I’m a biographer with a special interest
in women and war where there is a rich
seam of untold stories but today I’m
going to be asking the question how the
past navigated through historical
biography can service to know who we are
so I’m going to start with the perhaps
surprising statement that I don’t think
history is the past I think history is
our relationship with the past so I was
delighted when earlier this year Hilary
mantel the Booker prize-winning
historical novelist said something
similar in her wreath lecture
she said history is no more the past
than a birth certificate is a birth or a
script is a performance or a map is a
journey well I agree with that I think
that’s beautiful and I think that
perhaps history books are bridges to the
past I write historical biography
because I understand the world through
people the past isn’t just something
that happened out there we people make
it happen and little takes you back more
authentically through time than hearing
the voices of people who didn’t know
what was going to happen next and so if
history books our bridges to the Past I
like to think that historical
biographies foot bridges to the path
personal pathways to give us connections
between past and present lives and
crossing that footbridge you can look
across to the past but you travel back
as a tourist taking your baggage with
you and you cannot interact with the
people who are there although sometimes
doing my research on my books I have had
cause to question that when I was
writing my second biography it’s about
the life of Christina skarbek a Polish
born countess who became the first woman
to work for Britain as a special agent
in the Second World War I was very lucky
I got to go to Poland to look in the
archives and I stayed in Warsaw in a
beautiful apartment in the old town
right on the old square belonging to the
son of one of Christina’s lovers and
he’s a Polish count and he said today in
my lovely apartment so I came down in
the morning and open the front door to
go out and do my research and I saw an
entire ver marked unit from the Second
World War
outside the front door I just thought
well yeah that’s not right so I shut the
door and I took a moment to calm myself
and then I opened up again and
unfortunately they were still there and
now they were quite annoyed as well and
this Nazi officer got off his motorbike
and started running towards me and he
was shouting and he had he had a
handheld machine gun with a kind of
perforated barrel at the end of it and
he started jabbing it towards my neck at
which point I was nearly in tears it’s
pretty scary stuff and then my friend
Matty egg who had come to translate for
me came running around the corner he
said I am so sorry Claire
I didn’t realize last night when we
arrived it was dark and I didn’t see
this poster tacked on to the sides of
the buildings it says please don’t come
out of these flats between 8:00 and
10:00 in the morning was we’re filming
for a world war two TV series and I come
out right in the middle of it and ruin
their take and that’s why they were
quite cross
and so I suppose because I was a
biographer and I was there yearning to
make a connection on my imagination had
left back into the past and in fact on
the carry the spy novelist has said the
real bridge is imagination but of course
I hadn’t really traveled back through
time because as far as I’m aware you
can’t do that and but I had made a real
emotional connection
so if historical biographies are bridges
to the past or perhaps Windows I
I also think they are mirrors to the
past and they reflect the preoccupations
perceptions of the people trying to look
through them the British historian dr.
David Starkey rightly argued in 2009 our
new world has its own set of prejudices
its set of distinct lenses and we need
to be aware of them and I think that’s
absolutely right but I wear glasses
today I’m wearing contact lenses and I
know that if you’re looking through a
lens it’s actually very hard to see the
glass
so dr. Starkey continued to say if you
were to do a proper history of Europe
before the last five minutes it’s a
history of white males because they were
the power players and to pretend
anything else is to falsify well this is
where I disagree with dr. Starkey
because I think a proper history is
actually that whole rich tapestry of all
the people that make up our past I think
that dr. Starkey could only see other
people’s other historians perspectives
he couldn’t see his own so of course it
is much harder to recognize your own
perspectives and bias if I look back at
photographs of myself in the 1980s I’m a
punk I thought I was pretty cool I had
long green hair made my own skirts
sometimes walked out of them and now I
look back and I think well what was I
wearing what was I thinking I feel like
you know much more confident today I
mean I don’t I make better choices but
of course in a few years time I’ll
probably look back at the TED talk video
and think yeah but why do I choose to
wear that give my TED talk
because fashions change and fashions
change in the way that we look at the
world as well we’ve had Marxist
perspectives and Christian perspectives
we’ve had several waves of feminist
perspectives and today our views are
informed by
liberal ideologies or various different
extreme isms in 2011 but then British
Education Secretary Michael Gove said
that history in schools ought to be
taught to celebrate the distinguished
role of these islands in the history of
the world well I think that’s history as
propaganda if you like he was trying to
build a bridge forward through time to
get his ideas solidified and there is
nothing new about this Shakespeare was
doing it when he was writing his
historical plays in his day but in these
days I think we need to be particularly
wary when we have so much fake news
which can easily solidify into plate
history so we must be conscious of our
and other people’s perspectives bias and
prejudices but lenses if use carefully
can be very useful to bring new insights
to our understanding of history as well
I’m a feminist I have often noticed
writing about women and war that women
in the resistance or female special
agents are often written about in rather
romantic terms they’re described as
beautiful and selfless and a lot of
attention is paid to their courage well
they were courageous but they were also
very competent they were very effective
and this isn’t emphasized as much so you
know you can be ugly or plain and
courageous you can be female and
effective Pristina skarbek who I
mentioned before wasn’t just the first
woman to work as a special agent for
Britain in the war she was also the
longest-serving
among her many achievements she secured
the defection of an entire German
garrison on a strategic path in the Alps
also saved the lives of many of her male
colleagues now Christina worked for an
organization called SOE
which stood for the Special Operations
Executive but she was so keen to serve
that she volunteered early and she
signed up with an organisation called
section D before SOE was established now
the D in Section D
stands for destruction because they blew
up a lot of bridges and Christina was
involved in a lot of sabotage and it is
very tempting here to take a leaf out of
her book and think perhaps sometimes we
need to destroy the old bridges
including the old narrative bridges so
that we can build better ones but
actually I think the more bridges you
have the more perspectives the better
because we can learn something from
everyone that is why we regularly need
new biographies of the same subjects not
just because we have new information but
because we can bring new perspectives to
bear so every generation needs their own
Cleopatra or Elizabeth the first or
Violette Szabo and every biography talks
as much about the context in which it
was written
as it does about its subject in some
sense then I’ve often thought of Bagram
fees as being rather like fairy tales
which is not to diminish them or say
they’re childlike and in fact Albert
Einstein said if you want your children
to be intelligent read them fairy tales
but not earn biographies and fairy tales
do share certain traits a novelist when
they write the book they they act as God
if you like they create this entire
fictional world and there is only one
version of it their version nothing else
happens outside of it but biographies
like fairy tales are open to eternal
retellings nobody owns that story and
I’m certainly very suspicious if I hear
a biographer say I’ve written the
definitive biography of someone I
immediately think well no um but
biographies are also the opposite of
fairy tales fairy tales are about
archetypes the wicked witch the evil
stepmother or the innocent child and by
our biographies are fundamentally about
real people with nuanced complex
characters not types and in reading
biographies we see not just the other
that intrigues us the female special
agent the Nazi female test pilot but
also
familiar that connects us when recently
I saw a film a friend had produced
called portrait of a soldier about the
Warsaw Uprising and a female soldier in
that battle called wonder tragic stuffs
cur and I was interested to see this
film because I wanted to know about that
woman’s motivations I wanted to know
about her her inner resources and I
wanted to know about her actions and the
achievements that made her such a
heroine but what really struck me in
that film was a little moment when she
was speaking she said she was looking
forward to getting given her codename
because she’d always wanted to be called
atma which in Polish means soul but they
looked at her she was quite short and
slightly round and they called her
passion which means donut and
immediately I felt a sense of connection
with this woman it really brought her
story to life for me so biographies can
provide us with access to the past that
can be at once different and
recognizable and often evolving we
cannot change the past but we can engage
with it recently I saw an interview with
a woman called Eva Moses Kaur
she is a survivor from Auschwitz she
entered auswitch
with her family her identical twin
sister Miriam and their parents and
Miriam and Eva were immediately
separated from the others they never saw
their family again they were taken away
and they were subjected to medical
experimentation by the Nazi so called
dr. Josef Mengele he injected both those
girls they were 6 years old with clear
liquids they never knew what they were
and both of the girls became incredibly
ill they were fortunate only in that the
camp was liberated while they were still
alive and both those girls survived the
war decades later Eva was invited to
take part in a television documentary
about Auschwitz and while she was there
she met another of the interviewees for
this document
three he was a former Nazi and he had
been a so-called doctor at Auschwitz and
how he meant to respond to him or she
did something rather marvellous she
invited him to go back to Auschwitz with
her and there 50 years after the
liberation of the camp she asked him to
sign a witness statement saying what he
had seen at the camp and then she said
she had it in black and white and if she
met a Holocaust denier which she still
does incredibly she could say look I’ve
got it a written statement so I thought
that was pretty powerful but she went on
from there she said for 50 years she had
felt that she was a victim she had
considered herself as being a victim in
life but now she found she had a power
she had the power to forgive and so she
wrote jaws for herself personally a
letter to that doctor so-called doctor
she wrote him a letter of personal
forgiveness
she said we cannot change what happened
that is the tragic part but we can
change how we relate to it so I think we
need to be more honest about our very
subjective relationship with the past
historical biographies provide very
personal footbridges back through time
and crossing these bridges we can learn
about the past and we can engage with
history in new ways most bridges span
fixed points but historical biographies
spend time so they’re sort of built on
shifting sands and every history or
biography every text has a context in
which it was written and a different one
in which it is read and understood
history then our relationship with the
past is not static it’s not something
over and done with it’s alive and
ever-changing
and historical biographies serves us not
just showing us past lives but in
showing us how we look at the world who
we are today
and who we could be thank you very much
[Applause]
[Applause]
in women and war where there is a rich
seam of untold stories but today I’m
going to be asking the question how the
past navigated through historical
biography can service to know who we are
so I’m going to start with the perhaps
surprising statement that I don’t think
history is the past I think history is
our relationship with the past so I was
delighted when earlier this year Hilary
mantel the Booker prize-winning
historical novelist said something
similar in her wreath lecture
she said history is no more the past
than a birth certificate is a birth or a
script is a performance or a map is a
journey well I agree with that I think
that’s beautiful and I think that
perhaps history books are bridges to the
past I write historical biography
because I understand the world through
people the past isn’t just something
that happened out there we people make
it happen and little takes you back more
authentically through time than hearing
the voices of people who didn’t know
what was going to happen next and so if
history books our bridges to the Past I
like to think that historical
biographies foot bridges to the path
personal pathways to give us connections
between past and present lives and
crossing that footbridge you can look
across to the past but you travel back
as a tourist taking your baggage with
you and you cannot interact with the
people who are there although sometimes
doing my research on my books I have had
cause to question that when I was
writing my second biography it’s about
the life of Christina skarbek a Polish
born countess who became the first woman
to work for Britain as a special agent
in the Second World War I was very lucky
I got to go to Poland to look in the
archives and I stayed in Warsaw in a
beautiful apartment in the old town
right on the old square belonging to the
son of one of Christina’s lovers and
he’s a Polish count and he said today in
my lovely apartment so I came down in
the morning and open the front door to
go out and do my research and I saw an
entire ver marked unit from the Second
World War
outside the front door I just thought
well yeah that’s not right so I shut the
door and I took a moment to calm myself
and then I opened up again and
unfortunately they were still there and
now they were quite annoyed as well and
this Nazi officer got off his motorbike
and started running towards me and he
was shouting and he had he had a
handheld machine gun with a kind of
perforated barrel at the end of it and
he started jabbing it towards my neck at
which point I was nearly in tears it’s
pretty scary stuff and then my friend
Matty egg who had come to translate for
me came running around the corner he
said I am so sorry Claire
I didn’t realize last night when we
arrived it was dark and I didn’t see
this poster tacked on to the sides of
the buildings it says please don’t come
out of these flats between 8:00 and
10:00 in the morning was we’re filming
for a world war two TV series and I come
out right in the middle of it and ruin
their take and that’s why they were
quite cross
and so I suppose because I was a
biographer and I was there yearning to
make a connection on my imagination had
left back into the past and in fact on
the carry the spy novelist has said the
real bridge is imagination but of course
I hadn’t really traveled back through
time because as far as I’m aware you
can’t do that and but I had made a real
emotional connection
so if historical biographies are bridges
to the past or perhaps Windows I
I also think they are mirrors to the
past and they reflect the preoccupations
perceptions of the people trying to look
through them the British historian dr.
David Starkey rightly argued in 2009 our
new world has its own set of prejudices
its set of distinct lenses and we need
to be aware of them and I think that’s
absolutely right but I wear glasses
today I’m wearing contact lenses and I
know that if you’re looking through a
lens it’s actually very hard to see the
glass
so dr. Starkey continued to say if you
were to do a proper history of Europe
before the last five minutes it’s a
history of white males because they were
the power players and to pretend
anything else is to falsify well this is
where I disagree with dr. Starkey
because I think a proper history is
actually that whole rich tapestry of all
the people that make up our past I think
that dr. Starkey could only see other
people’s other historians perspectives
he couldn’t see his own so of course it
is much harder to recognize your own
perspectives and bias if I look back at
photographs of myself in the 1980s I’m a
punk I thought I was pretty cool I had
long green hair made my own skirts
sometimes walked out of them and now I
look back and I think well what was I
wearing what was I thinking I feel like
you know much more confident today I
mean I don’t I make better choices but
of course in a few years time I’ll
probably look back at the TED talk video
and think yeah but why do I choose to
wear that give my TED talk
because fashions change and fashions
change in the way that we look at the
world as well we’ve had Marxist
perspectives and Christian perspectives
we’ve had several waves of feminist
perspectives and today our views are
informed by
liberal ideologies or various different
extreme isms in 2011 but then British
Education Secretary Michael Gove said
that history in schools ought to be
taught to celebrate the distinguished
role of these islands in the history of
the world well I think that’s history as
propaganda if you like he was trying to
build a bridge forward through time to
get his ideas solidified and there is
nothing new about this Shakespeare was
doing it when he was writing his
historical plays in his day but in these
days I think we need to be particularly
wary when we have so much fake news
which can easily solidify into plate
history so we must be conscious of our
and other people’s perspectives bias and
prejudices but lenses if use carefully
can be very useful to bring new insights
to our understanding of history as well
I’m a feminist I have often noticed
writing about women and war that women
in the resistance or female special
agents are often written about in rather
romantic terms they’re described as
beautiful and selfless and a lot of
attention is paid to their courage well
they were courageous but they were also
very competent they were very effective
and this isn’t emphasized as much so you
know you can be ugly or plain and
courageous you can be female and
effective Pristina skarbek who I
mentioned before wasn’t just the first
woman to work as a special agent for
Britain in the war she was also the
longest-serving
among her many achievements she secured
the defection of an entire German
garrison on a strategic path in the Alps
also saved the lives of many of her male
colleagues now Christina worked for an
organization called SOE
which stood for the Special Operations
Executive but she was so keen to serve
that she volunteered early and she
signed up with an organisation called
section D before SOE was established now
the D in Section D
stands for destruction because they blew
up a lot of bridges and Christina was
involved in a lot of sabotage and it is
very tempting here to take a leaf out of
her book and think perhaps sometimes we
need to destroy the old bridges
including the old narrative bridges so
that we can build better ones but
actually I think the more bridges you
have the more perspectives the better
because we can learn something from
everyone that is why we regularly need
new biographies of the same subjects not
just because we have new information but
because we can bring new perspectives to
bear so every generation needs their own
Cleopatra or Elizabeth the first or
Violette Szabo and every biography talks
as much about the context in which it
was written
as it does about its subject in some
sense then I’ve often thought of Bagram
fees as being rather like fairy tales
which is not to diminish them or say
they’re childlike and in fact Albert
Einstein said if you want your children
to be intelligent read them fairy tales
but not earn biographies and fairy tales
do share certain traits a novelist when
they write the book they they act as God
if you like they create this entire
fictional world and there is only one
version of it their version nothing else
happens outside of it but biographies
like fairy tales are open to eternal
retellings nobody owns that story and
I’m certainly very suspicious if I hear
a biographer say I’ve written the
definitive biography of someone I
immediately think well no um but
biographies are also the opposite of
fairy tales fairy tales are about
archetypes the wicked witch the evil
stepmother or the innocent child and by
our biographies are fundamentally about
real people with nuanced complex
characters not types and in reading
biographies we see not just the other
that intrigues us the female special
agent the Nazi female test pilot but
also
familiar that connects us when recently
I saw a film a friend had produced
called portrait of a soldier about the
Warsaw Uprising and a female soldier in
that battle called wonder tragic stuffs
cur and I was interested to see this
film because I wanted to know about that
woman’s motivations I wanted to know
about her her inner resources and I
wanted to know about her actions and the
achievements that made her such a
heroine but what really struck me in
that film was a little moment when she
was speaking she said she was looking
forward to getting given her codename
because she’d always wanted to be called
atma which in Polish means soul but they
looked at her she was quite short and
slightly round and they called her
passion which means donut and
immediately I felt a sense of connection
with this woman it really brought her
story to life for me so biographies can
provide us with access to the past that
can be at once different and
recognizable and often evolving we
cannot change the past but we can engage
with it recently I saw an interview with
a woman called Eva Moses Kaur
she is a survivor from Auschwitz she
entered auswitch
with her family her identical twin
sister Miriam and their parents and
Miriam and Eva were immediately
separated from the others they never saw
their family again they were taken away
and they were subjected to medical
experimentation by the Nazi so called
dr. Josef Mengele he injected both those
girls they were 6 years old with clear
liquids they never knew what they were
and both of the girls became incredibly
ill they were fortunate only in that the
camp was liberated while they were still
alive and both those girls survived the
war decades later Eva was invited to
take part in a television documentary
about Auschwitz and while she was there
she met another of the interviewees for
this document
three he was a former Nazi and he had
been a so-called doctor at Auschwitz and
how he meant to respond to him or she
did something rather marvellous she
invited him to go back to Auschwitz with
her and there 50 years after the
liberation of the camp she asked him to
sign a witness statement saying what he
had seen at the camp and then she said
she had it in black and white and if she
met a Holocaust denier which she still
does incredibly she could say look I’ve
got it a written statement so I thought
that was pretty powerful but she went on
from there she said for 50 years she had
felt that she was a victim she had
considered herself as being a victim in
life but now she found she had a power
she had the power to forgive and so she
wrote jaws for herself personally a
letter to that doctor so-called doctor
she wrote him a letter of personal
forgiveness
she said we cannot change what happened
that is the tragic part but we can
change how we relate to it so I think we
need to be more honest about our very
subjective relationship with the past
historical biographies provide very
personal footbridges back through time
and crossing these bridges we can learn
about the past and we can engage with
history in new ways most bridges span
fixed points but historical biographies
spend time so they’re sort of built on
shifting sands and every history or
biography every text has a context in
which it was written and a different one
in which it is read and understood
history then our relationship with the
past is not static it’s not something
over and done with it’s alive and
ever-changing
and historical biographies serves us not
just showing us past lives but in
showing us how we look at the world who
we are today
and who we could be thank you very much
[Applause]
[Applause]
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