Here is my review of a “history” book that appeared, in modified form, in the Sunday Telegraph magazine yesterday. Here is the unexpurgated version.
The Secret History of the World by Jonathan Black, Quercus £25
by Damian Thompson
The Secret History of the World is, by a comfortable margin, the worst book I have ever reviewed. It’s not just badly written, sloppily edited and full of egregious errors of fact, though it is all of these. The book is morally deplorable. “Jonathan Black” is the nom de plume of Mark Booth, head of Century, an imprint of Random House. For many years, Booth has commissioned titles built around bogus history and conspiracy theories. Not content with this, he has now written a “history” of civilisation that repeats the wildest claims of his authors and throws in some nasty ones of his own, such as the slur that Pope John Paul II was a secret adept of an esoteric cult. Worse, the whole thing is artfully packaged by Quercus, a fashionable new imprint, to look like a serious intellectual enterprise, thus further poisoning the public domain with pseudohistory.
The purpose of the book, says Booth, is to “show that the basic facts of history can be interpreted in a way which is almost completely the opposite of the way we normally understand them”. Well, he has certainly achieved that much. We understand history by evaluating the evidence that distinguishes facts from fantasy. Booth dispenses with this tiresomely constricting methodology.
“Is the Pope Catholic?” he asks. “Well, not in the straightforward way you might think.” He then informs us that Karol Wojtyla was “initiated into the spirit realm under the aegis of a secret society” of which his Rosicrucian mentor, “Mieczlaw Kotlorezyk”, was a master. And there we have Booth in a nutshell: (a) he obviously wrote this paragraph when John Paul II was still alive and hasn’t got round to updating it; (b) he misspells both names of the theatre director Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk ; (c) Kotlarczyk wasn’t a Rosicrucian; (d) we are offered no evidence that Wojtlya was a member of secret society – there isn’t a footnote in the whole book.
Booth’s thesis, if you can dignify it thus, is a mixture of conspiracy theory and warmed-up Theosophy. Zoroaster, Imhotep, Jesus, the Knights Templar, Dante, Joan of Arc, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Milton, Newton, Beethoven, Tolstoy, Gandhi – all were initiates into the occult secrets of the universe. Towards the end of the book Booth gets very excited about Freemasons. He sees their hand everywhere, not least in the French Revolutionary Terror, led by Robespierre “the most principled of Freemasons”. Actually, Robespierre wasn’t a Freemason, but Booth isn’t one to let trifling details stand in the way of his “secret history”.
The book ends with a conceited bibliographical essay. I liked this bit: “Beethoven spoke of the Appassionata as his most esoteric work but for me it is his last piano sonata, no. 31 in A flat major Opus 110, in the course of which, suddenly he jumps forward to the music of a hundred years later the prophesied jazz.” Ye gods, where do we start? Beethoven didn’t describe the Appassionata as esoteric; the passage in question does not prophesy jazz; although it does occur in the last piano sonata, that work is no. 32 in C minor Opus 111. And shouldn’t a professional editor be able to punctuate?
The rest of the essay is taken up with plugging the pseudohistorians that Booth has commissioned or edited. I have met some of his authors, and they are sad creatures who genuinely seem to believe that the apocalyptic fantasies of the first-century Jewish Book of Enoch contain coded references to the 10,000 year-old megalithic monuments of northern Scotland, which are actually time machines whose secrets have been preserved by Freemasons. That’s a real example, by the way: Uriel’s Machine: The Prehistoric Technology that Survived the Flood, written by a pair of boobies called Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas and published by Mark Booth at Century.
Booth himself is a graduate of Oxford University, as he points out several times; one wonders what his history tutors would make of his subsequent career. I’m not sure myself. On the one hand, there is a stench of cynicism about the willingness of Random House and other big publishing houses to sell what I call counterknowledge – fiction masquerading as fact. On the other, The Secret History of the World does leave the reader feeling trapped in the corner of a room by a nutter, so perhaps “Jonathan Black” believes his own bullshit. But let me suggest the name of one person who doesn’t believe it: Anthony Cheetham, Eton- and Balliol-educated former CEO of Orion Books and also a proper historian in his own right. Cheetham is the founder of Quercus, which he intends to turn into Britain’s most influential independent publisher by the end of the decade. Is this how he intends to do it?
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Sounds like just another opinion really, wrapped in a bit of ego. The language here clearly depicts to me a person who represents most of the population: Not really interested in truth, but what confirms his prejudice. Just an observation, but not definitely not someone who I would rely on for truth. Anyone who uses the term ‘Conspiracy theory’ is almost ALWAYS using it as a way to automatically dismiss the information as false, because they automatically don’t think it ’sounds’ true, often resorting in a ‘he’s crazy and I’m sound’ argument to finish it off.
Dear Damian Thompson,
I’ve read your review of Mark Booth’s “The Secret History of the World.” Although I am keen on such subjects, I must say I enjoyed your take on it. Such inconsistency is a good sign: Aristotle invented the rule of non-contradiction, but never meant it to be an unbreakable, universal law.
I enjoyed your wit and the many good points you made. Yes, the book if full of imprecisions, and a more level-headed, let alone informed, approach would have been preferable. Among contemporary writers, Rupert Sheldrake and Joscelyn Godwin, to name only two, offer far more researched and plausible books. The latter, in particular, claims to be an agnostic spiritualist.
But the fact remains that there is more that meets the eye. I suspect that someone like you a thousand years ago would have debunked the existence of microorganisms and other galaxies simply because his naked eye could not see them. The invention of the microscope and the telescope has shown otherwise.
In the field of esotericism, you may enjoy reading the works of the immensely well-read and scholarly authors Julius Evola and Ernst Jünger. Not everybody’s cup of tea, but convincing in a rather alarming way in challenging one’s assumptions.
Having said that, I have enjoyed your review a great deal.
Antoine-Pierre de Bavier
Here is my review of a “history” book that appeared, in modified form, in the Sunday Telegraph magazine yesterday. Here is the unexpurgated version.
The Secret History of the World by Jonathan Black, Quercus £25
by Damian Thompson
The Secret History of the World is, by a comfortable margin, the worst book I have ever reviewed. It’s not just badly written, sloppily edited and full of egregious errors of fact, though it is all of these. The book is morally deplorable. “Jonathan Black” is the nom de plume of Mark Booth, head of Century, an imprint of Random House. For many years, Booth has commissioned titles built around bogus history and conspiracy theories. Not content with this, he has now written a “history” of civilisation that repeats the wildest claims of his authors and throws in some nasty ones of his own, such as the slur that Pope John Paul II was a secret adept of an esoteric cult. Worse, the whole thing is artfully packaged by Quercus, a fashionable new imprint, to look like a serious intellectual enterprise, thus further poisoning the public domain with pseudohistory.
The purpose of the book, says Booth, is to “show that the basic facts of history can be interpreted in a way which is almost completely the opposite of the way we normally understand them”. Well, he has certainly achieved that much. We understand history by evaluating the evidence that distinguishes facts from fantasy. Booth dispenses with this tiresomely constricting methodology.
“Is the Pope Catholic?” he asks. “Well, not in the straightforward way you might think.” He then informs us that Karol Wojtyla was “initiated into the spirit realm under the aegis of a secret society” of which his Rosicrucian mentor, “Mieczlaw Kotlorezyk”, was a master. And there we have Booth in a nutshell: (a) he obviously wrote this paragraph when John Paul II was still alive and hasn’t got round to updating it; (b) he misspells both names of the theatre director Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk ; (c) Kotlarczyk wasn’t a Rosicrucian; (d) we are offered no evidence that Wojtlya was a member of secret society – there isn’t a footnote in the whole book.
Booth’s thesis, if you can dignify it thus, is a mixture of conspiracy theory and warmed-up Theosophy. Zoroaster, Imhotep, Jesus, the Knights Templar, Dante, Joan of Arc, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Milton, Newton, Beethoven, Tolstoy, Gandhi – all were initiates into the occult secrets of the universe. Towards the end of the book Booth gets very excited about Freemasons. He sees their hand everywhere, not least in the French Revolutionary Terror, led by Robespierre “the most principled of Freemasons”. Actually, Robespierre wasn’t a Freemason, but Booth isn’t one to let trifling details stand in the way of his “secret history”.
The book ends with a conceited bibliographical essay. I liked this bit: “Beethoven spoke of the Appassionata as his most esoteric work but for me it is his last piano sonata, no. 31 in A flat major Opus 110, in the course of which, suddenly he jumps forward to the music of a hundred years later the prophesied jazz.” Ye gods, where do we start? Beethoven didn’t describe the Appassionata as esoteric; the passage in question does not prophesy jazz; although it does occur in the last piano sonata, that work is no. 32 in C minor Opus 111. And shouldn’t a professional editor be able to punctuate?
The rest of the essay is taken up with plugging the pseudohistorians that Booth has commissioned or edited. I have met some of his authors, and they are sad creatures who genuinely seem to believe that the apocalyptic fantasies of the first-century Jewish Book of Enoch contain coded references to the 10,000 year-old megalithic monuments of northern Scotland, which are actually time machines whose secrets have been preserved by Freemasons. That’s a real example, by the way: Uriel’s Machine: The Prehistoric Technology that Survived the Flood, written by a pair of boobies called Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas and published by Mark Booth at Century.
Booth himself is a graduate of Oxford University, as he points out several times; one wonders what his history tutors would make of his subsequent career. I’m not sure myself. On the one hand, there is a stench of cynicism about the willingness of Random House and other big publishing houses to sell what I call counterknowledge – fiction masquerading as fact. On the other, The Secret History of the World does leave the reader feeling trapped in the corner of a room by a nutter, so perhaps “Jonathan Black” believes his own bullshit. But let me suggest the name of one person who doesn’t believe it: Anthony Cheetham, Eton- and Balliol-educated former CEO of Orion Books and also a proper historian in his own right. Cheetham is the founder of Quercus, which he intends to turn into Britain’s most influential independent publisher by the end of the decade. Is this how he intends to do it?
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