Neal Ascherson

‘All history is the history of unintended consequences, but that is especially true when we are trying to untangle humanity’s relationship with the natural environment,’ David Blackbourn writes, in this magnificently compelling, vivid and often pioneering book. Its subject is Germany’s struggle to subjugate its landscape, above all its waters, over the last 250 years. But its implications apply to the contemporary world, to the gigantic struggles over the future of Amazonia or the Yangtze basin as much as to penitent thinking about what ‘development’ has done to the lands of the Danube, Dnieper or Rhone.

As soon as you realise how good it is, this book will frighten you. This is not just a history. It is a highly intrusive biography, especially if, like me, you belong to the British generations who were children before and during the war. When we were learning to read, Europe was a dark word, an inaccessible ‘over there’ place of suffering and menace. But as we grew up and the war...

His son goes on to revive some of Claud’s maxims about journalism, and to update them against his own experience. ‘All stories are written backwards,’ he once observed. ‘They are supposed to begin with the facts and develop from there, but in reality they begin with a journalist’s point of view from which the facts are subsequently organised.’ Patrick takes this disrespect even further. Reporters, he finds, ‘are ill-equipped to extract information which others do not want to impart’. Most great stories - Watergate, for instance - arise from deliberate leaks rather than from fearless investigation. ‘A journalist might like to be a spy but generally ends up as a conduit for information.’ True enough. I remember how in Warsaw the great German journalist Ludwig Zimmerer told his apprentice Chris Bobinski: ‘My boy, in this job you must learn to let your head be used as a latrine!’

Revolution is a staircase. In February 1848, the poet Lamartine found himself in charge of a Paris revolution, from an upper floor in the Hôtel de Ville. He identified on the staircase something as specific as a tornado: a roaring double helix formed of those fighting their way upwards and those pressing downwards. It appears whenever a society mutinies and decides to make a new world. I...

“The real abyss separating Deutscher from modern historiography is a moral one. An average British history graduate today will have been taught to evaluate revolutions on a simple humanitarian scale. Did they kill a lot of people? Then they were bad. Showing that some of those killed were even more bloodthirsty than their killers is no extenuation . . . Isaac Deutscher saw history differently. His standards are not those of Amnesty International. Instead, he measures everything against the cause of the Revolution. The Trotsky trilogy has a spinal column of moral argument running through it which can be reduced to this question: did this or that course or idea help to fulfil the Revolution, or divert it from its true purpose?”