David Starkey on Night Waves
October 23rd, 2008 by Steve BowbrickAlan Connor put me onto this one. A really exhilarating 45 minutes of to-and-fro between Philip Dodd and David Starkey about The Tudors (and Henry VIII in particular), history (and historiography in particular) and life in general (and David Starkey in particular) from Radio 3's Night Waves. Here's the MP3.
October 24th, 2008 at 11:58 am
I’m still undecided on whether or not something that makes me as cross as the first part of the discussion with David Starkey constitutes good listening. The segment about the ‘mythical’ Starkey hooked me back in, however, and it just got better from then on (dipping sharply around feminism and ‘honour’ but coming back up again). Whatever else you might think, there’s no denying that Starkey’s a highly intriguing personality.
Philip Dodd did a commendable job of keeping Starkey at bay and pulling him up on his spurious outbursts. He managed to stay considered, focused and interested throughout.
(Some brief points on the history: it is highly questionable whether Henry intended to change the ‘national religion’ (and in any case he didn’t succeed); the disendowment of the church had been considered on an equal scale a number of times before, for example, in the Lollards’ proposals to parliament.
The trend of using vernacular English because it was felt to be more appropriate for those living in England to do so went back at least a century and a half before Henry VIII. Henry V consciously began using English as the sole language for his correspondence during his second French campaign.)
I was surprised that I agreed with Starkey on his final point – that the ideal of the historian should be the ‘complete world’, however impossible it might be to attain.