Photograph: ullstein bild Dtl./ullstein bild/Getty Images I particularly enjoyed a fascinating essay called The Life and Death of Colonel General Blaskowitz, with its deliberate echo of Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.Ĭolonel General Blaskowitz. Germany features throughout the succeeding essays, not least because it forms the area of Clark’s expertise. Power, then, is as much consented to as claimed, though of course that consent is often “given” from a position of weakness. Even in Hitler’s Germany, Clark reminds us, citing Robert Gellately’s work, acquiescence and consent played a more significant role in shaping popular support than the terroristic side of nazism. Yet power, even so-called absolute power, is seldom a straightforward matter of maximum coercion resulting in a desired outcome. As Clark notes: “Power is at once the most ubiquitous and most elusive theme of historical writing.”

“The habit of imagining history as a succession of empires has been hard to shake.” And it’s a habit that in its era-defining clarity promotes a picture of the struggle for power that obscures its complex nature. Until the modern era, that was the conventional means of delineating the march of time, a tendency that was only slightly amended by Hegel’s notion of historical progress.Įven today, having emerged from what Henry Luce called the “American century”, there is much talk of China’s assumption of the mantle of world power. The story is both a fable of power and, as Clark explains, the beginning of the understanding of history as a foreordained “sequence of hegemonies”. As Clark notes: 'Power is at once the most ubiquitous and most elusive theme of historical writing' It begins with the Book of Daniel and the king of the neo-Babylonian empire’s disturbing dream, which the imprisoned Daniel interprets as a prophecy, thus rendering the grateful king his worshipful servant. The long opening essay, entitled The Dream of Nebuchadnezzar, is a bravura exploration of the role of political power in history.

The sleepwalkers by christopher clark