arcadia (nicolson)

Nicholson is a restless writer, constantly seeking windmills to tilt his theories against. Arcadia takes the premise that the ancient English estates which were formed at the end of the Middle Ages and consolidated in Tudor times offered a vision of indentured Englishness which was collective, bucolic and aspirational, in spite of the fact these estates were autocratic and had little respect for individual freedoms. HIs wider theory is that within a social framework, the citizen has to accept compromises about the degree of liberty as opposed to the degree of security, whereas contemporary UK is a society that has chosen to value liberty above any great sense of security.

Nicholson’s focus is the Wiltshire estates of the Pembroke family, where Phillip Sidney wrote his great poem, Arcadia, (dedicated to his sister the Countess of Pembroke), and which inspired a sleepy, idyllic vision in the work of Aubrey, Browne and others. This was a nostalgic vision, one  with one foot in an idealised past and another in an inevitably compromised present. The book traces the way that the very power of these estates lead to the conflict with the king that produced the Civil War, but suggests that underneath this conflict was a more ideological struggle between a communal vision of Britain and an individualistic vision. HIs slightly heretical conclusion is that people had a better standard of living with less freedom than with more. When one thinks of the harsh rural world depicted by Hardy, where the labouring rural class had few rights and less security, a world which was in Nicholson’s view a direct result of the defeat of the more paternalistic, autocratic Tudor society, the logic of his argument is clear. There is even an ecological element to Nicholson’s argument, as the Tudor estates permitted smallholdings, whereas the subsequent break up of the copyholder system lead to the construction of vast farms owned by the few, driven by the need for profit as much as a requirement for sustainability. Nicholson’s writing tends to flourish when it is more comprehensively tied to the articulation of his theory and the latter half of the book tends to get lost in the detail of history. All the same this is a book that speaks of Britain past and Britain present with a degree of imaginative and intellectual verve which puts those phoney fogeys of the current government to shame.

“It was an organic ideal, a belief not in mutual exploitation but in the balance of different parts of society. To some extent, ever since, these have been the values of the counter-culture, an underlying thread of idealism which has run throughout the history of the modern world.”

the mighty dead - why homer matters (adam nicolson)

Nicolson’s book about Homer is compelling. The challenge is laid down by the title and the book, to my surprise, lived up to it. Nicolson’s remit is broad, from Keats to Simone Weil to Sinuhe, an ancient Egyptian writer. His speculation about the origin of Homer’s twin poems takes him from the Irish coast to Bahrain. The key theory that emerges from the book is a fascinatingly counter-intuitive one to our common understanding of what it means to be Greek. Rather than being the great seers of civilisation, Nicolson presents Homer’s Greeks as savage warrior people, emerging from the steppes of Central Asia. The Iliad charts their confrontation with the far more advanced civilisations of Asia Minor, which they both ransacked and stole from. The book’s historical range is vast, covering at least ten centuries, which clearly gives scope for a great deal of more speculative hypothesis. Still, it’s the very scale of the book which gives it weight. Nicolson is looking at history through a long lens, and through that lens we discern the ebb and flow of power as it has been exercised across the Mediterranean and Western seaboard of the Atlantic, over the course of thousands of years. Within this, Homer’s tales capture a more elemental version of our origin myth (the ‘our’ standing for all those peoples and civilisations locked into that geographical zone), and indeed, through Homer, Nicolson traces the conflicts which existed prior to the birth of the idea of Europe or classical civilisation, as we now understand it.

nb - The above was written a few weeks ago. It would be more than feasible to view the current war, initiated by Russia against Ukraine, within the terms of Nicolson’s Homer. Ukraine’s much lauded European values standing for the Trojans, against the more Philistine band of Russians, coming from the Eurasian steppe, who have no hesitation in raising cities in order to achieve predominance. This observation is offered in order to reaffirm that Nicolson’s innovative reading of the historical impulses which lead to the writing of the Iliad and the Odyssey feels persuasive, and it is one of the book’s great achievements to show how culture is a thread that binds across the centuries, how Homer was writing for a society so ancient that we don’t even really know where it existed, but he was also writing for every generation that came since in this place we call Europe, and beyond.