THE first time a world war erupted, famine and extreme deprivation struck Greater Syria. Conservative estimates put the deaths from starvation at half a million. Tripoli, Junieh, Haifa and Acre ‘underwent years of extreme deprivation’. Incidences of cannibalism were reported as the hungry perished on the streets. These were the memories that haunted Palestinians at the start of the Second World War. They also haunted colonial officials, who faced the economic consequences of their brutal containment of the Great Revolt (1936–39) and its innovations in guerrilla warfare. By 1938 the signs of economic devastation from closed workshops, increased unemployment and the spectre of famine were everywhere. The onset of war compounded these conditions with further shortages and inflation. Colonial officials hoped to confront these issues with ‘extreme sensitivity and caution’. By 1940 everything from sugar to shoes was out of reach. Blockades and the effort to secure arms shipments meant prices soared, shops were emptied and trade routes closed.

To manage these crises, the British colonial government developed new institutional technologies of rule such as ‘the calorie’, austerity schemes such as rationing and new institutions such as the Middle East Supply Centre. Officials initiated a broad austerity regime (beginning in 1939) and an ambitious rationing scheme inaugurated in 1941. Throughout the war British colonial officials introduced new conceptions of development, poverty, health and productivity. Their failures reveal the politics of basic needs and disrupt the colonial panopticon that tempts us with its coherence.

Settler Colonialism and Revolt

Palestinians survived the economic duress and famine of the First World War only to face a new regime – colonial control – dubbed ‘mandatory rule’ by the League of Nations. In 1919 the Covenant of the League of Nations divided the world into ‘advanced nations’ and those peoples who were ‘not yet able to stand by themselves’. Based on the principles of ‘well-being and development’, the Covenant sought to provide ‘tutelage’ to these not-yet-peoples of the former German and Ottoman territories, which the document further divided into a three-tiered hierarchy (A, B, C) based on potential for self-rule. The Covenant graded the Arab provinces of the former Ottoman Empire, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq as A- territories, whose independence could be provisionally recognized.

IN 1918, Newman was plunged into grief after his first wife, Kate, died from kidney disease. When he emerged from despair some months later, Newman married his second wife, Vera, and decided on a career change: he left the Birmingham Daily Post and moved to London. According to Vera, Newman ‘spoke of his determination to leave Birmingham as soon as possible. His years there had seemed an endless time of frustration and misery’. In Newman's letter of resignation to the Post's editor, he wrote:

Feeling trapped and intellectually stale Newman wanted a change, and an opportunity soon presented itself. J.L. Garvin, editor of London's Observer and creator of ‘serious Sunday journalism’, wrote to Newman offering him a job. Newman ‘felt he could take the plunge and move to London’, even though he was not given a contract. Newman first wrote for the Observer in late March 1918, contributing articles on an ad hoc basis, until he began a weekly column entitled ‘Music and musicians’ on 15 September 1918, which ran until 15 February 1920. However, Newman's term on the Observer was short-lived.

In January 1920, he was invited to join the Sunday Times for five years with an annual salary of £850. The contract prohibited Newman from writing on music for other London papers but he could contribute on other subjects for publications, regardless of their location. He continued to write a weekly column for the Manchester Guardian until late 1923.

Newman joined the Sunday Times during a period in which the newspaper experienced spectacular growth. In 1915, four years before Newman started to work on the Sunday Times it had a modest circulation of 50,000. By 1932 it had risen to 187,000, and it had soared to 270,000 by 1937. At the time of Newman's retirement in November 1958, the Sunday Times’ readership numbered 900,000 in a market where there were 30 million readers of Sunday papers, up from 15 million in 1937.

As their nine-year genesis indicates, Schumann's Szenen aus Goethes Faust proved both the most ambitious and the most recalcitrant of his major works. Begun in 1844 in the wake of the success of Das Paradies und die Peri, their completion was deferred until 1853, during which time intervening projects – from the Piano Concerto and the Second Symphony in 1845 to Der Rose Pilgerfahrt and the revision of the Fourth Symphony in 1851 – came to fruition. The Szenen aus Goethes Faust are consequently summative in various respects. As a statement of Schumann's dramatic aspirations, they assimilate and in a sense sublimate the preceding oratorios and stage works. As a compendium of Schumann's styles, they range across his entire oeuvre, finding resonances in the songs, symphonies, chamber and solo piano music. And as John Daverio has explored, as an aesthetic statement, they embody on the largest scale a mentality that guided Schumann's entire career.

The work's significance in the context of Schumann's oeuvre is, however, hardly reflected in its reception history. On the contrary, Faust is perhaps the largest casualty of the reversal of critical perception that took hold at the turn of the twentieth century, by the terms of which Schumann was reinvented as a miniaturist, whose primary achievement lay in the piano works of the 1830s and song cycles of 1840, but whose facility stalled before the challenge of large-scale form and then decayed under the impact of mental illness. And although the major instrumental works of the 1840s and 1850s have persisted despite critical censure, the choral and dramatic music has, notwithstanding occasional revivals, dropped largely from view.

The reasons for this neglect are manifold. It is in part one product of applying the critical modes of value judgement generated by the late nineteenth-century convergence of Formenlehre and canon formation, which increasingly reinforced the apparent inadequacy of post-Beethovenian and especially Biedermeier attempts to compose in Beethovenian forms. It is also a by-product of Faust's historical proximity to Wagner, and to the polarised musical polemics his music generated.

GLUCK and the Opera, published in 1895, was Newman's first book and the first biography of the composer to be published in English. By employing the comparative method, Newman wrote what he considered to be a pioneering work of music history. Even though the book's methodology suggests the influence of many writers, Newman seems to have drawn mostly on the work of Hippolyte Taine. Taine's History of English Literature was published in 1864, translated into English in 1871, and was regarded for more than a generation afterwards as a model use of the comparative method. The critical reception of Gluck and the Opera reveals much about Newman's grasp of the comparative method and his familiarity of its application across a range of European literature. The book's critical reception shows that Newman was highly regarded by his peers as a promising music historian and biographer.

Genesis of Gluck and the Opera

Newman began the research for Gluck and the Opera some time in the late 1880s. He later wrote about the difficulties he encountered while writing it:

Newman did not explain why he chose to write on Gluck in favour of other composers whose works he admired. Henry George Farmer suggested that the motivation for the book came after Newman attended a performance of Iphigenia in 1888, which fits neatly into the timeframe when the research was undertaken.

In the extensive discussion of the emergence of a modern concept of childhood in the eighteenth century—and the controversy Philippe Ariès caused by suggesting its absence before then—relatively little attention has been given to changing conceptions of the “environment” (Umwelt) that is thought to surround a child and influence its upbringing. This is surprising, not only because today it is commonplace to assume that the environment in which a child grows up—be it social, cultural, familial, economical, or other—is of utmost significance for the child's development, but also because there were significant changes in meaning and importance of the concept of environment around 1800. A brief historical comparison can shed light on this point. Before the eighteenth century a child's surroundings were merely perceived as a potential danger to its existence as it was thought that a person's identity was predetermined by birth and god. Wolfram von Eschenbach, for example, wonders about the consequences of baby Parzival's removal from the court and then shows us a young adult who is woefully lacking in worldly manners and basic social and hermeneutic skills. Yet, Parzival becomes the hero he was destined to be due to his lineage. The unusual surroundings in which he grows up can delay, but not prevent his development and the fulfillment of his calling. Religious dogma long supported the assumption that a child's environment is of little consequence. While Martin Luther lamented the dangers of urbanization and materialism, which “die kinder von der schulen zum dienst des Mammon zu keren” (turned the children away from school toward the service of mammon), these factors are not viewed as formative of the person's identity, but rather are seen as dangers threatening to derail the “true,” that is, inherited, nature of a person. Compare this to the attention Jean-Jacques Rousseau pays to the environment in his representation of Émile's education. Rousseau believes that the environment affects the formation of a child's character in essential ways and plays a constitutive part in a child's cognitive and moral development. Émile's flight to the countryside is motivated by the desire to escape the decay that the narrator associates with civilization and urbanization, but also demonstrates that the educator's ability to control the learning environment is perceived to be of utmost significance.

THE Life of Richard Wagner, published in four volumes between 1933 and 1946, was Newman's magnum opus. Most reviewers considered the book to be a monument not only to Wagner—but to Newman—demonstrating his mastery of musical biography. For the book's publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Newman's Wagner was ‘one of the great biographies of my period’ even though the book did not sell as well as Knopf had hoped. The Life of Wagner was a sympathetic and measured account of the composer's life and works, though this was not the case in some of Newman's earlier writings on Wagner. In A Study of Wagner (1899), Wagner as Man and Artist (1914) and Fact and Fiction about Wagner (1931), Newman was not the perfect Wagnerite. Although charmed by Wagner's music, Newman was at times extremely critical of Wagner's philosophical and political writings, anti-Semitism, and reputation for arrogant and manipulative behaviour. These books not only bring to light Newman's ambivalence about aspects of Wagner's career but demonstrate Newman's expertise on a wide range of concomitant issues in European thought, such as debates over the theories of the evolution of music.

John Deathridge has described Newman as ‘Wagner's most outstanding biographer’ and in the context of Wagner scholarship it is not difficult to see why. In the nineteenth century, for example, readers of British newspapers and musical literature had contended with fierce opposition to Wagner by the leading critics of the day, including Henry Chorley (Athenaeum, 1830–1866) and J.W. Davison (Times 1846–1879). Even though more judicious work on Wagner, by Francis Hueffer, for example, had been published in the 1870s, the largely anti-Wagnerian tide had begun to change, especially with such strong advocacy through George Bernard Shaw's The Perfect Wagnerite in 1898. Moreover, Newman's Wagner scholarship was more concerned with questions of continental aesthetics and historiography, and were more intellectually wide-ranging than what Chorley, Davison, Hueffer and Shaw had accomplished in their work in the previous twenty years. The Life of Wagner demonstrates Newman's close acquaintance with a vast European literature on Wagner—a familiarity unparalleled by many other British writers.

CEYLON, an island with a mixed-race population of about 6.2 million people at the time of the Second World War, was annexed by Britain because of its strategic importance during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815). Left in Dutch hands, the risk of French corsairs using Colombo and Trincomalee as bases to intercept British shipping in the Indian Ocean was too great, and so these key ports were occupied. Ceylon's strategic significance escalated in the Second World War as Britain's maritime empire, and the shipping lanes that underpinned it, were challenged from both the east and the west.

While Singapore is famed as an imperial military base that failed, and Malta heralded as an imperial military base that held, Ceylon remains uncelebrated in general histories of the war. Yet its enormous strategic significance was recognized by leaders and commanders at the time: Stanley Bruce, Australia's High Commissioner in London and former prime minister, wrote that ‘the defence of Ceylon was a matter of importance, second only to that of the British Isles’. Winston Churchill described Ceylon as ‘that indispensable island’. In conversation at the British Embassy in Washington in 1946, the former prime minister said that:

the most dangerous moment of the war, and the one which caused me the greatest alarm, was when the Japanese fleet was heading for Ceylon and the naval base there [April 1942]. The capture of Ceylon, the consequent enemy control of the Indian Ocean, and the possibility at the same time of a German conquest of Egypt would have closed the ring and the future would have been black.

ABERDEEN, George Hamilton Gordon (1784–1860), 4th Earl of Aberdeen, Prime Minister 1852–5; in Greece 1805, Founder of Athenian Society.

ADAIR, Robert (1763–1855), diplomat, MP, traveller.

AIREY, General Sir George (1761–1853), career soldier; Sicily 1805–12, Commanded British forces in Ionian Islands 1812.

ÅKERBLAD, John David (1763–1819), Swedish diplomat, traveller and linguist, worked on Rosetta Stone, C. consulted him over inscriptions.

ALBERTI, Leon Battista (1404–72), Italian architect, his greatest work, De Re Aedificatoria, published 1485.

ALI FARMARKI (fl. 1800–10), Albanian Muslim, fought against Ali Pasha.

ALI PASHA (1740–1822), Albanian Muslim, ruled northern Greece from Ioannina 1789–1823, visited by Byron (1809), C. and others.

ALLASON, Thomas (1790–1852), architect, travelled in Greece with Spencer Stanhope 1814, claimed discovery of entasis, also claimed (probably correctly) by C.

AMHERST, William Pitt (1773–1857), 1st Earl Amherst, diplomat in Italy, Governor General of India 1823–8.

AUGUSTUS, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg [Prince Saxe-Gotha] (1772– 1822), art collector, grandfather of Prince Albert, Prince Consort.

BARKER, John (1771–1849), Levant Company, consul in Aleppo, Consul General in Malta while C. there.

BARTHOLDY, Jakob Saloman (1779–1825), diplomat, art patron, travelled in Greece with Gropius c. 1800, 1815 Prussian Consul-General to Italy.

BEAUFORT, Sir Francis (1774–1857), Naval officer, hydrographer, charted southern Anatolian coast, published Karamania, account of the area, 1817, devised the wind scale named after him.

BEECHEY, Henry William (1788/9–1862), painter and explorer, accompanied Belzoni to Egyptian Thebes 1816–17 to draw monuments.

BELLI, Charles (1791–1800), C.'s cousin, see Family Tree.

BELLI, Lt. George (1787–1807), C.'s cousin see Family Tree, lieutenant on Royal George, killed on Prota, Prince's Islands, Sea of Marmara, February 27, 1807, during Admiral John Duckworth's operation against the Turkish Navy, C. visited his grave, J. Gold 1807, Naval Chronicle, 17, 430–2; Travels, 38.

BELZONI, Giovanni-Battista (1778–1823), explored Egyptian ancient sites, discovered tomb of Seti I in Valley of Kings, published account of his travels 1820, mounted exhibition of tomb in Piccadilly, London, 1821.

BENTINCK, Lord William Cavendish (1774–1839), commanded British troops in Sicily.

BOWLES, Elizabeth née Rushout (1774–1862), daughter of Earl of Northwick, sister-in-law to C.'s uncle, Sir Charles Cockerell.

BRIGGS, Samuel (1776–1868), merchant banker with Levant Company, Consul in Alexandria.

Essential to any investigation of Liébana society in the centuries analysed in this book is some discussion of the development of that society in the preceding centuries; to this end, this chapter will introduce the archaeological and documentary sources with which any attempt to do so must be undertaken. It will also analyse important early evidence from the region in order to paint a picture of Liébana society that differs in crucial respects from that of Barbero and Vigil. All historical writing on the Spanish early Middle Ages is locked in a critical dialogue with a vision of society that questions the nature and extent of Romanisation and Visigothic influence in Cantabria and the Asturias. This chapter, and the book as a whole, will argue, contra Barbero and Vigil, that northern Spanish local societies and their political and economic underpinnings were not in any meaningful way ‘tribal’, and that the northern fringe of Spain shared broad socio-economic characteristics with the rest of the peninsula in the post-Roman centuries; it will thus make the case for significant Romano-Visigothic influence in Cantabria from c.500 to c.700. This background created the socio-economic conditions that frame the patterns of landholding and social relations that emerge with increasing clarity as documents become more plentiful after 900.

The evidence in context: monasteries and mountains

In 790 Álvaro and various men and women from Aquas Calidas (Las Caldas), a small hamlet set high above the narrow gorge that leads to the Liébana from the north, decided to record the foundation of their new monastic community in a charter. This document, a simple enough statement of the pact that was to set the rules by which they would live, is the oldest to survive in the cartulary of Santo Toribio de Liébana, the principal source for the region. It is also one of only two surviving eighth-century documents. Some fifteen ninth-century Santo Toribio documents are augmented by only four from the smaller and less well known monastery of Santa María de Piasca, giving in total twentyone documents before 900. It is only when the tenth-century documentation is considered – sixty documents from the Santo Toribio cartulary, plus some twenty-two from Piasca – that we can begin to work with a relatively substantial body of charters.

THE fourteenth-century compilation A Talkyng of the Love of God (hereafter A Talkyng) is an excellent example of the incorporation of two texts from the ‘Wooing Group’ – On wel swuðe god ureisun of God almihti (hereafter Ureisun of god almihti) and þe wohunge of ure lauerd (hereafter Wohunge) – in a new textual and social context. Ureisun of god almihti, Wohunge and the related text Ancrene Wisse, associated by dialect and manuscript tradition, were originally written for anchoresses in the West Midlands in the thirteenth century. Both Wohunge and Ancrene Wisse are specifically addressed to anchoresses, but these texts nevertheless quickly passed into the hands of a wider group of readers.

A Talkyng is included in the closely related fourteenth-century Vernon and Simeon anthologies. MS Bodleian Eng. Poet. a.1 (The Vernon Manuscript) contains the complete text, but in MS British Library Add. 22283 (The Simeon Manuscript) the beginning and end of A Talkyng are missing. Both Ryan Perry and Wendy Scase have demonstrated that the texts in the Vernon manuscript were thoughtfully edited and revised, and this leaves the question open as to whether possible versions other than the Vernon and Simeon copies of A Talkyng might have been substantially different.

In addition to the anchoritic source material from the ‘Wooing Group’, A Talkyng is made up of a translation and free rendering of parts of some of Saint Anselm's (d. 1109) ‘Prayers and Meditations’. Anselm's texts in fact already underlie the thirteenth-century anchoritic texts, and Wohunge in particular. This text incorporates the Anselmian confession of the sinful soul, its tone of impassioned prayer and exclamation, and the idea of withdrawal into the chamber of the heart. Anselm's texts were still very much in vogue in the fourteenth century, both in Latin, but also in Middle English translations. Both the Vernon and the Simeon manuscripts also contained Middle English versions of Anselm's meditations. There is a Middle English translation of Anselm's second meditation in the Simeon Manuscript, but unfortunately the translation that is announced in the fifteenth-century index of the Vernon Manuscript, under the title ‘Orisons off seynt Anselmes Meditaciouns’, is absent in the Vernon manuscript due to a loss of forty leaves.

Charles Robert Cockerell was fortunate in being born, in 1788, into a self-made but higher professional family, in a London which was on the brink of its nineteenth century power and wealth. He was one of eleven children in what was a close-knit and loving family. His father, Samuel Pepys Cockerell, was a man of strong will, a successful surveyor, architect and property speculator, and very proud of his descent from the diarist's family. His uncle, Sir Charles Cockerell, had made a large fortune in the East India Company, and Cockerell was related to John Belli, Warren Hastings’ private secretary, and to William Howley, a future Archbishop of Canterbury. Samuel was well able to give his son a gentleman's education at Westminster School, where he arrived in 1802 to acquire a sound grounding in Ancient Greek and Latin, and, no doubt, an ability to take care of himself. Here, each year, he will have seen the Latin Play with its backdrop of Athens devised in 1758 by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart himself, who was to be Cockerell's inspiration and model.

Cockerell left Westminster when he was sixteen, and began architectural training in his father's office, from where, in 1806, he was sent on a tour of the West Country and Wales, which served as a kind of small pilot study for the substantial tour he was to make. But first, in 1809, he was sent to work in the office of Robert Smirke, a friend of his father's, who had just received the commission for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Cockerell worked on drawings for Covent Garden, the large Doric Portico of which was crucial to the development in Britain of the ‘Greek Revival’. Samuel Cockerell, always a man to smell the wind, thought that direct experience of ancient Greek architecture would equip his son to be a leader in what would clearly be the new fashionable style, and in 1810 determined that he would embark on a lengthy foreign tour, originally fixed at three years.

Greece itself was always intended to be the principal goal, although Samuel hoped that Cockerell would be able to experience Italy also, in spite of the fact that most of the continent, including Italy, was controlled by Napoleon and closed to Englishmen.

IN 1940 Winston Churchill's coalition wartime government introduced a brand-new institution: the communal feeding centre. These not-for-profit government-run canteens provided nourishing, healthy and warm midday meals for the public at cost and off the ration. Rebranded ‘British Restaurants’ by Churchill himself, these institutions represent a striking new phenomenon: for the ‘first time in the history of [the United Kingdom]’ the government was providing nourishing and nutritious meals at below true market value to all of its citizens in a manner that could not be classed as ‘charity’. This provision of communal feeding facilities for ‘the general public under Government auspices’ was, according to the Ministry of Food [MOF], ‘an entirely new development since the War’. But, given that they served only 618,000 meals across the United Kingdom per day, and there were almost six times as many industrial canteens in operation during the Second World War, many historians have paid little attention to this innovation in government feeding. Instead, most have downplayed their significance, arguing that British Restaurants contributed only ‘marginally to wartime feeding’ and thus made only a ‘slight difference in relation to women's need to purchase food and then prepare it at home’. While acknowledging their limited contribution when measured in terms only of the number of meals put into hungry bellies, this chapter argues that, by loosening the ties that bound women to the kitchen and thus to the home, these institutions played an important cultural role in wartime Britain and beyond. Unlike rationing, which did not fundamentally alter domestic roles, the introduction of a state-run meals service opened up the possibility that the cooking of meals for oneself or one's family – an often-onerous duty – need no longer structure a woman's day and thus limit her economic, political and social choices. While domestic roles within the family were slow to change, debates over the British Restaurant were part of this process and exposed a variety of tensions around gender, food and the British family that circulated during the Second World War and in planning for reconstruction.