The Lion and the Unicorn

I picked up this book by Sir Arthur Bryant in a second-hand bookshop in Welshpool, mid-Wales, last week while on a half-term holiday.

It is a collection of articles from the many written between 1936 and 1985 by Sir Arthur Bryant for the Illustrated London News, as a weekly column.

He calls it the 'The Lion and the Unicorn' because these two animals, he thinks, symbolise something of the British character - sometimes great strength and courage, sometimes quixotic idiosyncrasy.

It is delightful book. There are articles about Bryant's boyhood - born in 1899, his father a personal secretary to King Edward VII, Bryant lived in Edwardian London in a house adjoining Buckingham Palace mews. This must have contributed at least in part, one feels, to the romantic patriotism that drove his adult work as a historian.

He writes in one article of how he became interested in history, through marriage into the Shakerly family of Cheshire, and being given the opportunity to sift through their treasure trove of family papers, giving him access to living history over many centuries.

Other articles cover the years leading up to the Second World War, though they do not make any reference to the fact that Bryant was an early admirer of Hitler and wrote an approving (apart from Hitler's attitude towards the Jews) preface to an English edition of Mein Kampf. He was also a supporter of appeasement but once war broke out he was the soul of patriotism and wrote many stirring pieces about the English spirit and values that apparently did much to help the war effort.

He writes interestingly on the oft neglected post war years. Later articles cover the changes of the 1960s; there are a number, too, simply revelling in the England of quaint cottages with wood fires, country house hotels and stately homes that Bryant loved and hated to see passing; a few on animals (read hastily) and finally several on Christianity of a decidedly culture-laden variety.

He is conservative but not necessarily Conservative, which is refreshing. He was married and divorced twice. He died in 1986. He was reputed to be the favourite historian of four Prime Ministers - Churchill, Attlee, MacMillan and Wilson, who knighted him.

Bryant is an engaging writer. He is also a substantial historian, with biographies on Charles II and Samuel Pepys that are still highly regarded. My first encounter with him, in my teens, was his affectionate history of medieval England, Makers of the Realm. It makes you feel proud to be British (or, at least, English broadly defined).

But Bryant is not popular with professional historians, and not only because he was hugely popular with the public, which academics normally do not like (as with C.S. Lewis). His scholarship and analysis were undoubtedly deeply tinged with the rose-tinted spectacles of a sentimental attachment to Olde England. It is Christian (in all the right rather Whig ways) with the right values which we are determined to fight for when pushed. This was not just to boost the war effort - he really was in love with the England of his boyhood and what he saw England to be in the past.

Yet it is not all romance. He has well reasoned arguments and much of what he says is broadly true - perhaps it is just because he was the last of a rather Victorian kind of patriot that he seems out of place in the mid 20th Century - let alone when you read him in the 21st.

Yet - he is just right for a holiday when you want something edifying, informative, not too demanding. I may brush off my copy of Makers of the Realm for Christmas! He certainly beats dusty old scholars of the more cynical variety.