In his new book Happiness: A History, Darrin McMahon refers to the observation made by Hegel: ‘One may contemplate history from the point of view of happiness, but history is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.’ But what are the ‘periods of happiness’ in history, and were there, in fact, such periods in history (even if we allow them to be ‘blank pages’)? Obviously, the yearning for happiness is one of mankind's fundamental needs, and its fulfilment is the basis for a person's creative activity, filling the sphere of his/her imagination. The yearning for happiness is a quite individual need, and this is why drama arises from the historical impossibility of harmonising individual happiness with the overall social project. Without doubt, the Soviet era attempted to achieve just this harmony. It was, however, an era of shortages everywhere. The only thing that it provided in abundance was the historical cataclysms that followed hard upon each other, any one of which might well comprise an entire era in the history of a nation. The Russian revolution was an attempt to fast-forward history. Today, what it produced-the Soviet era-has itself become history.

Marxism, which the Russian revolutionaries invoked, was least of all concerned with the private (or bourgeois) ideal of happiness.

Despite the changes that had occurred in the upper military echelons in 1917 and 1918, the man commanding the BEF had somehow managed to survive. Lloyd George had plenty of cause to give Haig the boot, particularly after Cambrai, but as we have already noted, shrank from doing so for one reason or another. The issue emerged again in the second half of July, mainly because new leadership was desired in anticipation of the campaign for 1919. Lloyd George never had much use for Haig, was convinced that he was obstinate, used unimaginative tactics and showed little interest in avoiding heavy casualties. Other factors now came into play. The prime minister resented that Haig would not join him to induce Foch to place American divisions in his sector, thus freeing British troops to assist in his plan to protect and expand the empire in the east. This brought up a related point, namely, that Haig was certain to collaborate with Foch to prevent the removal of British troops from the western front.

The prime minister felt that the scorching indictment of Haig by Borden and the other Dominion prime ministers provided him with enough justification to sack Haig. He raised the matter at the meeting of the X Committee on July 16.

Born into a family of academics – his grandfather was Master of Balliol and his father Provost of Queen's College, Oxford – Thomas graduated from Balliol in 1932. Deciding against an academic career he applied for the colonial service but instead of Palestine, his preference, was offered a post in the Gold Coast. Later an esteemed historian of Africa, Hodgkin opted to travel to Palestine as an unpaid assistant on an archaeological project at Jericho. His period as an archaeology student between January 1932 and July 1933 was unsuccessful career-wise, but he used it to travel around Palestine and parts of Syria and Transjordan. In May 1934 he was back as a cadet in the Palestine civil service. Hodgkin's political views were formed out of the maelstrom of events in the 1930s. Siding with the Left and opposed to imperialism he soon found it unconscionable to be involved in the British suppression of the Palestinian Arab revolt, which began in 1936 and which he supported. He resigned leaving Palestine in the summer of 1936. Edited by his brother E.C. Hodgkin, Letters from Palestine 1932–36 was published only in 1986. Unlike Duff Gordon's Letters from Egypt or Bell's Persian Letters, Hodgkin's letters were not intended for publication and so remain unpolished.

From:

Letters from Palestine 1932–36 (1986)

Rather like the young Disraeli's Home Letters (Lothair and Tancred were actually fresh in Thomas' mind when he wrote them) these letters display qualities of vivid immediacy and youthful effervescence.

A familiar sight in the area I live in, Central Calcutta, are Bohra families dressed in their distinctive robes, keeping very much to themselves as they carry on with their busy lives. Despite the fact that some of the biggest shops and showrooms of the area are owned by them, their lives and thoughts have always stayed an enigma to me. When I decided to research on this intriguing subject, I immediately faced a block. There is very little secondary material in the libraries on the Bohra community per se and the few books that are available are on the community in Gujarat and Rajasthan. There is none on the Calcutta Bohras. This is because none of the leading Bohras of Calcutta have left any account of their migration to the city or on their work here. I began by conducting interviews with some of the leading members of their society to understand the basic features of the community and their beliefs. They candidly admit that there is very little written documentation on the Bohras of Calcutta in English and whatever there is, is in Gujarati or in Lisaan-ud-Dawat which is their religious language – Deen-i-Zabaan. Thereafter I concentrated on circulating questionnaires within the community to get a broader view. My aim in this chapter is to bring into focus the distinctiveness of the culture and also show that there is no dichotomy within them between their ‘modernity’, a term by which they mean ‘use of advanced technology’, and their deep religiosity.

The DNB tells us that although he was of French Huguenot descent ‘and brought up in France and Germany, Chirol was a staunch English patriot, proud of his Anglo-Saxon Ashburnham [his mother's family] blood.’ It was not until the Franco-Prussian War broke out that he and his mother resettled in England. Though trained as a barrister the young Chirol spent four years in the Foreign Office before turning to travel: he visited Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and in 1880 Istanbul where he took up journalism. In 1882 he reported Wolseley's campaign against Urabi in Egypt for the London Standard, went to India and Persia (1884), and reported the events of 1885 in Sudan. Through his good connections he joined the newly opened Times foreign news department in 1891. After a spell as Berlin correspondent during which he became disillusioned with German politics, he returned to his desk at the Times where he was appointed foreign editor in 1899. It was while in this highly influential post that Chirol wrote The Middle East Question. Together with David Fraser, another journalist who worked under him at the Times, he helped promote what would now be considered a ‘realist’ line in which Britain's foreign policy interests were held to override the aspirations of Eastern nationalisms such as those of Persia and Turkey (Nash 2005: Ch 4).

Historical Background

Mainly a desert terrain, in 1800 the Arabian Peninsula had a population of perhaps no more than 1 million, a large part of which – excluding those living in the mountainous areas of Oman and Yemen where agriculture was practised – was pastoral, herding sheep, goats, or horses. Apart from the oases towns the major centres of population were on the coasts (Yapp 1987: 173). At the close of the eighteenth century most of the Arabs in the peninsula were independent of – and some actively hostile to – Ottoman rule. Wahhabis in Central Arabia, and in the South East Ibadis in Oman and Zaydis in Yemen, each functioned beyond Ottoman authority. In the Hijaz the Sherifs of Mecca ruled the holy cities but there was an Ottoman governor at Jeddah (Hourani 1991: 251, 253). In this period Arabia was therefore isolated but subject to expansive forces from within. The Wahhabis, whose power emanated from an alliance between the puritanical doctrine of the religious reformer Abdul Wahhab (1703–92) and the political leadership of the al-Saud clan, were the dominant political force in the subcontinent before Muhammad Ali's campaigns against them (1811–8). By 1840 the Egyptians had withdrawn leaving Central Arabia under Wahhabi control; an Ottoman return in Arabia was slow in coming and only took off after 1880 (Yapp: 174–5).

In my earlier monograph, Towards a Poetics of the Indian English Novel (2000), I had argued that English novels by Indians had a more complex genealogy than was normally supposed. That they were the inheritors of two different literary traditions, English and Indian, and also of two linguistic ones as Meenakshi Mukherjee suggested by dubbing them ‘twice born’ is by now well-recognized. But what was not equally clear was how we might understand and evaluate their larger civilizational burden. For this, one needed to connect them not only with other fictional works in many Indian languages or with those forms of narrative, such as vernacular prose chronicles or romances, which came before them, but also to the classical literary traditions, particularly the great epics of India. If we did so, we would not only be closer to defining their identity but also to evaluating them.

My earlier project, which tried to do this, was thus an endeavour to ‘define both the commonness and the uniqueness’ of the Indian English [IE] novel (12) and to see ‘how this genre has evolved and developed in the last 150 years’ so as to delineate the ‘tradition of the IE, to identify its main types, and to spell out its relation to the broader cultural formations of our country’ (12–13). I argued that the age-old framework of the purusharthas, enunciated not only in the Manu Smriti or the Mahabharata, but also in Bharata's Natyasastra, could come in handy.

Happiness in Russian Culture: Introductory Remarks The specificity of the concept of happiness in Soviet culture is best understood against the background of how this concept was traditionally interpreted in Russian culture. Vladimir Dahl's authoritative dictionary of the Russian language, first published in 1863, accorded two meanings to the word. The primary meaning is given as ‘success, lucky chance, something unforeseen but desirable’. The secondary meaning refers to ‘happiness’ in the sense that this word would be used in English—‘bliss and the complete fulfilment of one's wishes’. While a number of articles published recently have dealt with the place of schast'e in the Russian linguistic world-picture in terms of its ‘semantic universals’, so to speak, these seem to have left out something of fundamental importance to the understanding of the word: what one might term the ‘metaphysics of happiness’ in Russian tradition.

As has often been noted, both nexuses of meaning are derived from concepts of fortune and fate, one's ‘portion’. The basic morphological and semantic component of the word schast'e is easy to identify—chast' (a piece or portion of something, cf. uchast', ‘fate’). The prefix s' (c ъ) with reduced vowel has been identified as originally meaning ‘good, kind’, which means that the whole word can be interpreted as meaning ‘kind fate’, ‘good fortune’.

With Lady Anne Blunt and Gertrude Bell, Freya Stark completes the triumvirate of renowned British women travellers to Arabia. Like Doughty, her motivation to travel may have been to escape an unhappy background as well as to find freedom in unfamiliar and exotic places. Brought up in Asolo in northern Italy – where she lived with her mother and sister – at the age of 12 Freya was injured in an accident in the basket factory her mother had set up for her Italian lover. Educated at Bedford College, London, she spent the early years of the Great War as a nurse, only starting to travel in the Middle East relatively late when in her early thirties, having studied briefly at the London School of Oriental Studies in 1927. She then lived for periods in Damascus and Baghdad, her first piece of writing, Baghdad Sketches, appearing in 1933 and Letters from Syria in 1942. Two books on her travels in southern Arabia are: The Southern Gates of Arabia and Winter in Arabia (1940). While frequently celebrated for her romantic view of Eastern lands and closeness to the peoples amongst whom she travelled, and for her spirit of independence that resulted in run-ins with British colonial officials (‘she was denounced for having challenged authority and forsaken her European character’ (En-Nehas, LTE: 1136)) it is sometimes overlooked that during her earlier Middle East travels, Stark was actually working for the British government.

Born Jean Louis Burckhardt into a wealthy Swiss manufacturing and trading family, Burckhardt was forced to leave Switzerland as a result of his father's falling out with the new order thrown up by the French Revolution. After studying at Leipzig and Göttingen universities he moved to England (1806) where he gained employment with the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa (1808). He studied Arabic at Cambridge University before travelling to Syria staying in Aleppo for two years (1809–11) where he acquired a scholarly knowledge of Arabic and the Qur'an. He also travelled in Lebanon and Palestine before reaching Cairo in September 1812. Burckhardt's identity therefore twice shifted: the new ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, believed the Swiss to be an English spy, even though he had adopted the persona of Sheykh Ibrahim, a poor Muslim scholar of Aleppo. Journeys in Upper Egypt and Nubia followed, before Burckhardt determined to put his Arab identity to the ultimate test by going to Mecca and Medina where he eventually stayed for two years (1814–15). Travelling in reduced circumstances and plagued by ill health, a combination of his remarkable knowledge of written and spoken Arabic and the ambiguous protection of Muhammad Ali ensured that he succeeded in taking sufficient notes to be able later to write his seminal Travels in Arabia (1829) This and two other works, Travels in Nubia (1819) and Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys (1822), were published posthumously under the auspices of the Africa Association, Burckhardt having died of dysentery in Cairo in 1817.