Aspects of History

In the epigraph to his previous book, How to Stop Fascism (2021), Paul Mason recalls the anti-fascist lawyer and political scientist Karl Loewenstein’s observation that “history teaches us the deathlessness of ideas”. The quotation encapsulates a view of history shaped by the enduring power of ideas to transcend the contexts from which they emerge. In his latest work, Reds: A Global History of Communism, the author is animated by a similar conviction.

Unbelievably, most people have probably never heard of Brian Franks until now. Loved by officers and soldiers alike, he was tough, capable, charismatic and charming, and  David Stirling credited him as being one of the five founding fathers of the SAS. Yet surprisingly, like Biffy Dunderdale and David Birkin (whom I have written about in A Suspicion of Spies and A Dangerous Enterprise), he is until now largely unknown outside the Special Operations world.

Wartime requisitioning of Britain’s country houses transformed the lives of owners, servants and occupiers and the consequences were far-reaching. What was it like to have your house requisitioned during the war? To share your home with occupiers, whether Land Girls, POWs, soldiers, or spies? What compensation did families receive for the loss of their homes? And how did it all work? These were the questions I...

The historian examines with Daria Santini the deep historical roots of communism, the push and pull between Utopian ideals and authoritarianism, and the continued relevance of past communist movements in an era of Chinese ascendancy and debate over alternatives to capitalism. Welcome, Paul, to Aspects of History. Why did you choose to begin Reds: A Global History of Communism in antiquity rather than with Marx, Engels, or the Russian revolution?

Welcome, Paul, to Aspects of History. Why did you choose to begin Reds: A Global History of Communism in antiquity rather than with Marx, Engels, or the Russian revolution? What do we miss when we treat communism as a purely modern phenomenon? Because before it was a political movement, communism was an impulse. There’s plenty of evidence to substantiate the claim that hunter-gatherer societies in the Upper Paleolithic practised the same kind of altruism and sharing that surviving tribes do.

If you have ever looked at a map of the Roman Empire at its height in the early 2nd century AD, you will note that it surrounded the entire Mediterranean Sea, while stretching north and west into modern-day Germany, France, Belgium and Britain. To the east, it embraced Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Serbia, to name but a few. At the end of the 3rd century BC, however, the situation was very different.

There is, in the origin story of communism, something akin to what happens the first lines of the Book of Genesis. Left-wing politics in the 1830s are like the biblical “formless void”, with the early workers’ movement mesmerised by pointless speculative Utopias. Then Marx turns up in Paris in 1843, armed with the dialectical logic he has learned at Berlin University, and says, “Let there be light!” An intellectual system is formed, based on the principles of social science.

“Subandrio! Subandrio! Subandrio! Can you hear us Subandrio? Of course you can! For you can never close your ears to our voices. The voices you tried to smother in the Well. The voices of us the dead.

What was it like to have your house requisitioned during the war? To share your home with occupiers, whether Land Girls, POWs, soldiers, or spies? What compensation did families receive for the loss of their homes? And how did it all work? These were the questions I initially wanted answered when I began The Country House at War. The idea for writing a book on requisitioned country houses during World War II came because I couldn’t find a book that answered them.

It’s astonishing how firmly the tragic story of Puyi and Wanrong, the last emperor and empress of China’s Qing Dynasty, remains in the public imagination. In the West, much of that fascination comes from Bernardo Bertolucci’s lavish 1987 epic The Last Emperor – now 38 years old. In China, the doomed couple, their gilded-cage existence in the Forbidden City and their eventual downfall at the hands of the Japanese continue to inspire histories, novels, soap operas, websites and graphic novels.