An anthology of posts In That Howling Infinite addressing matters historical

The great and the good, the wise and the weary, have all offered a definition of ‘history’. To Napoleon, it was “a myth that men agree to believe”. Historian Marc Bloch observed that it was “an endeavour towards better understanding”. His Nazi killers disagreed – their’s was a less nuanced, more zero-sum approach. Abba Eban, long time Israeli foreign minister, wrote that it “teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives”. Aldous Huxley observed “that men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.” And channeling Mark Twain and Karl Marx, Buffy Summers remarked, “You know what they say. Those of us who fail history are, doomed to repeat it in summer school”. But best is John Banville’s admission in The Sea that “the past beats inside me like a second heart”.

Mark Twain remarked sardonically, “history doesn’t repeat itself. A best, it sometimes rhymes”. Like most folk who get into history, I am partial to parallels and patterns in the past that speak to the present. Albeit in a more ambivalent way – cleaving to Mark (Twain, that is) rather than Marx, I am fascinated more by the rhymes rather than the repetitions. But “remembering”, as Taylor Swift sings, “comes in flashbacks and echoes”.

So, let us walk down what Welsh poet RS Thomas called ‘the long road of history”, beginning with, yes, the usual suspects: power and pride, greed, and aggrandizement, and as accessories after the fact, dolour, devastation, and death.

From A Brief History of the Rise and Fall of the West

From the foggy ruins of time – our favourite history stories

Australia

• Martin Sparrow’s Blues
• Farewell to Old England forever … reappraising The Fatal Shore
• Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land – a poet’s memorial to a forgotten crime 
• We’ve Got The Australia Day Blues 
• The Frontier Wars – Australia’s heart of darkness 
• Banjo’s Not So Jolly Swagman – Australia’s could’ve been anthem  
• Small Stories – A Tale of Twin Pines
• Small Stories – the schools of the Tarkeeth
• Small Stories – Crossing the South Arm
• Tel al Sabi – Tarkeeth’s ANZAC Story
• The Watchers of the Water – a song about Gallipoli
• So far away from home – the Diggers who fought in Spain
• Tolkien’s Tarkeeth – Images of Isengard
• Tolkien’s Tarkeeth – In the Darkest Depths of Mordor
• Arguments of Monumental Proportions
• The agony and extinction of Blinky Bill 
• The ballad of ‘the Breaker’ – Australia’s Boer War 
• Menzie’s Excellent Suez Adventure 
• Journey’s end – photographer Tim Page’s wild ride 
• A bridge from past to present – the forgotten memoirs of Alice Duncan-Kemp
• Killing for Country … dark deeds in a sunny land
• Farewell to Old England forever … reappraising The Fatal Shore 

Britain and Ireland

• The Spirit of ’45
• What did Lenin do for us? The welfare state, that’s what,
• The Monarch of the Sea  
•  Mo Ghile Mear – Irish myth and melody
• The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir 
• O’Donnell Abú – the Red Earl and history in a song 
• Over the sea to Skye 
• Free Derry and the battle of the Bogside
• Outlander – if I didna hae bad luck, I’d hae no luck at all …
• Enoch knocking on England’s door
• Little Sir Hugh – Old England’s Jewish Question
• When Harald Went A Viking
• Roman Wall Blues  
• Arguments of Monumental Proportions
• Beyond Wolf Hall (1) – Revolution Road
• Beyond Wolf Hall (2) – Icarus ascending
• Bad company – how Britain conquered India 
• The Crown – the view from Down Under 
• Song of the Road – my hitchhiking days
• One ring to rule us all – does Tolkien matter?
• Ciao Pollo di Soho – memories a classic café 
• Johnny Clegg’s Impi – the Washing of the Spears
• Rider Haggard and the book that launched a genre
• A Son Goes To War – the grief of Rudyard Kipling 
• 1922 – the year that changed literature
• I am the enemy you killed – Wilfred Owen’s solemn testament
• Bringing it all back home – the missing mosaic and other ‘stolen’ stuff 
• The Rite Stuff – the coronation’s pomp and circumstance  
• Farewell to Old England forever … reappraising The Fatal Shore
• Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment 

Romans

• Roman Holiday – the perils of a poet in Nero’s Rome
• Roman Holiday – The poems of Meniscus Diabetes
• What have the Romans done for us?
• Cuddling up to Caligula
• Five things about about Masada
• Roman Wall Blues 
• Blood and Brick … a world of walls 

The Middle East

• Rocky road to Heaven’s Gate
• Once in Royal David’s Citadel
• The grand old New Imperial Hotel
• Nova Via Dolorosa
• King Herod’s edifice complex
• Five things about about Masada
• The Mizrahi Factor 
• O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie…
• The hand that signed the paper  
• Islam’s house of many mansions 
• Ottoman Redux – an alternative history 
• Sailing to Byzantium 
• The Watchers of the Water
• Pity the Nation
• Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion 
• Children of the revolution 
• Rojava and the Kurdish conundrum
• The ghosts of Gandamak
• Messing with the Mullahs – America’s phoney war
• Ruins and Bones
• The tears of Zenobia – will Palmyra rise again?
• Tel al Sabi – Tarkeeth’s ANZAC Story
• Visualizing the Palestinian Return – the art of Ismail Shammout
• تصور عودة الفلسطينيين – فن إسماعيل شموط
• O Beirut – songs for a wounded city 
• Al Tariq al Salabiyin – the Crusaders’ Trail 
• Menzie’s Excellent Suez Adventure 
• Muzaffar al Nawab, poet of revolutions and sorrow 
• We did not weep when we were leaving – the poet of Nazareth  

America

• The Bard in the Badlands – Hell is empty and the devils are here
• The Bard in the Badlands 2 – Shakespeare in a divided America
• The last rains came gently – Steinbeck’s dustbowl ballad.
• The Sport of Kings – CE Morgan’s “great American novel”
• Tales of Yankee Power
• Rebel Yell
• Phil Och’s Chicago blues 
• Looking for Lehrer
• The Strange Death of Sam Cooke
• Legends, bibles, plagues – Bob Dylan’s Nobel lecture
• Blind Willie McTell – Bob Dylan’s Americana
• Cross the Green Mountain – Bob Dylan’s Americana
• I hear America singing – happy birthday, Walt Whitman
• A cowboy key – how the west was sung 
• The Ballad of Denton Crocker – a Vietnam elegy  
• Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam journey 
• Journey’s end – photographer Tim Page’s wild ride 
• The Shoah and America’s Shame – Ken Burns’ sorrowful masterpiece 

Europa

• Ghosts of the Gulag
• The Death of Stalin is no laughing matter
• Stalin’s Great Terror
• What did Lenin do for us? The welfare state, that’s what,
• Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism
• The Russian Tradition – Russia, Ukraine and Tibor Szamuely
• Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war
• The Roots and Fruits of Putin’s Irridentism
• Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold – 1968 revisited
• A Brief History of the Rise and Fall of the West
• November 1918 – the counterfeit peace
• Dulce et ducorem est – the death of Wilfred Owen
• Tanks for the memory – how Brezhnev changed my life
• Springtime in Paris – remembering May 1968
• Righteous Among the Nations 
• 2nd September 1939 – the rape of Poland (2)
• 17th September 199 – the rape of Poland (2)
• Las Treces Rosas – Spain’s Unquiet Graves
• The Shoah and America’s Shame – Ken Burns’ sorrowful masterpiece 
• So far away from home – the Diggers who fought in Spain 
• 1922 – the year that changed literature 

The rest of the world and more …

• A Short History of the Rise and Fall of the West
• The Twilight of the Equine Gods 
• Sic Semper Tyrannis 
• Thermidorian Thinking
• Solitudinem Pacem Appellant
• A House Divided – the Nature of Civil War
• Allende’s Desk and Osama’s Pyjamas
• Weighing the White Man’s Burden
• Freedom at Midnight (1): the birth of India and Pakistan
• Freedom at Midnight (2): the legacy of partition 
• Paradise Lost – Kashmir’s bitter legacy 
• Song of the Road – my hitchhiking days
• Fact or friction = fiction – a consideration of historical fiction
•  The Odyssey of Assid Corban 
• Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow – judgement in Kabul  
• The ballad of ‘the Breaker’ – Australia’s Boer War 
• The Rest is History – a gift that keeps on giving 
• Getting back to the garden – Tom Holland’s Dominion 
• Blood and Brick … a world of walls

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Ataturk Monument, Istanbul

Salah ud Din al Ayubi, Damascus

                           The Croppy Boy, Enniscorthy