One of the strangest figures of the first half of the 20th century was Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who began his life as an English prince, the grandson of Queen Victoria, but as an adolescent was plucked from his life at Eton and transported to Germany where he had unexpectedly inherited a dukedom. What happened then is described in his DNB entry:
The duke still felt close to his old home in England…. The outbreak of the First World War found the duke in England and faced him with a painful dilemma. He told his sister he would like to fight for England, but duty demanded his return to Coburg, where people were turning against the ducal house for its English connections. A show of patriotism was imperative. A lame leg from a bobsleigh accident made active service impossible at first, but Charles Edward supported his own Coburg troops on the eastern and western fronts throughout the war and his sympathies became more German as the years passed. In Britain he was denounced as a traitor. Forced to abdicate the ducal throne of Coburg in November 1918, he was stripped of his British titles in 1919, but there was still some sympathy for him in the British establishment, where it was remembered how German nationality had been forced upon him.
A disappointed man, in the early 1930s Charles Edward was drawn to the Nazi party by its confident militarism, which was strongly reminiscent of imperial Germany, and by fear of communism. He attended Nazi rallies and held several appointments, becoming president of the German Red Cross in 1933 and a party member in 1935. He longed for better relations with Britain: as president of the Anglo-German Fellowship he visited England and was active in canvassing the prince of Wales and other prominent men thought to be pro-German. In this way the Nazi regime sought to make use of his connections. His enthusiastic reports to Berlin reflected hope, but not reality: he idealized memories of Eton and never understood that by the 1930s his boyhood contemporaries saw him as a foreigner.
The Second World War shattered Charles Edward's hopes of closer friendship between England and Nazi Germany and brought personal grief. His second son and son-in-law were killed in action and his adherence to Nazism deepened. He never acknowledged the brutality of the movement and remained unrepentant even when placed in an internment camp in 1945.
From devoted Etonian to unrepentant Nazi. Quite a journey.
This piece of mine is half-essay and half-homily.
You know, I’ve seen the Uffington White Horse and it doesn’t really look like this.
In which I explain why I’d like to be the first biographer of Bob Dylan.
(I also posted this to BlueSky because I want to see how long it will be before someone responds, “Actually, there are already several biographies of Bob Dylan.”)
Gary Saul Morson and Julio M. Ottino:
Artificial intelligence can process vast datasets, identify patterns invisible to human perception, and generate explanations with remarkable coherence. Faced with such capabilities, it is tempting to believe that uncertainty can finally be overcome — that the future can be rendered legible in advance.
But the deeper effect of AI lies in its ability to reorganize the past. Given sufficient data, AI systems can produce narratives that make outcomes appear coherent, even inevitable. They can identify correlations, reconstruct causal chains, and highlight what they regard as signs foreshadowing what followed. The result is not necessarily false, but it is selective.
In this way, AI functions less as a predictor than as a powerful engine of narrative compression, reducing the apparent space of possibilities by presenting a single path as the path. What was once understood as a field of possible alternatives becomes retrospectively legible as an inevitable sequence, reducing many “futuribles” to one. The danger here lies in premature coherence, the sense that complexity has been resolved when it has only been reorganized into a persuasive form.
David Hackett Fischer, from Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America:
Shortly before the American Revolution … the Anglican Society for the Propagation of Gospel sent missionaries to Massachusetts for the conversion of the “heathen.” They built one of their missions not on the frontier but across the street from Harvard College and labored to convert the sons of Congregational New England. The head of this Anglican organization, Bishop Thomas Seeker, made no secret of his contempt for the colonists, whom he collectively characterized in 1741 as “wicked, and dissolute and brutal in every respect.”
An excellent idea whose time has come again.