The Best of Brit Lit

A look at great reads from the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. This week: Maggie Thatcher’s concerns over German reunification and diplomatic etiquette for the digital age.

Thatcher’s German Worries

Margaret Thatcher has already admitted in her memoirs that her policy on German reunification was an “unambiguous failure.” Twenty years ago, although she had begun by welcoming the democratic revolution in East Germany, she was alarmed by the possibility of German reunification that suddenly became very real in the weeks that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. She believed Germany's “national character,” as well as its size and position in the center of Europe, made it an inherently “destabilizing rather than a stabilizing force in Europe.” This week the TLS is reviewing various books published to mark the events of November 9, 1989, including Documents in British Policy Overseas, Series III, Volume VII: German Reunification 1989-1990, the Foreign Office documents that set out for the first time in full the prime minister's dilemma.

Satow’s Diplomatic Practice. Edited by Ivor Roberts. 792 pages. Oxford University Press. $220. Diplomatic Etiquette, Updated

British diplomats were mostly, but not wholly, opposed to Mrs. Thatcher on that occasion—just as they were to Tony Blair in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003. Sir Jeremy Greenstock was U.K. ambassador to the U.N. in New York during that period and has been prevented so far from publishing his own book of praise and blame for Blair, Bush, and Saddam. This week he considers the new Oxford edition of Satow's Diplomatic Practice, edited by Sir Ivor Roberts, a traditional guide to how to behave at European royal courts, but also a "treasure" for separating the calls of "duty from stupidity" and understanding how matters of peace and war ought to be handled by men of reason.

The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Edited by Dinah Birch. 1216 pages. Oxford University Press. $125. Oxford English

We now have the seventh edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, which, since it first appeared in 1932, has been a hugely popular work of literary reference. Who and what is fresh in the new edition edited by Dinah Birch? Perusing the Hs, Henry Hitchens finds for the first time Mark Haddon, whose novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is “a remarkable tour de force”; hagiography, a term “often now used to condemn uncritical biography”; the Harlem Renaissance; Ben Hecht; His Dark Materials, which, we are ambiguously told, “has attracted many enthusiastic readers”; Alfred Hitchcock, whose entry mentions only four of his films by name (The Lodger, Blackmail, Rebecca, and Vertigo); Khaled Hosseini; Michel Houellebecq; and the “virtually unreadable” Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

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Peter Stothard is editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He was editor of The Times of London from 1992-2002.  He writes about ancient and modern literature and is the author of Thirty Days, a Downing Street diary of his time with British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the Iraq war.

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