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

Australia

• Martin Sparrow’s Blues
• We’ve Got The Australia Day Blues 
• The Frontier Wars – Australia’s heart of darkness 
• Small Stories – A Tale of Twin Pines
• Small Stories – the schools of the Tarkeeth
• Arguments of Monumental Proportions
• The agony and extinction of Blinky Bill 
• Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land – a poet’s memorial to a forgotten crime 

Britain and Ireland

• The Spirit of ’45
• The Monarch of the Sea  
•  Mo Ghile Mear – Irish myth and melody
• The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir 
• Over the sea to Skye 
• Free Derry and the battle of the Bogside
• Encounters with Enoch
• 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 

Romans

• Roman Holiday – the perils of a poet in Nero’s Rome
• Roman Holiday – The Poems of Menscus Diabetes
• What have the Romans done for us?
• Cuddling up to Caligula
• Roman Wall Blues 

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
• 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?
• Visualizing the Palestinian Return – the art of Ismail Shammout
• O Beirut – songs for a wounded city 

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
• I hear America singing – happy birthday, Walt Whitman
• A cowboy key – how the west was sung 

The Rest of the World

• A Brief 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
• Ghosts of the Gulag
• The Death of Stalin is no laughing matter
• Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold – 1968 revisited
• Weighing the White Man’s Burden
• Freedom at Midnight (1): the birth of India and Pakistan
• Freedom at Midnight (2): the legacy of partition 
• 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
•  The Odyssey of Assid Corban
• Righteous Among the Nations 
• 2nd September 1939
• Las Treces Rosas – Spain’s Unquiet Graves 

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