First 2019 read: The White Nile, by Alan Moorehead. The author is best remembered as a journalist and war correspondent—I have read with pleasure his accounts of the WWII campaign in North Africa—and while this volume might not pass muster with today’s academic historians, with their austere standards, I’ve enjoyed it. Sample passage, anent General Gordon’s defeat at Khartoum in 1885:
There is a fatal quality about the events of the next six months, an air of pure and certain tragedy that lifts the story out of time and space so that it becomes part of a permanent tradition of human courage and human helplessness. It can be repeated just as a Shakespearean tragedy can be repeated, and it never alters. The values remain the same in every age, and the principal characters are instantly recognizable; we would no more think of their playing different roles from the ones they actually played than we would dream of withholding death from King Lear or rescuing Hamlet from his hesitations. Each of the three main protagonists—Wolseley coming up the Nile with his soldiers, Gordon waiting and watching on the Palace roof in Khartoum and the Mahdi with his warriors encamped in the desert outside the town—behaves precisely as he is destined to, and it is wonderfully dramatic that these three men, who were so perfectly incapable of understanding one another, should have been thrust together in such desperate circumstances and in such an outlandish corner of the world. Each man is the victim of forces which are stronger than himself. The Mahdi, having raised a holy war, is bound to assault Khartoum. Gordon, having committed his word to the people in the town, is bound to remain there to the end. And Wolseley, the soldier, having received his orders, is bound to try and rescue him. None of these three really controls events, none of them can predict what will happen. From time to time they feel hope or despair, confidence or uncertainty, but in the main they simply hold on to their predestined courses and they are like the pilots of three ships in the fog that are headed for an inevitable collision.
A fine read. I’m amused that some reviewers on Amazon castigate the author of this 1960 work for being insufficiently au courant in his condemnations of XIX century colonialism. Geez, it’s a fucking shame that that those old geezers weren’t as woke as we are, amirite?

cordially,