The Times (London)
July 29, 2006, Saturday
Christina Hardyment on a century of slaughter
by Christina Hardyment
Sobering, enthralling and illuminating, Niall Ferguson’s The War of
the World: History’s Age of Hatred (Penguin, CDs, £ 16.99, offer £
15.29) begins with a plot summary of H. G. Wells’s The War of the
Worlds, then moves into an overview of the century that fulfilled
Wells’s prediction of a ruthless takeover of Earth by aliens.
As Ferguson points out, there was no need for the aliens to come from
Mars. All that was required was for nation states to use industrial
techniques to exterminate men, women and children as if they were
aliens, so that the chosen folk could find "living room" in their
countries.
Although it has a respectable role, our own island’s story is far
from central to Ferguson’s global viewpoint, making it easier to
understand why the killing of the heir to the Austro- Hungarian
Empire sparked the First World War, how Asiatic ambitions decided the
future of Europe, and how inhumanly civilians have been treated as
armies flow and ebb across killing fields in Armenia, Poland, the
Balkans, Cambodia and Africa.
Nor has humankind changed. Ferguson points out that the furnace of
racial hatred still burns, and that all the elements for a Third
World War, rather than the Third World’s endemic wars, are in place
as China rivals the US in economic power.
Sean Barrett’s narration is measured and compelling.
Turning to lighter things, Emilia Fox’s gloriously fluffy reading of
Sophie Kinsella’s The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic (Corgi, CDs,
£ 14.99, offer £ 13.49) fizzes with fun, but is not without an
improving moral. It introduces the incorrigibly optimistic Rebecca
Bloomwood, a savings clerk who is in debt up to her expensively
maintained eyebrows but can’t resist designer clothes, chic home
accessories and expensive meals out.
She has plenty of sassiness and inner resource; also a generous
flatmate, an almost saintly bank manager and a millionaire with a
soft spot for her could just see her through. Kinsella makes us
realise that there is a little of Beccy in us all as we roam the
shops snapping up bargains on credit. That most of what we buy seems
to be made in China takes us squarely back to Ferguson’s ominous
predictions.
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