Welsh Journals

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF DEREK BEALES. Edited by T. C. W. Blanning and David Cannadine. Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. ix, 298. £ 35.00. 'Always the most presumptuous of the arts', in Sir George Clark's phrase, biography has often been trivialized or abused. And as the editors of this volume remark, 'few historians today trouble themselves with large-scale, full-dress biographies'. One who does, however, is Derek Beales. History and Biography, his Cambridge inaugural lecture of 1980 which is reprinted here, pleaded for a biographical approach to redress academic historians' excessive concern with impersonal structures and trends; and alongside that lecture now stand twelve papers by his friends, colleagues and former students exploring aspects of that dual subject. Though they range from the mid- eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century and from Europe to North America, their main emphasis falls on Britain, Italy and Austria-Hungary-the areas which Beales in his teaching and writing has made especially his own. At least two broad themes emerge from the collection. One, which is perhaps the more fundamental, concerns the quality and quantity of biographical source material. A biographer must ask how a particular manuscript came into being, as John Brewer does of John Marsh's 'History of My Private Life', part Georgian comedy of manners and part Christian morality tale. One must be critically alert to tainted sources, as Denis Mack Smith shows from numerous Italian examples, and as Beales himself demonstrated in his first article on Joseph II. And a writer must keep a sense of proportion, as Tony Badger argues from the case of Roosevelt and the New Deal, not allowing the plethora of papers amassed by some modern statesmen to obscure his view of the broader social impact of policy. The most valuable sources are those which enable an author to 'get inside the mind of his subject' while at the same time opening up a wider scene. Thus, P. G. M. Dickson uses three memorials drawn up in the 1750s by Austrian elder statesman, Bartenstein, to throw light on the defects and unpopularity of Haugwitz's reform of the Habsburg administrative system in 1748-9. From a later age of reform, culminating in the Revolutions of 1848, R. J. W. Evans draws skilfully on the voluminous (and multilingual) diaries of Count Istvan Szechenyi to portray the intellectual milieu of this Hungarian patriot who nevertheless remained loyal to the idea of 'a united Austrian state' (p. 140). And in a piece which nicely catches the informality of a spoken lecture, Owen Chadwick graphically recounts the breakdown of the Rome-Berlin Axis in 1943 from the 'down to earth, unbuttoned' letters of Alfieri and Bastianini, respectively Mussolini's ambassador in Berlin and the last of his foreign secretaries.