So grammar schools are back on the agenda. Oh dear. Though I suppose it was only to be expected from the party now governing. So many of its members seem to be stuck in a haze of middle-class nostalgia for a golden age that never really was. And I suppose it does, in a way, mark a subtle rejection of last year’s Tories – the Eton rifles, the Bullingdon boys. 

The previous prime minister got to Oxford via Eton, and before that went to the same prep school as princes Andrew and Edward. Posh. 

Theresa May, famously and proudly, is not so posh. She too went to Oxford, but she got there by a route that was not so smoothed by family cash and privilege.

She went to a state primary followed – strangely, perhaps, for a vicar’s daughter – by a spell at a Catholic convent. But it’s her secondary schooling that’s really interesting.

At 13 she won a scholarship to Holton Park, a girls’ grammar school set in delightful grounds a few miles from Oxford. Just two years later, the school went comprehensive. In came the boys, and all the local kids who’d failed their 11-plus exams.

You can see that this might have been a shock – might even have seemed a disaster – to the nice grammar school girls. Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s surely relevant to May’s attitude now to selective schooling.

It's beside the point, but I rather like the fact that on its Wikipedia page the renamed Wheatley Park School lays claim to model Laura Bailey, actor Dominic Rowan, motorbiker Bradley Smith and the rock band Supergrass before it gets round to mentioning that the Prime Minister also went there.

As it happens, Theresa May and I were in the same school year. Like her, I went from a comprehensive school to a place at Oxbridge, which was rarer then than now. And like her I had some grammar school experience first – five years to her two.  Moving to a comprehensive for the sixth form was an escape.

The whole experience left me with a very different attitude than the one revealed by May. And though I don’t for a moment doubt her honesty and care on the subject, I think I can fairly claim to know something about it too.
My parents devoted much of their lives to the cause of comprehensive education - Dad as a headteacher, Mum chairing a large county education committee, both as school governors. They would have been dismayed by May's plan to turn back the clock.

May spoke on Friday about “a future in which Britain’s education system shifts decisively to support ordinary working-class families”. 

It’s a worthy ambition. And it’s certainly true that the post-war state grammar school system had some notable successes, including some fine writers, a number of my friends – and a quarter of May’s Cabinet. 

But what about those left behind, the ones rejected at 11 by the selection system? A system which - even if you approve of it in principle - was often little better than arbitrary.

May also said: “Every child should have access to a good school place.” Every child. Not just the bright ones, not just the ones whose parents have books around the house and read them bedtime stories.

The crux is that word “access”. She can’t mean everyone should go to the same good school. That would be comprehensive, not grammar. So she must be talking about opportunity. There’s another word for opportunity. Chance.

And if there are “good schools” to be aimed at, what does that say about all the others?

The school where I took my A-levels had been a secondary modern. Its very first sixth-formers were in the year above me. There were just a handful of them, but they had all got to Advanced Level after being written off at 11 as not grammar-school material. 

The old system had let them down. The school turning comprehensive gave them another chance. Another opportunity. Access to higher things.

None of that year made it to university – I was the first from the school to do that. But when I got to Cambridge I met students who didn’t have the brains or the work ethic some of those 11-plus failures had shown. What they had was family, cash, “good” schools – and, in so many cases, a totally unjustified belief in their own superiority.

One of the weirdest things about May's enthusiasm for grammar schools is that the Tories' own former Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, thinks it's weird. And there are reports that Justine Greening, who was appointed by May as Morgan's successor, is unhappy with it. Greening herself is comprehensive-educated.

All this, along with the timing of it, suggests the whole thing is little more than a bee in May's personal bonnet. 
I'm sure she's well intentioned, on this issue at least. I'm equally sure she's got it wrong.

The past, they say, is another country. But why must so much written history have national boundaries imposed upon it?

A glance along my bookshelves reveals such titles as The English, Elizabeth’s England, The Black Death in England, Gothic England, English Social History, The English Abbey, A History of English Architecture, The Earliest English, England in the Age of Thomas More, various volumes from a series called simply English History, and another entitled History of England.

Then there’s Britain BC, Blood of the British, British Prehistory, Britain in the Middle Ages, The Isles (you needn’t guess which isles are referred to) and, by way of slight variation, India Britannica.

That’s a selective sample, of course, but I think you’ll see a pattern emerging. And I’m no little-Englander.

If it’s true (and of course it is) that history is written by the winners, what do such titles tell you?

Not that it’s England, or Britain, that’s victorious in the world. I have other books bearing the names of Ireland, Russia, France, the USA, the Jews, the Roman Empire.

The real winner is simply the idea of the nation.

Not just this nation, but any nation. Any people associated with a particular piece of territory.

It’s a concept so deeply ingrained that most of us, nearly all the time, take it for granted. An idea we almost never question. But it is only an idea.

History doesn’t have to be defined along geographical or tribal lines. It just nearly always is.

The world hasn’t always been divided entirely into countries, with borders and frontier security. It just looks that way to us now.

It may be relatively easy for us in Britain, surrounded as we are by sea, to imagine our territory, and our nation, as fixed. But look at all those book titles with the words “England” or “English”. What place do the Scots, or the Welsh, have in that history? And what of Ireland, divided as it is between independence and subservience to its neighbour?

What about all those people who live in these islands but retain a strong link with a heritage elsewhere? Or those – vastly more numerous – who live in other lands but have British heritage? All those many millions Winston Churchill tried to scoop up in his History of the English Speaking Peoples.

On the mainland, of Europe or any other continent, the picture gets rapidly more blurred.

Consider that territory which over the past century has been Russian, German, Polish, Lithuanian, Russian again, German again, Soviet Russian and is now independent Lithuania. Today it’s a small country, but once it ruled part of what is now Poland, a large slab of what’s now Russia, and all of present-day Belarus and Ukraine.

Should any written history of Lithuania consider all the lands it once contained, or only the shrunken area it denotes now? Or should its focus keep widening and narrowing as it moves through the centuries?

Some of my ancestors grew up in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, considering themselves Russian, speaking Russian. The Nobel Prize-winning writer Czeslaw Milosz was raised there as a Pole, speaking Polish. Yet somehow the Lithuanian language survived and now flourishes, within its much reduced borders, along with a strong sense of Lithuanian identity.

The question is: Why?

The answers are many and complex. Some are no doubt beyond my understanding. But the question is still worth asking. Not just about Lithuania, or England, or Britain.

Why, when throughout history it has caused more wars, death and suffering than any other idea except maybe religion, do we cling to the idea of the nation? 

It’s a particularly pertinent question now when Europe, where the idea first took hold, is reverting to old nationalisms.

If the grand experiment of European union ends up collapsing in nationalist fragments, I shall take no pride in belonging to the nation that started the process.

Not that I ever thought national pride had much point to it. It’s not my fault that I was born in the country whose rulers once sold thousands of poor Irish into slavery. (Don’t believe it? Look it up.) And if I can’t accept blame for the sorriest episodes in my island’s history, I can hardly take credit for its various glories either.

What exactly is this nation of mine, anyway? My passport says (below the fated words “European Union”): “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”. It doesn’t specifically mention England, where I have lived all my life. Or Scotland, which I may choose to emigrate to should it sever its union with England to preserve its union with Europe.

The words on the inside cover are interesting too. It “requires” all other nations to let me “pass freely without let or hindrance” and give me “such assistance and protection as may be necessary”. 
​
I wonder if those good words will have to be repealed when Britain puts all its eggs in one Brexit.

Did you know the Duke of Wellington was still alive? It came as news to me. I don’t mean, of course, the chap who led the victorious British forces at the Battle of Waterloo. He died in 1852, a full 37 years after his finest hour and 22 years after his brief stint as one of Britain's worst prime ministers.

But the title that was given him a year before Waterloo lives on. It currently sits on the shoulders of the ninth duke, the inheritor also of the titles Prince of Waterloo, Duke of the Victory of the Kingdom of Portugal and Duke of Ciudad Rodrigo. He was born Earl of Mornington.

He went to Eton, married a Prussian princess (who knew there could be such a person, more than a century after the unification of Germany?) and had 10 years as a Tory MEP. The long list of company boards he’s sat on includes investment banks, insurance companies, tobacco firms Rothmans and Dunhill and the drinks company Pernod. First I’d heard of him was last week when he unveiled a memorial to his most famous ancestor’s most famous victory at the London railway station that bears its name.

The first Duke was still alive when Mrs Cecil Alexander wrote one of everyone’s favourite hymns, “All Things Bright and Beautiful”. If you know it, you may know the third verse. That’s the one which goes:

            “The rich man in his castle,
            “The poor man at his gate,
            “God made them high and lowly,
            “And ordered their estate.”

Hmm. Believe that if you will. My school hymnbook had an asterisk next to that ringing endorsement of inequality, giving permission for it to be “omitted”.

The ninth duke still lives at Stratfield Saye House, the stately home in Hampshire that was bought for his family in 1817 “by a grateful nation”. It’s not a castle in the fortified sense, but it’s certainly what the French would call a chateau. Very grand indeed.

These days the poor man is allowed past the gate – for a fee – to admire the building (well, parts of it), the grounds (ditto) and an exhibition devoted to the first duke’s grandeur.

Today’s Duke of Wellington, like all his eight predecessors, is the same sort of chap as the famed barons who – 800 years ago yesterday – forced King John to put his seal to the document that has gone down in history as Magna Carta.

The “big charter” is renowned as the original declaration of democracy, but it was never really that.

For one thing, the ancient Greeks had a truer democracy than anything Magna Carta laid down.

For another, it wasn’t about giving power to the people. Only about taking it away from the king and giving it to the rich landowners, who were hardly about to share it with the peasants and other workers.

There was a beautiful irony about the Queen taking part in Monday’s celebrations of the curtailing of royal power. A different kind of weirdness about a 13ft statue of her, in full royal regalia, being unveiled at Runnymede.

But perhaps the weirdest symbol of all of our clinging to the old codes is the honours system, which was wheeled out again at the weekend for its twice-yearly flag-wave. The Queen’s Birthday Honours List – though her actual birthday is in April.

Top of the list, at least as far as the media cared, were the knighthoods bestowed on singer Van Morrison, rugby-player Gareth Edwards and comedian Lenny Henry. They were among 30 new knights, most of whom you’ve never heard of and probably never will.

But what is a knight?

William Marshall, first Earl of Pembroke, whose name was at the very top of Magna Carta, is often considered to be the typical knight: a brilliant fighter on horseback, brave and powerful – and successful – in tournaments and on the battlefield; a man who raises an army to fight for the king; and sometimes gets to decide who’s going to be king.

I can just picture Van Morrison and Lenny Henry donning full metal armour and getting up on horseback to go jousting. My money’d be on Van the Man – until bold Sir Gareth entered the lists.

Among previous title recipients, imagine Sir Mick Jagger and Sir Paul McCartney riding into battle against the infidel hordes of the rebellious Middle East.

Tragic that John Lennon was snatched away before he could be offered a title. Would he have accepted? The man whose best known solo song includes the line “Imagine no possessions…”.

Most of the new knighthoods went of course, as ever, to top civil servants, bankers and businessmen. The sort of people who expect a K as the final rubberstamping of their career status.

One shocked headline at the weekend remarked on “A knighthood for services to the Tory party”, as if that was a surprise. Isn’t that what ennoblement has always been about – services to the ruling elite?

Other folk get lesser honours.

Like Will Pooley, the Suffolk nurse who went back to help Ebola sufferers in West Africa after recovering from the disease. To him an MBE – a patronising pat on the head for an ordinary Joe who did something extraordinary, something truly honourable.

All makes you proud to be British, doesn't it?

 

What’s the loudest noise anyone has ever heard?
It certainly wasn’t the gunshot that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. That is often described as “the shot heard round the world”, and in a sense it was. The non-literal sense, that is, that it kicked off a world war.
The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 was many, many times louder – though there have been many much bigger nuclear explosions since, mostly in tests by the USA or USSR.
It’s arguable that it changed the world even more than the Sarajevo assassination. It could equally be argued that without the earlier event the bomb would never have happened.
In so many ways we are still living in the world created by Gavrilo Princip’s trigger finger.
Things have consequences – chains of event mostly unforeseen.
But the loudest thing was almost certainly a natural occurrence, not any bang made by man.
It’s often said to have been the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa. The Indonesian island blew up in 1883, causing shock waves that were literally recorded around the world. The tsunami it unleased killed a reported 36,000 people. It’s been estimated at about 13,000 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb, and four times the biggest nuclear device ever detonated. It was a big bang.
But it wasn’t the biggest. And it didn’t have the most devastating consequences.
Just under 200 years ago – on April 10, 1815 – another island in the same Indonesian chain erupted.
The British statesman Stamford Raffles (famous later for founding London Zoo and the city of Singapore) heard it.
He reported: “The sky was overcast at noon-day with clouds of ashes. Showers of ashes covered the houses, the streets, and the fields to the depth of several inches. And amid this darkness explosions were heard at intervals, like the report of artillery or the noise of distant thunder.”
And he was over 700 miles away in Java.
The Tambora eruption killed 12,000 people immediately. But that was only the beginning.
It’s now known that it blew 160 cubic kilometres of rock and ash into the air. That’s more than six times the size of Krakatoa – and more than 1,000 times the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland that so disrupted air traffic in 2010.
The ash cloud released by Tambora didn’t just ground a few planes and make things dusty. It turned southern China’s summer to winter, wiping out the rice harvest and causing a massive famine.
By the time the weather returned to normal three years later, the economy of Yunnan province had switched from rice to poppies. Instead of feeding themselves directly, the farmers were now in the drugs trade. It was the start of China’s long association with opium.
Right across Europe and America 1816 was “the year without a summer”. Due, as no one at the time knew, to the Tambora eruption.
There were failed harvests and food riots. Famine from Ireland to Switzerland – whose closed-borders, “neutral” position in world affairs began then.
In India, the monsoon failed. The longest drought in the country’s history was eventually followed, in September 1816, by ruinous flooding. The devastation led in 1817 to the world’s worst cholera outbreak.
Genetic research now suggests that conditions in Bengal then enabled the mutation that led to the disease spreading around the world.
Among its further-flung results you could plot the great drive to western expansion in North America – and with it the near-annihilation of the Native Americans.
In Europe, cholera brought death and misery on a grand scale, especially in the big cities. In London it led eventually to the development of modern sewers and the building of the Thames embankments. And from that, you could argue, followed the creation of the underground railway.
A less obvious effect of Tambora’s disruption of global weather patterns occurred in the Arctic. The shifting of ocean currents melted the ice off western Canada, leading to the fabled hunt for the North-West Passage. A hunt doomed to failure because by 1818 the sea had re-frozen.
Climate-change deniers sometimes point to that temporary thaw as reason not to worry now about the melting ice-caps. “These things happen,” they say.
They might add that what humans foul up, nature can fix – or make worse.
But what is happening to the ice-cover now is on an altogether different scale from the 1816 thaw, on a different timespan, and for a different reason.
I’ve taken some of the details in this article from a book, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World, by Gillen D’Arcy Wood. Professor Wood concludes: “If a three-year climate change event in the early 1800s was capable of such destruction, then the future impacts of multi-decadal climate change must be truly off the charts.”
No one can say we haven’t been warned.
A recent cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winner Matt Davies in New York’s Newsday refers to a different volcanic eruption. A much smaller one than Tambora, longer ago, but still much better known.
“Employing sophisticated X-ray scanning technology,” it says, “scientists decipher the ancient burnt scrolls of Pompeii.” And the scrolls say: “The volcano is potentially a threat, but taking evasive action might harm the economy.”
Ouch.