New Zealand Listener - May 26, 2018

48 LISTENER MAY 26 2018

BOOKS&CULTURE

by NICHOLAS REID

T

here’s one thing that even the

best-educated Englishmen are

unable to do. It is to write or

speak of France and the French

without at some stage sneering or

becoming patronising.

Personally, I blame that Bill Shakespeare

chap. Ever since he wrote his historically

dodgy play Henry V, Englishmen have

harboured the delusion they have always

prevailed over the French. They remember

Harry winning Agincourt and the Black

Prince winning Crécy, but conveniently

forget that it was the French who won the

Hundred Years’ War and not merely some

of its battles.

Bravo, then, to John Julius Norwich,

son of the statesman and ambassador to

France, Duff Cooper, for being an excep-

tion. He is an Englishman who is 100%

Francophile. Now 88, this prolific and

popular historian says France: A History

from Gaul to de Gaulle will “almost cer-

tainly be the last book that I shall write”.

Norwich tells many anecdotes, starting

from earliest childhood, to demonstrate

his privileged view of France, recounting

holidays in Provence and sharing a meal

with Charles de Gaulle.

As he says in his preface, this is not a

book of original research and historians

“will find nothing in it that they do not

know already”. True. This is a chatty

narrative history, concentrating on lead-

ing figures (kings, generals, presidents,

cardinals), national politics, international

entanglements and, especially, wars both

foreign and domestic, including revolu-

tions. Social analysis be damned.

It is surprising that Norwich boldly

declares, two pages from the end of his

360-page tome, that “France has made

a contribution to European culture

greater than that of any other nation.”

by PETER CALDER

I

n the final chapter of this highly

entertaining history of the human

search for technological exactitude,

Simon Winchester visits the

headquarters of Seiko, whose commercial

quartz wristwatches made precise personal

timekeeping affordable.

He ruminates ruefully about the Japa-

nese concept of wabi-sabi, an aesthetic

sensibility that values

craftsmanship, “rough-

ness and impermanence”.

Might there be, he finds

himself wondering,

“simply too much preci-

sion” in the world?

The Seiko visit serves to

assuage his misgivings a

little. The quartz revolu-

tion decimated sales of

mechanical watches, so

Seiko stopped producing

the latter in 1978. But the

Japanese “lingering love

affair” with craftsman-

ship prompted a rethink.

Today, the electronic side of the plant

pumps out 25,000 quartz watches a day;

two-dozen watchmakers create barely 100

of the old-fashioned kind. And that side of

the operation is doing just fine.

It’s a sweet note on which to conclude

Exactly: How Precision

Engineers Created the

Modern World, which

takes us from the steam

age to the space age

and beyond: in 2015,

laser interferometers

detected the gravitational

waves Einstein had

predicted almost a

century earlier, and can

measure distances as far

as 26 trillion miles with

a margin of error of the

width of a human hair.

Winchester is a master

at plucking stories from

the pages of history and breathing life into

them. After two enthralling books about

the creation of the Oxford English Diction-

ary, he has turned his attention since to

such diverse subjects as the 1883 erup-

tion of Krakatoa and the real Alice (the

The Gaul of

that man

Englishman John

Julius Norwich’s racy,

action-packed history

of France.

The quest for

perfection

Simon Winchester’s

engrossing history of

precision machinery.

ALAMY; GETTY IMAGES

Simon Winchester: breathing life

into history.