A book by its cover

The Nazis effected countless unconscionable evils during their tenure. One might, therefore, evaluate book-burning as a comparatively minor odious pastime. While this is an accurate description in absolute terms – burning books does not physically harm humans – symbolically, it is a far more sinister and destructive act than the facile throwing of combustibles onto hot coals might suggest.

The books selected for conflagration were those believed by the Nazis to be incompatible with their ideology, typically penned by Jews, communists and other undesirables. The intention was to eradicate all traces of the culture of these sub-humans in conjunction with the extermination of their bodily existence. The term ‘cultural genocide’ is therefore apposite.

Scanning my bookshelves this week, I pondered which of my beloved publications could be judged sufficiently subversive to be burned or, at the very least, commandeered for evidence of my nonconformity with 21st-century sanctimonious groupthink. I treasure my volumes by or about Nigel Biggar, David Starkey, Enoch Powell, Margaret Thatcher, Rudyard Kipling, Roger Scruton, John Locke, Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner. They sit comfortably alongside Michael Kenny, Austin Mitchell, Dieter Helm, Sathnam Sanghera, Karl Marx, Doreen Massey and Guy Shrubsole. 

An eclectic library is more cerebrally stimulating than one amassed to reinforce entrenched convictions. Furthermore, it is testimony to a mind that has, especially at my time of life, critically and thoroughly, not precipitously, dismissed one set of discourses in favour of competing dialectics, by way of astute assessment that finds the dismissed set to be fallacious. Because of my diligence, episodic doubt or disillusionment at the behest of a seemingly compelling counterargument is more likely to lead to a refinement in a ‘baroque’ belief system than to a demoralised volte-face towards unidimensional conformity. Groupthinkers could thus deem a balanced library to be a greater threat to their jaded world order than a homogenous one.

I could dip into any tome of the aforementioned writers to pursue this commentary further. Instead, it is to an historical novel – one that is itself historical – to which I will turn shortly. I brought home most of Mum and Dad’s books while clearing their bungalow. To accommodate them all, I had to doublestack my bookshelves and find innovative places in every room to stash one or two here, three or four there, until they all had a home. I discarded very few: one or two, maybe three or four, found their way to the charity shop, including those that were duplications, in dreadful condition, or those I deemed to be aberrational purchases or misguided birthday gifts. Anything that looked reasonably old I examined more carefully. I decided that many of these were not purchased by Dad in second-hand book shops during his lifetime, but must have been owned by his father, if not his grandfather who died prematurely in 1922 of quinsy and septic pneumonia.

One such book is by William Harrison Ainsworth who died in 1882, when my great-grandfather was just nine years old. Ainsworth was a lawyer and a publisher before he picked up his creative quill. He wrote 39 historical novels and was a contemporary of Charles Dickens, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Thomas Carlyle, James Hogg and William Makepeace Thackeray. Very popular during his lifetime, Ainsworth rapidly disappeared from public consciousness after his death. American critic E.F. Bleiler professed, "All in all, Ainsworth was not a great writer – his contemporaries included men and women who did things better – but he was a clean stylist and his work can be entertaining".

I am the proud beneficiary of two of Ainsworth’s novels: The Tower of London and Old Saint Paul’s. The former captivated me as soon as I opened the front cover. Glued on the top left-hand corner is a tiny label that reads: “R. Burlington ** Booksellers ** Whitehaven”. Whitehaven is the town where Sis and I were born, Dad was born, and to where his grandfather relocated his wife (Granny Ada) and two children in 1907, from Somerset, in search of a better paid positions as a church organist and professor of music. A brief trawl of the internet revealed that Burlington’s used to be sited at 37 King Street. In 1928, Mr Burlington laid claim to own the oldest extant business in the town. Today my grandfather’s former music shop, which he founded in 1922 (the year his father died) on Duke Street, can lay claim to that crown!

The Tower of London charts the coronation of Lady Jane Grey in 1554, her dethronement nine days later and subsequent execution. The architecture, clothing, cuisine and antics are vividly yet reverently illustrated. The shifting duplicities are riveting. The ignominious existence of ordinary Londoners is pungent; the succession of executions of the wealthier is alarming; together they expunge the contemporary insular myth of white privilege.

It dawns on me that Ainsworth – the long-deceased raconteur of entertaining yarns – should be transposed from my ‘innocent fiction’ shelves to join the ‘deliciously seditious’ Starkey, Kipling, Powell … and Orwell. Apposite, because Ainsworth – in his subject matter (British history), ethos (deferential), writing style (erudite) and audience (aspirational) – is as anathematic to ‘Guardianistas’ as Emmanuel Goldstein is to Big Brother in 1984. Enemy-of-the-state Goldstein is used as a scapegoat by The Party to justify the permanent suspension of civil rights. Such an approach is blatant and brutal. The favoured tactics employed by the latter-day echo chambered are more subtle, yet they still impinge on the rights of others. A slippery slope. Therefore, in their symbolic way, these tactics are to authoritarianism what book-burning is to genocide.

One example is writers and artists boycotting cultural festivals because they object to the perceived values of the venue, sponsor or of other participants. It has been argued that boycotts are acceptable because the activists are exercising their freedom of expression and choice. A counterargument is that boycotts are bodily expressions of intolerance, of sanctimonious groupthink and, by limiting attendance at events or even forcing cancellations, the activists are stifling artistic expression and silencing culture. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy described the practice as “self-defeating virtue signalling” that risks gagging society. The congruence with the opening paragraphs of this essay is stark: the aim of Nazi book-burning was to eradicate all traces of cultures that were incompatible with their ideology.

Paradoxically, those who would silence culture allege fascism in others: Robinson, Farage, Trump, Musk, Meloni, Me. Then again, just as Dorian Gray clings to his superficial prettiness while his bewitched portrait doggedly reminds him of his increasingly wretched character, so do the activists and their devotees raucously claim moral superiority while Banquo’s ghost looks on.