Word: guedalla
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Concentrating on Spain, Anti-Historian Philip Guedalla reverses history by awarding Boabdil, the Moorish King of Granada, the victory in his battle with Ferdinand and Isabella at Lanjaron in 1491. Actually, Ferdinand and Isabella won, expelled the Moors, and, for good measure, drove away Spain's Jews under the threat of forced conversion. Spain thus was depleted of most of its learning, most of its artisans and half of its cultural inheritance...
...Guedalla's universe, Granada continues to thrive as a great center of civilization, encompassing most of Spain. After its annexation of Morocco in the 17th century, it takes its place as a formidable European power. Granada is sporadically allied with England, but by 1865 the two countries nearly go to war, the author roguishly reports. Why? Because the poet Swinburne, who in real life had curious difficulties with the opposite sex, is killed while adventuring in the royal seraglio. The scandal is smoothed over, however, partly because of the good feeling left by the fervently pro-Moorish writings...
...Philip II of Spain. Such history tinkering, though, can go on forever. Suppose Don John and Mary had established a Catholic England. Would cross-Channel Calvinism have undermined it eventually? Suppose Luther had been unable to find a nail in Wittenberg for all those theses. Or better, suppose Guedalla's Boabdil had crossed the Pyrenees and swept through France, creating a Moorish Europe. Might there be mosques in Manchester today...
Died. Philip Guedalla, 55, best-selling British historian (The Second Empire, The Two Marshals, The Hundred Years); in London. An Oxford (Balliol College) brilliant (he was president of the Union [Debating] Society, testing ground of many a Prime Minister), swart, slick-haired Guedalla wrote biographies as brilliantined as his conversation, admired the tawry grandeur of the age he mocked best: the era of Bismarck and Napoleon III. His definition of biography: "a region that is bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium...
...Twenty-five years passed before Bazaine's military views reappeared in France. The debacle of 1870 led the disgusted French to put their faith in those who, like Foch, were fanatical believers in the "offensive at all costs." But Bazaine's faith in the defensive, says Author Guedalla, became the faith of Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain-the old man through whom "the abject philosophy of salvation by surrender . . . prevailed" in 1940, who "consummated a surrender far beyond the basest imputations of Bazaine's accusers...