Nato, which could get us willy-nilly into
a catastrophic war. But the Nato trea-
ty is not mandatory. It calls on each of its
members to come to the common defence
by taking ‘such action as it deems neces-
sary, including the use of armed force’. It
thus leaves them with full national discre-
tion: the Americans would have agreed to
nothing else.
The Treaty of Rome is different. It does
indeed transfer some national decisions to
the collective in Brussels. Lord Kilmuir, Mac-millan’s cabinet colleague, warned against
taking ‘the first step on the road which leads
by way of confederation to the fully federal
state’. In parliament the issue was raised on
all sides, as it has been ever since. The leader
of the opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, warned
against abandoning 1,000 years of history
to become a mere province of Europe. Mac-
millan countered that the fears were exag-
gerated. Whatever their rhetoric, the French
would never go beyond what their president,
General de Gaulle, called ‘l’Europe des
patries’. ‘Europe’ would never become a true
federation. That too was a plausible argu-
ment: it carried the day for the time being.
The membership negotiations seemed to
be reaching success when the Cuban missile
crisis erupted in October 1962 (Hennessy’s
retelling of the story is terrifying). In the
aftermath, Macmillan negotiated with Presi-
dent Kennedy an arrangement to put Ameri-Failure of the grand design
Rodric Braithwaite
Winds of Change:
Britain in the Early Sixties
by Peter Hennessy
Allen Lane, £30, pp. 573
Peter Hennessy is a national treasure. He is
driven by a romantic, almost sensual, fasci-
nation with British history, culture, and the
quirky intricacies of British democracy and
the government machine. His curiosity is
insatiable, his memory infinitely capacious.
His innumerable contacts confide in him
freely because his discretion is absolute. His
tireless work in the archives is spectacularly
productive. His generosity towards his stu-
dents is boundless. His books — 14 at the
last count — are gossipy, erudite, discursive,
intensely personal: not your conventional
academic history, but all the better for that.
His latest book — the third in a history
of post-war Britain — ranges over the early
1960s. For most of that time the prime min-
ister was Harold Macmillan, thoughtful,
Even Macmillan’s opponents could
not forgive De Gaulle for jilting
Britain at the church doorsis of Hamlet reminds us that we all have our
backstories, our heartaches, and (mostly) our
own good reasons for the actions we choose.
His inclusion of Cide Hamete Benengeli,
the Moor thought to have been the inspira-
tion for Don Quixote, suggests that even in
times of great fracture between world views
we might still find the value of the Other.
And his short exploration of Satan as a lit-
erary and metaphysical figure could be held
up alongside Elaine Pagels’s seminal book-
length study, The Origin of Satan (‘We resort
to Satan’, says Manguel, ‘to try to understand
the infamous events that plague us daily, now
and always’).
One of the longest pieces is an extended
fable centred on the prophet Jonah and the
relation between art and life and truth. Man-
guel casts much of the story of Jonah’s call-
ing to bring God’s revelation to Nineveh as
part of a larger conflict between politicians
and artists. The city’s representatives, sus-
picious of artists, hoped to wear them out,
to get them to work against themselves, to
accept wealth and fame as the great human
achievements. Manguel has Jonah standing
up and promoting the importance of the art-
ist as truth-teller, and this essay has a trans-
cendent literary power of its own.
Ultimately, the joy of Fabulous Monsters
is its forceful argument that these figures
may help us better understand our own real-
ity. Perhaps we won’t agree on the characters
of Trump or Prince MBS; but it still might
be possible to reverse-engineer our human
insights and remind ourselves of some truths
about the good life and the unworthy life. We
are not so far gone, Manguel suggests, that
we can’t read ourselves back to sanity.
politically astute, driven by a sense of public
service. Macmillan had restored confidence
to a country demoralised by the bungled
Anglo-French invasion of Suez in 1956. Now
he set out to modernise the economy and the
machinery of government, and to accelerate
an orderly dismantling of empire.
But he was also seeking to solve an even
tougher conundrum. With the shift of power
from Europe to America and to a threat-
ening Soviet Union, Britain, as the former
American secretary of state Dean Acheson
said cruelly but accurately, had lost an empire
but failed to find a role. Macmillan’s solution
was to get Britain into what was then called
the European Community. He failed for rea-
sons that remain entirely relevant.
He spent Christmas 1960 in bed, draft-
ing what he called his ‘Grand Design’. Brit-
ain, he concluded, still had powerful cards
to play: its Commonwealth associations, its
relationship with America, and its independ-
ent nuclear force. But its economic future
and its international influence could best,
perhaps only, be secured by membership of
the Community. There was a moral dimen-
sion too. Europe had pulled itself to pieces
twice in a generation. The Community was
a device to prevent that ever happening
again. Since we could not beat them, we
could only join them.
These are still plausible arguments.
But Macmillan knew that Britain would
have to make difficult adjustments. Some
were essentially transitional: agriculture
and the Commonwealth. One was fun-
damental: the issue of sovereignty. Hen-
nessy argues that we had already made
a greater surrender of sovereignty toMacmillan welcomes JFK to Britain in June 1963.The arrangement they negotiated after the
Cuban missile crisis convinced De Gaulle that Britain would always look first to AmericaALAMY STOCK PHOTO