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Telegraph
2 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
The historian who worked so hard it nearly broke him
The historian Asa Briggs apparently aimed to write 1,500 publishable words a day and liked to be working on at least three books at any one time. His Stakhanovite labours included some 45 books, countless reviews, reports, forewords and encyclopaedia entries, unstinting service on countless committees, presenting many lecture series and chairing numerous learned societies. Not to mention a five-volume history of the BBC and the text for a volume of Brooke Bond Tea picture cards. Though his career is not often celebrated today, his life, as Adam Sisman 's measured but compelling biography makes plain, was both busy and remarkable. It also came at a cost: the very drive that fuelled his output later became a burden, as writing turned from joy to compulsion. Briggs was born in Keighley in 1921, a grammar school boy raised above a grocer's shop in what he would later call 'modest comfort'. His upbringing was imbued with the northern, nonconformist virtues of hard work, discipline and self-reliance, values he never ceased to embody, even after acquiring grand houses, a peerage and a taste for haute cuisine. (As well as becoming president of the Workers' Education Association, the William Morris Society, the Victorian Society, the Ephemera Society and the Brönte Society, Briggs was also a founding member of the British Academy of Gastronomes.) He started degrees at Cambridge and LSE, concurrently, at just 16, taking firsts from both of them. By 1942, at 21, he was working at Bletchley Park. Not long after the war, he was teaching at Worcester College, Oxford, where his pupils included a young Rupert Murdoch. Briggs's professional trajectory, as Sisman puts it, was a story of 'spectacular success'. Vice-Chancellor of Sussex, Chancellor of the Open University, Provost of Worcester, and eventually Lord Briggs of Lewes, he scaled and conquered the post-war academic establishment with dizzying speed and unwavering determination. But though he had a knack for cultivating useful friendships and influencing people, his success did not endear him to everyone. His jet-setting lifestyle led colleagues to dub him 'Professor Heathrow', while the acerbic Hugh Trevor-Roper liked to joke, 'What is the difference between The Lord and The Lord Briggs? The Lord is always with us.' Sisman, an acclaimed biographer – including of Trevor-Roper, and John le Carré, whose serial affairs he revealed to the world in 2015 – is ideally suited to the job. He's a writer highly attuned to the niceties, sensitivities and indeed the hypocrisies of the British class system and of academic life, a complex terrain which he traverses smoothly. He is also, as he freely admits, necessarily selective: a 'comprehensive' life, he writes, would 'require at least a decade to write' and 'several volumes'. At a little over 400 pages, The Indefatigable Asa Briggs is more than enough: what emerges is a sharply sketched figure, part whirlwind, part workaholic, part Victorian relic. Briggs's scholarship roamed far beyond the confines of traditional historical research. He was a pioneer of labour history, urban history, local history, business history and the history of communications. But this breadth was also a liability: as AJP Taylor once remarked of The Age of Improvement 1783–1867 (1959), that cursed book inflicted upon generations of British schoolchildren, he was 'a veritable Lysenko of verbiage, making three sentences grow where one would do'. (Victorian People (1955) and Victorian Cities (1963) are much more focused and better reads; the BBC volumes remain his most significant, if not uniformly admired, contribution to original research.) He was also not always reliable. As Sisman writes, Briggs often accepted commissions he could not fulfil: some he abandoned entirely; others he completed only under duress, to vastly differing standards. In the final decades of his life, the compulsion turned to torment: Sisman notes a growing detachment in the later works, as deadlines loomed and standards slipped. For a richly researched biography, Briggs's private life remains curiously opaque. There were entanglements with various women, Sisman notes, though he refrains from going into more details – a curious obscurity, given the le Carré book. Briggs met his wife Susan when she worked as his research assistant. She later remarked that love 'was never part of it', but somehow the marriage endured: she had affairs, while together they climbed the social ladder. There's a faint Pooterish air once Briggs reaches the top: letters of complaint to travel agents and cashiers; luncheon with the Queen; and a dinner at Bletchley Park, late in his life, served by the finalists of Celebrity MasterChef. For all the accounting of Briggs's frenetic activity, though, there's a strange hollowness at the centre of the book: we get no sense of Briggs's interior life. Perhaps there was none: he may have been too busy or too distracted. 'Greedy', one of Sisman's sources, an unnamed historian, calls him. If so, it wasn't just greed for money – though he made plenty – as much as for the role of the historian to become a kind of public institution. Sisman's biography is dry-eyed but humane and honours the labour without overstating the legacy. It amounts to a portrait of a man who, like Victorian Britain, Briggs's great subject, believed that more was more – and who, like that age, left behind an awful lot, some of it brilliant, some of it best forgotten. ★★★★☆
Telegraph
7 days ago
- Telegraph
‘Little more than glorified sheds': What drives people to spend £45,000 on a beach hut
Looking to invest in property? How about an uninsulated one-room shack, vulnerable to the elements, with no running water, no electricity, no bed nor sleeping permissions, but space (just about) for a gas stove and kettle, and superlative sea views. A snip at £45,828! That's the average cost of a beach hut in Britain, though some sell for less, some a lot more. The grander chalets lining Dorset's Mudeford Sandbank can cost upwards of £450,000. These sound outrageous amounts for what's basically a glorified shed. But you're not just buying a shed – you're buying into a vision of the British seaside. 'Beach huts have an iconic status – and I use that advisedly because everything is iconic these days,' says Kathryn Ferry, a historian specialising in seaside culture. Kathryn spent two months travelling the country, researching beach huts – 'there are about 28,000, I counted' – and is the author of Beach Huts & Bathing Machines, Sheds on the Seashore and, her latest, Seaside 100: A History of the British Seaside in 100 Objects. She knows her huts. Some of her favourites include the stilted, pine-backed beauties at Wells-next-the-Sea in Norfolk and an unusual row in Mablethorpe, Lincolnshire, which have roofs made of recycled Nissan huts that make them look a little like pagodas. But what's the general appeal? 'There's an element of nostalgia. But it's also a back-to-basics thing,' Kathryn reckons. 'With the pace of modern life, everything being digital, you can never switch off. But the beach hut is an antidote. 'You just sit and watch the world go by. And you're in that exclusive club: when the rain comes, you can retreat into your hut while everybody else flees the beach.' The history of the beach hut The beach hut dates back to the beginnings of the seaside itself, which was originally marketed to health tourists who'd come to take the waters as a cure. Horse-drawn mobile bathing machines started to appear in the mid-18th century, to ease access to the sea and to preserve the modesty of well-to-do dippers, keeping men and women apart. But by the late 19th century, Kathryn says, 'the wheels began to come off – quite literally.' As more wealthy people started travelling abroad, they found that, on European beaches, the sexes weren't segregated. British resorts suddenly seemed outmoded. To compete, they began offering mixed bathing. As long as you were suitably attired, it was now deemed respectable to be seen on the beach. 'This meant you could park your bathing machine,' says Kathryn, 'so it became a beach hut.' The first purpose-built public huts were erected alongside Bournemouth Pier in 1909. Their popularity peaked post-war, then declined as more Brits started to holiday overseas. The revival came in the late 1990s. 'They started to become more fashionable when really cheap flights meant there was nothing exclusive about flying any more,' says Kathryn. 'It meant that paying thousands for your own beach hut on your own little plot of seafront had a bit more cachet: the crowds had gone to Spain, so the cool thing was to go back to the British seaside.' That coolness was confirmed when Tracey Emin sold her Whitstable hut to Charles Saatchi in 2000 for £75,000. Connections to in-vogue artists are certainly going to increase asking prices. However, location is the biggest factor. You can pick one up in Harwich for £17,000 while a hut in a prime Southwold position might cost £250,000. It also comes down to availability. 'It's a buyer's market at the moment, due to the number of beach huts for sale,' says Laura Simpson of Callaways Estate Agent, which sells huts in Hove. 'Last year was a very bad year for beach hut sales as the summer was quite wet. This year started off well with the warm weather coming early in April. 'When the weather is good, more people visit the beach, see the huts, see the people sitting outside their huts, decide they want one. We are helping to sell a lifestyle rather than the hut itself.' Getting the lifestyle for a fraction of the price However, you don't have to own a hut to partake of their simple charms. There are many available to rent by the day, week, month or season. For instance, Natural Enterprise, a charitable trust on the Isle of Wight, has built four huts as part of the Appley Tower renovation project. They cost from £35 a day to £1,575 for July–September rental and the income is used to help preserve the Gothic-style folly. Or you could spend a day living inside a picture postcard at Wells-next-the-Sea: a bolthole with balcony and deckchairs costs from £65 per day. Wales has some super spots. The National Trust rents out a row of 70 ice-cream-dreamy huts at Llanbedrog Beach on the Llŷn Peninsula for £450 for the May-September season – though applications must be made well in advance. Barry Island's bright-hued huts are a bargain: £23 a day in summer, £8 in winter. Hunkering down in an unheated hut in January might sound unappealing, but winter hire is a growing trend as staycationers seek cheaper prices, crowd-free coasts and access to cold-water swimming. has seen a 20 per cent rise in out-of-season bookings this year. Janet Gershlick lives in the Suffolk town of Southwold, home to some of the most famously photogenic beach huts in the country. She is fascinated by them. 'Each has a different name, each has a different story,' she says. Her book, Southwold: A Place to Love, records some of them. For instance, there's the hut called 'Floyd's Place', named for a boxer dog that used to skateboard along the promenade. There's 'All Mine', renamed after its owner won the hut in her divorce settlement. One of Janet's favourites is 'Woodlands', owned by the Chadds, whose ancestors have holidayed in Southwold since the 1890s and who built the hut in 1958. 'The family remembered the adventures they'd had – crabbing, playing cricket, eating shrimp teas, swimming, then hanging the woollen costumes up to dry,' Janet recalled. 'Now the children and the grandchildren come. And that's what I love – seeing families at the huts, enjoying themselves together.' Everything you need to know about beach huts What do people actually use them for? They're basically a cupboard you can sit in – used for storing surfboards, deckchairs and beach paraphernalia, plus people-watching, weather-sheltering and making tea. What's in them? Precious little. No running water, no toilet – owners have to use public loos and standpipes. Also, no electricity, though owners may rig lights to a battery pack or install gas stoves. Beyond that, expect space-saving solutions such as fold-out tables, storage benches and lots of hooks. Are there rules? Yes. Insurance is required, annual fees are usually imposed, regular maintenance may be required. 'Considering the annual costs, beach huts probably won't make money in the long term,' says estate agent Laura Simpson. Can you spend the night in them? Not usually. Most huts are leasehold, and landowners don't allow it. Freehold owners may be able to overnight, but restrictions can still apply. If sleeping is permitted, it's probably a beach chalet, not a hut. Can you use them year-round? Some huts are moved in winter to protect them from the elements. Others remain usable, with caveats: Becca Tremain, secretary of the Sutton-on-Sea Beach Hut Owners Association, remembers trying to use hers one Christmas: 'The door was swollen shut – we couldn't get in.' Can you decorate them? Some councils have strict guidelines on appearance and colours. But personalisation is often a big part of the appeal. 'Owners put a lot of love into them,' says Becca. Her own hut was a wreck when she bought it.
Arab News
21-07-2025
- Business
- Arab News
What We Are Reading Today: The History of Money
Author: David McWilliams In this eye-opening global history, economist David McWilliams charts the relationship between humans and money — from clay tablets in Mesopotamia to cryptocurrency in Silicon Valley. McWilliams shows that money is central to every aspect of our civilization, and from the political to the artistic. According to this book, money defines the relationship between worker and employer, buyer and seller, merchant and producer. It also defines the bond between the governed and the governor, and the state and the citizen. In this book, McWilliams takes the readers across the world, from the birthplace of money in ancient Babylon to the beginning of trade along the Silk Road.
New York Times
20-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Jean-Pierre Azéma, 87, Dies; Chronicled French Collaboration With Nazis
Jean-Pierre Azéma, a historian who became a leading chronicler of France's dark days of wartime compromise, helping lead a generation's shift in attitude about that period though he himself was the son of a notorious collaborator with the Nazis, died on July 14 in Paris. He was 87. His death, in a hospice, was announced by the university where he taught for more than 35 years, the Institut d'Études Politiques, popularly known as Sciences Po. With a series of dispassionate, carefully researched books beginning in the 1970s, Mr. Azéma became part of a group of younger historians who helped destroy the postwar myths that France had comforted itself with: that the collaborationist wartime Vichy regime had done what it could to resist the occupying Germans and to protect the French, and that its leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain, was essentially benevolent. Mr. Azéma was having none of it. 'A phony regime' is what he called Pétain's government in his best-known work, 'De Munich à la Libération, 1938-1944' (1979, and translated in 1984 as 'From Munich to the Liberation'). He condemned the government for its 'sententious moralism and anti-democratic élitism' and its 'defensive and inward-looking nationalism.' Vichy was 'basically authoritarian,' Mr. Azéma wrote, a careful judgment not then universally accepted. He became known for picking apart Vichy's various factions — from the believers in Pétain's cult to the opportunists, and from those who believed in the marshal's project of a 'National Revolution' to those who were pro-Nazi. In France, Mr. Azéma's book outsold even the groundbreaking work of his friend the Columbia historian Robert O. Paxton, 'Vichy France,' which Mr. Azéma's mother, Claude Bertrand, had translated into French six years before and which was the first to set off the revisionist tide. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
France 24
11-07-2025
- Politics
- France 24
Historian retraces 5,000 years of Indian history
11:06 From the show On Access Asia this week, we speak to historian Audrey Truschke, whose new book covers 5,000 years of history on the Subcontinent. She tells us how she remains committed to historical truth, saying: "I will not be swayed by modern politics, modern pressures, no matter how extreme they are." We also cover how Afghans have been left in limbo, with the latest deportation drive from Iran underway.
