Jonathan Dimbleby

Comment from Russian perspective

Let me comment on it from Russian perspective: I think it is an exceptionally good book on the matter. One can only wonder where does this vitriol of the reviewers seep from?
First, to me the book feels absolutely objective. I unlike other foreign reviewers haven’t sensed any bad feelings toward my country and its people or at least the ones that significantly affects his ability to perceive reality objectively and I was never offended. I had a luxury of show more traveling to many same destinations the author visited (even that bar in Murmansk) and thus know what I am speaking. The vastness of the country is nicely captured in his strategically placed visits to its most nodal and/or characteristic points.

Yes, he confesses his downbeat emotional state at times, but it’s Ok. We’re all humans. What is important is that his emotional state does not influence the speakers he interviews. And the speakers…you may not like their opinions, but they speak what they think. And there’s a great array of opinions, just like it is in reality in Russia. His interlocutors are Stalinists, yuppies, dissidents, common folks or in general from all walks of life and layers of Russian societies. I heard those opinions thousands of times and can confirm their genuineness. They are all grounded in reality unlike Orlando Figes’s stretching, wishful thinking and outright fraud. Such array of views should be very sobering to those of you who has your own pet-theory of Russia or who thinks it is monotone and monochrome.

The author sheds light onto many pages of Russian history and does it timely, appropriately, not boring and with verve. I immensely enjoyed the book, it is not shallow, it is not glossing over or vilifying Russia. The man just tries hard to understand the country, which at times is incomprehensible to its own citizens, who often can only mumble something fatalistic like “This is Russia”.

I may myself not like some things he sees and reports, but it’s not his fault. He conveys the actual reality, which currently is not a solacing view. Don’t attribute society’s and state’s ills to the author’s ill-deposed attitude to Russia. Don’t pick on him for extolling virtues of true democracy and always contemplating what he sees in Russia ….Of course a book that reports only niceties is vastly more pleasant to read. But switch on or tune to Russian State Channel news and you’ll get this rosy view in spades. That is why Russians are NOT watching their television. You may not need such disturbing depictions of our country, but we certainly do. In fact, the reality and corruption are even uglier and less conceivable. From time to time he also makes comparisons between Russia and his native UK with such comparisons not always in favor of the latter.

And after all, he is not that downbeat all the time – there are multiple moments and encounters in which he experiences generosity, wit and good humor or Russian people (not only ethnical Russians). To summarize: it is an enlightening, thought-provoking and realistic work that reads well.
P.s. it is not unavoidable to drink as much vodka as he did during his trips. I managed to stay within reasonable limits (I hate the taste of vodka) while visiting pretty much the same places and simultaneously was able not to offend my genuinely well-meaning hosts :) show less

Published in the year that the British left Hong Kong (1997), there is too much mild polemic and friendship towards the protagonist of the story, Chris Patten, for this to be a definitive history but it is too good to be dismissed as 'journalism'.

Dimbleby is partisan in favour of Patten's attempts to be a liberal democrat in an untenable situation but he does not allow this to get in the way of the facts. The book is likely to be regarded as a fair-minded, reliable and quotable source for show more future historians.

The book has recently become relevant again because Hong Kong has recently become a touchstone issue in the increasingly fraught relations betweeen the 'West' (which includes many small East Asian and Pacific nations) and China.

From this perspective, the book stands as very useful in answering the question - what has gone wrong? Is it British moral turpitude or incompetence, Chinese intransigeance, the burden of colonial history, over-expectation on the part of Hong Kongers or business cynicism?

The book won't entirely answer those questions but it will help the reader to come to a view on how we got to where we are. The answer is not going to be a simple one or provide easy answers to an ongoing clash of cultures which could contribute to more serious confrontations later.

At times, reading the book is like watching paint dry as the tortuous negotiations over legal and technical matters are provided in necessary but mind-numbing detail, while the political squabbles between Sinologists and politicians make one want to weep at the human race.

Nevertheless, I finished the book and I was glad to do so because I have a much better sense of what the struggle over Hong Kong is about and why it is so intractable. My take on it is not Dimbleby's or Patten's but the facts are all there to justify mine as much as theirs ... or yours.

First, nothing to do with Hong Kong can be seen outside the historical context of a rapacious British Empire humiliating the Chinese Empire. On the other hand, the British created a prosperous trading city out of little more than rock. These two facts make neither contending side 'wrong'.

From a Chinese point of view, the Communist regime restored dignity to the polity and that rock is unfinished business as is (less plausibly) Taiwan. From a British point of view, the Empire created the modernity that China lacked and to which China should continue to aspire.

The Chinese view is stubborn. The British view is still not a little patronising. Where the British failed was in treating the people of Hong Kong as mere imperial raw material in the hands of both British and Chinese capitalists. This was a profitable boat not to be rocked.

The logic of the situation was for one cynical Empire to hand over property, over which it had limited rights and which it could no longer afford to manage, to another Empire for the best price it could negotiate and then bugger off into the sunset.

This was pretty much the view of the cynical British State machine (the Sin0logists in the civil service and the pro-business Tories). They had colluded with China in seeking trade concessions for a neat handover of the Crown Colony with sufficient cover to offload the local population as well.

This is the British at their most pragmatic and greedy and it is something that the Chinese could understand. As a result, absolutely no effort was made to communicate with the local population or to respond to their aspirations other than 'reassuring' fat cat capitalists.

To local business interests, democracy and human rights were so much pie in the sky. So long as they could prosper and create wealth as the capitalist trading outpost of the Chinese Empire, as they had been of the British Empire, the change of ownership was a mere formality.

So what goes wrong? The cynics are suddenly faced by liberal idealism emerging as part of the Tory machine - a tendency that was not unique to the Tories but was central to the later Blair operation and is now dominant in the foreign policy of the Tory Right.

Ooops! Civil servants thought they were running foreign policy. Suddenly jumped up elected politicians are not listening to them. John Major appoints a pal to be Governor of Hong Kong and that pal is a liberal Catholic with strong liberal democratic views.

It was a blunder, of course, if an honourable one but only a blunder because of the prior blunder of allowing British civil servants to follow through on their imperial anti-democratic instincts and treat the people of Hong Kong as so much colonial fodder.

It was all too late and, in case anyone thinks this is a Tory mistake, the same blunder was perpetrated under de-colonising scuttling Labour and Tory administrations alike. The last dregs of empire were problems or tradeable assets but not zones of popular autonomy.

The dregs of the British Empire could have been introduced steadily to rights and democracy from much earlier in the decolonisation process. They would have been established as independent facts on the ground for an incoming empire to deal with.

Of course, that would have been a bad idea for Hong Kong for a good reason ... the outgoing empire could not have guaranteed the security of an independent or autonomous Hong Kong any more than it could defend Singapore in the Second World War.

The second best option was to a introduce a significant degree of democracy and human rights from the 1980s, sufficient to embed liberal democracy alongside capitalism and bind the success of the latter (which is what Beijing cared about) to the success of the former.

And that is at the root of the failure of imagination that we have all come to expect from a negative and depressed British civil service and there were no imaginative politicians in the Thatcher administration capable of scenario planning in a different way from the Sinologists.

So, instead of over a decade of gradual democratisation and embedment of rights, in comes a rather second division but not unintelligent and decent politician, Chris Patten, into a wholly untenable situation, inadequately briefed (to an absolutely shocking degree in one key circumstance).

In the end, he faces a China that is not at fault in thinking that it has an 'understanding' with the British Empire and which subsequently finds that it is faced by (in their view and that of the Sinologists and their business pals) an unprofessional gad fly stirring up the locals.

In other words, Hong Kong is the victim of the very late discovery of the British of a sort of cack-handed moral idealism - the sort that infected at the cost of many lives, the subsequent Prime Minister Tony Blair - without the time or means to make it practical in Hong Kong.

Worse, without having any power to do anything about what is going to happen to these people when the British abandon them, Patten starts giving them hope and creating expectations and encouraging democratic behaviour at the very last minute when it will be most provocative.

The British have failed to behave decently for so long that a decent man arriving at the last minute can only posture and create problems for the future. The Chinese are confused and angry and the real villains (British civil servants and business) skulk and undermine their own man.

And that is when the story ends in this book. A naive and intellectually lazy Prime Minister has rewarded a pal whose inherent decency and sense of honour tries to correct the amoral and cynical behaviour of his own State but far too late to do anything except stir up trouble for the future.

And a quarter of a century later we are where we are now. Many Hong Kongers want the Western freedoms they should have been granted half a century ago under the rule of a communist-capitalist dictatorship quite capable of crushing by force any dissent on its territory.

But be in no doubt, it is Chinese territory because the British gave it to them and bits of paper (as we know from Brexit) are of no consequence when it comes to sovereign interest. The Chinese can do what they like if they accept the trading and other consequences. And they probably can and will.

The poor Hong Kongers have been left in the worst of worlds ... dumped unceremoniously by their old elite, where half of them just want to do business but the other half think of themselves as Westerners and want the same level of freedom as Westerners.

Their new masters are not happy that the British set an ideological ticking bomb inside their own empire and they are not fools in knowing that special interests (notably neo-conservative American interests) are trying to light a fuse that they hope will result in revolt in Shanghai and Beijing.

The Sinologists, meanwhile, wasted their careers. Partly due to business negativity over Brexit, the Tory populists have abandoned the 'business first' foreign policy of their predecessors and have developed their own brand of neo-conservatism but far too late to help the Hong Kongers.

There is not much to be done. Hong Kongers cannot be protected by the West because of the risks of direct confrontation but cannot fight for they want without being crushed, jailed and 'martyred'. The Hong Kongers are now just propaganda pawns in a dirty game.

This book helps us to assign blame. Given what we know of Communism in China, the Chinese are just being true to their nature - they are scorpions and they sting. Patten, too, was naive and probably did more harm than good but he was the victim of circumstance.

The blame is clear. British arrogance and cynicism under a State that, even now, has an instinct against democracy. Until the British State is brought under democratic control and values, blunders like this (not that there are many more bits of empire to screw over) will continue.

Nor is it a 'Tory' State that we are condemning here. There is no substantive difference between Tory and Labour administrations in their cynicism and laziness. Labour has ousted the non-cynical Corbyn as inconvenient and the Tories have come to liberal democratic values late in the day.

The most depressing story in the book was that of the Government's (a Tory decision, in this case) failure to offer free British citizenship to servants of the Crown. It was as if they were just employees to be transferred from one corporation to another to be fired in an asset strip.

Only 20% of serving British-Chinese military got passports that mattered, leaving the other 80% as potential pariahs in their own PLA-dominated city. We are still behaving unconscionably in Iraq where our translators are going to be dumped on the tender mercies of local militia when we leave.

While every European Tom, Dick and Harry was going to be let in to the UK to feed the maw of British business' hunger for cheap labour and European markets, the Government reaction was to limit migration from overseas even when we had a debt of honour. 'Racial', surely not?

So, a worthwhile work of contemporary history by a diligent and committed British journalist, this account of the last days of British Hong Kong under its last Governor is a good factual guide to the decision-making of that period. You can interpret the same facts as I did in your own way. show less

This is the story of the last British Governor of Hong Kong and the extraordinary efforts he made to introduce elements of democracy into this long standing British Colony prior to the Chinese take-over in 1997. The name Dimbleby might ring some bells, both his brother and father were/are much more famous British television commentators that Jonathan, who has been known to do the odd documentary or two himself. Jonathan is however primarily a political commentator, and his treatment of Chris show more Patten's Governorship is masterful. Patten was the quintessential politician, once touted to be the next conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Dimbleby is very close to Patten throughout Patten's five years in the job, taking notes and interviewing the key players as events unfolded. Although it might be more accurate to say 'unraveled'. At almost every step Patten's plans to introduce democratic reform in Hong Kong were opposed by the British Foreign Office and most of the largest commercial enterprises in Hong Kong who all saw China's antagonism towards democracy as a threat to Hong Kong's and Britain's future commercial relationship with China. China was - of course - the most vehement in their opposition towards any steps towards democratisation of Hong Kong, preferring to see it revert to a bare rock populated by sea birds rather than become a trojan horse of popular dissent within the 'new China'.

That Patten managed to achieve anything is remarkable, and Dimbleby does a fine job of documenting both the successes and failures of Patten's stewardship. You get the sense that Patten (and Dimbleby in telling the tale) had some real sympathy with the lot of the ordinary Hong Kong citizen, driven by necessity to make compromises in order to achieve financial stability, but always hoping for something even better for their children. Dimbleby doesn't pull any punches in describing the extremists on all sides of the debate, the libertarian capitalists, the ideologically pure but hopelessly impractical democrats and the ideologically obsessed communists. It may be that he spares Patten some criticism, but it is human nature to have greater sympathy for the subjects closest to you, and at least it can be said that Dimbleby manages to convey a fairly even handed tone throughout. His section of further reading includes some excellent books, including some which take a much harsher view of the British handling of affairs, which Dimbleby acknowledges contains more than a few grains of truth.

The strange thing about this otherwise excellent book though is the almost complete encapsulation of the story within the time frame of the career of Chris Patten as Governor. Events leading up to his appointment are covered adequately enough, but the reader might do well to have a look at Cottrell's 'The End of Hong Kong' for the full story. And of course every chronicle of events must choose a time to rule off the last entry and go to press, but Dimbleby's book ends (or fades out really...) a few weeks before the actual Chinese take over of Hong Kong. Hundreds of loose ends and contentious issues are left hanging in mid sentence, to be continued. The story of Hong Kong after the Chinese take over will make another fascinating book for anyone who has followed this one with interest. But as it stands, and because of his unparalleled access to the story and the main players, Dimbleby's book will always be an essential part of the telling of the story of Hong Kong. Highly recommended. show less

Roger Lancashire was a surgeon aboard the cruiser HMS Exeter in her confrontation with the German battleship Graf Spee. As his ship came under fire he described dealing with the injured:
“The casualties were pretty devastating. There were two or three who literally died in my arms. These were people I had been living with, as it were, for three years. There were cases where, if I’d had the facilities and an endless supply of blood transfusions, things might have been different, but it show more wasn’t like that. I did a quick assessment of who was most likely to benefit and then went to work on them”.
Powerful personal testimonies such as this are part of the delight of the new generation of military history, exemplified by Anthony Beevor’s work over the past few decades. British broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby has taken this model and applied it to this important theatre of World War 2. Through a range of mostly secondary sources he successfully sweeps from the broad strategic view down to the experiences of those on board the merchant vessels, navy ships and submarines that bore the brunt of the battle. As he points out, the term “Battle of the Atlantic” is a misnomer. It “not only lasted from the very first to the very last day of the war but, so far from being a single battle, it involved hundreds of hostile encounters on a wide variety of fronts” - more of a campaign according to Dimbleby.
He portrays the importance of the battle well, both through the views of war leaders such as Roosevelt and Churchill and through the everyday experiences of (often quoted) Nella Last of Barrow-on-Furness, dealing with the consequences of rationing. The drama is not just portrayed through the life and death struggle of the participants, but also with the battles within the participant powers. Churchill recognised the strategic importance of the theatre, but at the same time allowed the RAF to diminish the importance of Coastal Command’s efforts, resulting in a diversion of long range aircraft to bombing instead of maritime duties which almost let the German’s win the battle of attrition. On the German’s side Raeder and Donitz competed for Hitler’s attention and undermined each other with their visions of the relative importance of the surface and submarine fleets. Overarching these conflicts were the disagreements between the war leaders, especially Stalin’s displeasure and distrust of the US and Britain and their ability to meet their commitments for equipment supply via the Arctic convoys.
Interestingly having recently read [b:Enigma - The Battle for the Code|817512|Enigma - The Battle for the Code|Hugh Sebag-Montefiore|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348562133s/817512.jpg|145475] and seen the film The Imitation Game it was fascinating how little coverage Dimbleby gives Enigma. After getting the impression that the reading of Ultra (or not) directly correlated with success in the war against the U Boats, this book gives more subtlety, pointing out the many other factors especially the fact that the German’s could also read the merchant navy’s codes. This meant that when the convoys were diverted as a result of intel from Ultra the German’s were able to move their U Boats in response. Dimbleby’s viewpoint does carry some weight, as it explains why Donitz in particular, although suspicious never worked out that his communications with U Boats were being intercepted. Arguably in this theatre the two side’s efforts in code breaking almost nullified each other.
If I have one criticism of the book it is that at times the context about other theatres of war (for example the Russian front) are given a bit more attention that is necessary. This felt a bit like filler at times, although for someone reading this book without a good knowledge of the Second World War I’m sure these passages will be welcome. Overall this book provides a sound explanation of this vital theatre which places it in its justified historical context, providing well balanced coverage of the personalities, strategic decisionmaking, importance of the Atlantic lifeline and most of all conveying the struggles, discomfort and danger confronted by the sailors on the high seas. A recommended book. show less