In this week’s TLS – A note from the History editor

The sumptuous book now known as the Lindisfarne Gospels led a peripatetic life
in the two centuries after its creation, but it rarely travels these days.
It has survived in near perfect condition (minus original binding) for
around 1,300 years, and as Alexander Murray writes, its conservators at the
British Library have decreed that “no page may be exposed more than once in
five years or for more than three months at a time”. But Durham, the city
with which it was long associated and where, up until the Dissolution of the
Monasteries, it resided, is a special case. The book has been lent out to
feature as the main attraction in an exhibition at Durham University’s
Palace Green Library. The show not only displays some of the masterpieces of
early medieval art but, as Murray finds, does so “in the highly instructive
company of related manuscripts and artefacts”.

Luckily, the Lindisfarne Gospels avoided the fate of many other early English
treasures, of being looted by Viking raiders. But war has always made
cultural casualties. In the case of the air war over Europe, it was long
argued that Allied attacks on places of cultural rather than military
significance, such as Dresden, were responses to German escalation of the
air war to include attacks directed at civilian morale as well as materiel.
Reviewing Richard Overy’s impressive history of The Bombing War,
John Gooch concludes that, on the contrary, “we started it”, switching the
focus of raids to “heavy material destruction in large towns” in 1940. This
was a case, Overy argues with an Orwellian flourish, of “pre-emptive
retaliation”.

If that overturns one widely held misconception about Germany, a much more
curious feature of German life is the subject of a book by H. Glenn Penny,
reviewed by Peter Pfeiffer. The Germans have a long-held affinity, it turns
out, for Native Americans. Evidence for this comes not only in the form of a
history of self-identification traceable back to Tacitus, but in some of the
most popular German books and films, particularly those of Karl May,
featuring “Old Shatterhand” and his Apache friend, Winnetou.

David Horspool