: Tariffs before Trump
Donald Trump likes to tell us that ‘tariff’ is ‘the most beautiful word in the dictionary’. He does not remind us that the word comes from the Arabic ta’rif, or that such duties were first applied by medieval sheikhs and sultans in some of the places he has designated as ‘shithole countries’. They were not really things of beauty either, being modest tolls to raise a little revenue, not intended to keep out foreign stuff, and were seldom charged at more than 5 per cent.
Zoe Guttenplan - Unusual Suspects
Ferdinant Mount – I doff my cap to you, sir, for writing such a ripping yarn. If that sounds a bit plummy, forgive me. I have been reading The Pentecost Papers and am steeped in its language. If it sounds unladylike, I can only protest that I wasn’t reading it for long enough to lose my sense that women do more than waft about in red lipstick chatting up the wives of hedge fund managers.
The Tongue Is a Fire
It’s puzzling, unsettling even, to see ‘free speech’ rearing its head in public debate again, rousing passions which seemed long defunct. Wasn’t the doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton and Locke, and knocked into some sort of final shape by John Stuart Mill? Even before you get to today’s remix of the debate, you cannot help noticing two features of it. First, the zealots today are no longer the progressives on the left – liberals, socialists, trade unionists.
This is the day!
‘Was it really the greatest siege?’ Catherine de Medici asked. ‘Greater even than Rhodes?’ ‘Yes, madame,’ the knight commander Antoine de La Roche answered, ‘greater even than Rhodes. It was the greatest siege in history.’ Catherine’s constable, Anne de Montmorency, had been arguing for Rhodes, but even he had to concede that more guns had been fired, more mines dug, at Malta.
Ferdinand Mount · Salt Spray: When Britannia Ruled the Waves
There’s no ‘s’ at the end of ‘rule’, and there’s a comma before it. As every schoolboy pedant knows, it’s ‘Britannia, rule the waves!’ – an imperative or exhortation, not a statement of fact. An ocean-going navy is not a workaday public service, like a coastguard or a constabulary. It is a grand project, an ambition, a national glory or a national shame. Its power is hard-gained and fragile; its reputation can be won or lost in an afternoon.
Big Caesars and Little Caesars
Ferdinand Mount, author of Big Caesars and Little Caesars, is a British writer who doesn’t seem to buy this American exceptionalism. Though he gives considerable space to our once and perhaps future chief executive, he bestows pride of place on his own nation’s troubling former prime minister, Johnson. I don’t think you have to be a blinkered American jingoist to believe Mount is misjudging the relative risks to liberal democracy.
They Used to Rule the World. What Happened? Original
The British Conservative Party has long boasted of being the most successful political party on the planet. The unimaginable scale of its defeat on July 4, when it won the fewest seats in its history, looks like the downfallof moderate conservatism. It appears to be the final straw for the center-right parties offering pragmatism, prosperity and opportunity that have dominated Western politics since World War II.
Ferdinand Mount · One-Way Traffic: Ancient India
The sun still sparkles on the sapphire sea at Mamallapuram. The shoppers and sightseers still dawdle along the harbour front, gawping at the astonishing sculptures carved on the rocks behind: the gods and goddesses, bare-breasted and smiling; the lions, water buffalo, cobras and, of course, elephants. Nothing much has changed since the seventh-century poet Dandin, the greatest Sanskrit storyteller, sauntered along the prom ‘with eyes blossoming wide in wonder’.
The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904-1939
In This Review In This Review The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904–1939 Terrorism is notoriously difficult to define: one person’s terrorist, the cliché goes, is another’s freedom fighter. For this reason and others, government responses to terrorist violence are often disproportionate to the threat.
Book Review: "Keir Starmer" by Tom Baldwin
In This Review In This Review Keir Starmer: The Biography With a general election looming in the United Kingdom, the Labour Party enjoys a steady 20-point lead in polls. Yet the presumptive prime minister, Keir Starmer, has impressed few people, coming off instead as awkward and rather dull. This engaging biography, written with Starmer’s cooperation, adds some personal details to a mostly familiar story.
Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and Fall—From Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson
In This Review In This Review Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and Fall—From Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson Mount insists that this is an era of charismatic “little” Caesars, such as former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former U.S. President Donald Trump. In some ways, these figures resemble historical “big” Caesars, such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, and Julius himself.
Fans and Un-Fans
Carefree: that must be the essence of the sporting idea, whether you are doing it with Amaryllis in the shade, or on the village green with your grandchild Wilhelmine. You are disported, carried off out of yourself. In botany, a ‘sport’ is the wayward offshoot of an otherwise predictable shrub.
Our Week in Reviews: 11/11/23
Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton & Me by Bernie Taupin (Hachette Books). Reviewed by Michael Causey. “As the book’s title implies, Taupin as memoirist is not going for a comprehensive, linear look at his remarkable life. But it’s chockfull of intriguing celebrity encounters, detours, and pithy, astute comments about those he’s encountered on the ride. Alice Cooper becomes a great friend. Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham is an ass. Andy Warhol is boring.
Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How They Fall - from Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson
The world is, sadly, full of Donald Trumps: Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Britain’s Boris Johnson, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, India’s Narendra Modi, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, and Turkey’s Recep Erdoǧan. To different degrees, all these self-regarding leaders have in recent years pushed their countries away from democracy and toward authoritarianism.
Hail, Caesar!-And Farewell
If we recognize the strongman’s incendiary showmanship, we always have a chance of ridding ourselves of him. Caesars are back, big caesars and little caesars, in big countries and little countries, in advanced nations and developing nations. The world seems to be full of self-proclaimed strongmen strutting their stuff, or waiting in the wings and plotting a comeback after a humiliating fall. And we thought it couldn’t happen here.
Frisking the Bishops
The first thing people noticed about Henry, perhaps the only thing they noticed, was his droopy left eyelid. He was blond, of medium height for the times and pleasant looking, but otherwise unremarkable. Nobody ever claimed that he was clever. Later on, exasperated chroniclers denounced him as ‘simple-minded’, ‘senseless’ and ‘useless’ – simplex, insipiens, inutilis.
Big Caesars and Little Caesars
There are no results for your search Book extract Big Caesars and Little Caesars by Ferdinand Mount The would-be Caesar has to draw to him the classes of the resentful, the expropriated, those who lost out. In the Brexit struggle, it was argued that the motive power was supplied by the ‘Left-behinds’, from the de-industrialized towns (not cities) of Northern England, the so-called Red Wall of seats that went Tory for the first time since the war.
Collect your divvies
The Bank of England had been in existence for only a few months when it was first called on to save the nation’s bacon. The second siege of Namur in the summer of 1695 was to prove the decisive engagement in the Nine Years’ War. It was a huge battle, more than 100,000 on each side. William of Orange was in personal command of the allied forces and was making headway against the French, but he had run out of cash to pay the siege workers.
When banks fail
The collapse — and bailout — of Silicon Valley Bank is part of a cycle of complacency, woven throughout banking history. The late Queen Elizabeth was, I think, the first to put it so succinctly: ‘It’s awful — why did nobody see it coming?’ she inquired while opening the New Academic Building at the LSE during the Lehman Brothers crash of 2008.
December 2022 - Prospect Magazine
The Tories won’t recover until they face up to the disaster of Brexit
William Boyd: ‘If you think appropriation is a sin, I’m a sinner’
Nothing should be off limits to novelists. At least, that’s what William Boyd thinks. “The minute you start reining yourself in, you’re going to write a very crabbed, narrow view of the world,” says the author, sitting opposite me in the book-lined living room of his Chelsea townhouse. “When I look back over what I’ve written, if you think appropriation is a sin, I’m a sinner,” he continues as we talk about the current debate around authors writing of experiences beyond their own.
Why did it all go to pieces?
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Why did it all go to pieces?
It is unsettling when the Great Unsayable suddenly becomes sayable, taken for granted even, as if it were part of the conventional wisdom: the sort of thing people have been saying for years. I had this weird feeling when I saw the headline in the Daily Telegraph of 15th October: “Project Fear was right all along”.
The unhappy lives of the emperors
Reviewed here In the Shadow of the Gods: The Emperor in World History by Dominic Lieven Allen Lane (RRP: £35) Buy on Bookshop.org Prospect receives commission when you buy a book using this page. Thank you for supporting us. Suleyman II remarked that when he was taken from the harem to ascend the Ottoman throne, he thought he was going to be executed. He had good reason to be alarmed.
Shades of Peterloo
‘Corruption’s sons … sigh for the evidence of a PLOT. Oh how they sigh! They are working and slaving and fretting and stewing; they are sweating all over; they are absolutely pining and dying for a Plot!’ So William Cobbett wrote to Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt in 1816. He did not exaggerate. The verb ‘foment’ might have been invented to describe the activities of Lords Sidmouth and Castlereagh and their spymasters in Bow Street during the turbulent 1810s.
What shape is the Treasury in now?
Don’t bring a bottle. Your chances of finding a party in full swing down those chilly corridors are close to zero. At most, you might hear the sound of a distant flute playing a couranteby Lully. As Sir Howard Davies puts it in this insider’s view, which manages to be both authoritative and quite cheeky: Yet this notoriously ascetic culture is not in the least hierarchical.
Swank and Swagger
The story begins with a bombardment, and it more or less ends with one too. In the spring of 1799, Admiral Sidney Smith’s naval squadron bombarded the coast at Acre, in what is now Israel, and effectively put an end to Napoleon’s dream of marching on to India in the wake of Alexander the Great.
Zukunft der Adelsherrschaft: Warum die britische Öffentlichkeit an der Monarchie festhält
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It is better to be woke than dead
Why on earth now? It seems so very late in the day. It is nearly 75 years since the British Empire started to unravel, famously at midnight on August 14, 1947, when India became free. Yet over the past 18 months the arguments about the Empire have raged afresh, as septic and painful as ever. Does Britain deserve obloquy for profiting so hugely from the Transatlantic slave trade, or credit for having abolished it? Statues of imperialists and slavers have been toppled and daubed and tossed into rivers.
No Innovations in My Time
On Christmas Day 1788, the king hid his bedclothes under the bed, put a pillowcase on his head and hugged the pillow, which he called Prince Octavius and said had just been born (Prince Octavius had died five years earlier at the age of four). When George realised what day it was and that he had been kept in his straitjacket and not allowed to go to church, he suddenly went under the sofa, saying that he would converse with his saviour there, and that no one was to interrupt them.
Great Sums of Money
‘You were so generous, you British,’ Hans-Dietrich Genscher, West Germany’s perpetual foreign minister in the 1980s, once remarked: ‘You gave us a decentralised federal structure and a proportional system of election so that never again could we concentrate power at the centre, but you took neither of these for yourselves.’ Canadians and Australians could say much the same: the entrenched powers of their provinces and states remain the lynchpins of the remarkably successful federal systems...
Amartya Sen: the optimistic Indian
You can hardly imagine a more heavenly start in life. Amartya Sen’s first name means “immortal” in Sanskrit, and it was devised for him by the poet Rabindranath Tagore when he was born in 1933; he was also brought up at Tagore’s school in Santiniketan in west Bengal. The school was founded to unite the world in peaceful harmony.
Ferdinand Mount · Short Cuts: Untilled Fields · LRB 1 July 2021
‘This is certain – for I have noted it several times – some parts of England are becoming almost as lonesome as the African veld.’ This was Rider Haggard’s conclusion after two years’ gruelling travel across the farming counties of England in 1901 and 1902. Only the odd Irish tinker trudged the dusty roads. Thistles and rushes invaded the untilled fields.
John le Carré, the German master – Ferdinand Mount - The Oldie
John le Carré's last novel, Silverview, comes out on October 14. Ferdinand Mount remembers him as a brilliant teacher at Eton In my last year at school, we have a new German teacher. The top German set is a notoriously tough bunch, and the previous incumbent retired hurt to go and teach in a girl’s school. ‘This one won’t stand any nonsense,’ my tutor prophesies.
Ruthless and Truthless
There was always something a little weird about the scene: the heavy lectern hurriedly dragged out into the street from behind the famous front door, as though the premises were suddenly out of action because of flood damage or a bomb threat; on the other side of the road, the hacks and the pap pack awkwardly mustered and jostling for position.
Victory and Misery in Haiti
In response to: Democracy’s Demagogues from the January 14, 2021 issue To the Editors: There are some dangerous misstatements and curious falsehoods in Ferdinand Mount’s recent review of David A. Bell’s Men on Horseback [NYR, January 14].
Englishness and the fragile future of the union
Looking around his Cambridge common room, Robert Tombs found himself surrounded by disdainful Remainers.
With What Joy We Write of the New Russian Government
‘Ransome, when he turned up, proved to be an amiable and attractive man, with a luxuriant blond soup-strainer moustache, a rubicund complexion, a large mouth from which more often than not a pipe protruded, and a hearty disposition.’ Malcolm Muggeridge immediately took to Arthur Ransome when he first met him in Cairo in 1929. Most people did.
Democracy’s Demagogues
In 1917, when Europe seemed to lie in ruins, Max Weber wrote an influential essay with the misleadingly dull title “Parliament and Government in a Reconstructed Germany.” In it he drew attention to the outbreak of “Caesarism” in nineteenth-century Europe, taking Otto von Bismarck as the prime example of a modern Caesar for Germany (and indeed for the entire continent).
Mr Nowhere goes to Washington: Why Barack Obama did fulfil his promise
During the Trump years, it is hard to deny that a faint miasma of disappointment has lingered over the reputation of his predecessor. Yes, Barack Obama might personally be one of the most attractive presidents ever—charming, decent, eloquent—but how come he was succeeded by such a stinker? If he hadn’t exactly let Trump in, he hadn’t kept him out either.
The Importance of Being Ernie
Sir Nicholas Henderson was British ambassador almost everywhere that mattered – Bonn, Paris, Washington. He met all the great personalities of the second half of the 20th century. Yet in conversation he reverted, time and again, to the few years he spent in his twenties as assistant private secretary to Ernest Bevin.
Confusion is power
You can tell Russia is not a real democracy because there is no great mystery about its politics. Democracies are slightly baffling in how they work: just look at America; just look at Europe; just look at us. In Russia the basics are easy to understand: people use money to get power and power to get money. The country is ruled by a narrow, self-serving elite who go through the motions of holding elections and transferring power. No one is fooled.
Betrayal by Lilja Sigurdardottir
LoveReading View on Betrayal With short fast-moving chapters this is a piercing and riveting political thriller. Sitting within a time period of just over two weeks, former aid worker Ursula finds herself in deep water when she becomes Minister for the Interior in Iceland. Author Lilja Sigurdardottir and translator Quentin Bates team up again after the successful and fiercely intense Reykjavik Noir trilogy which I absolutely adored.
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