Andrew Roberts: Roasted by a reviewer in the Economist
EVER since "Salisbury: Victorian Titan" won its then 36-year-old author the Wolfson history prize in 1999, Andrew Roberts has been seen as one of the most eminent young British historians. So it is no surprise that, in his tenth book, he turns to Winston Churchill for inspiration. Mr Roberts limits his range to countries where English is the first language: America, Britain and its former dominions, core countries which he sees as "the last, best hope of Mankind", the source of the Rights of Man, free markets and the British Empire.
George Bush described this recently as a "great book". But Mr Roberts's work is less a history than a giant political pamphlet larded with its author's prejudices, with sneers at those who do not share them and with errors. Mr Roberts has the Red Army marching "eastward" across Europe in 1945 (one of three such reversals of geography); Britain's women's navy mis-spelled as "WREN"; similarly "Srebenica", "Götterdämmarung", Walter Laqueur as "Lacquer"; and, if you please, Luigi Barzini, an Italian journalist who in 1983 wrote "The Europeans", as a character in Henry James's 1878 novel of the same name.
So far, so trivial. Less so are Germany's atrocities in (today's) Namibia being displaced to Angola; the Lusitania as an "American" liner; "only" the English-speaking armies being "still capable of mounting any kind of offensive in 1918"—the year of a huge German one. Britain's 1945 election was "postwar"; and the list of prime ministerial adulterers "while in office" includes John Major—whose one publicly known affair ended two years before he moved into Downing Street.
If the common reader can spot these errors, what about an expert? Was American opinion really as "galvanised" by the torpedoing of the Lusitania as by Pearl Harbour and September 11th 2001? Outraged, yes, but it took two years and German resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in early 1917 (which Mr Roberts strangely postpones to that September) to bring America to war—surely the longest reaction-time in the history of galvanism. In boyish zeal, he rehashes the dubious British claims to have invented television and the jet engine. A Brit was just ahead of a German in the laboratory, but Germany had a jet flying 18 months earlier.
His broad judgments tend to be odder still. He thinks the right to bear arms "the final bulwark of American citizens' rights". So America has no Supreme Court? He approves of the Versailles treaty after the first world war (indeed he says it should have been tougher) and of American support for some vile regimes and ghastly civil wars in Latin America. He is nostalgic for the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and in deep mourning for the British one. It certainly had real merits, but was the Delhi durbar of 1911 really "the proudest day of the English-speaking peoples' mission [sic] in India"? In Amritsar in 1919, ten minutes' firing by troops into a banned gathering killed almost 400 Indians, even by the official count. Mr Roberts gives five pages to this massacre, saying it restored order. Not even in those days did the home government accept that excuse. ...
Read entire article at Economist
George Bush described this recently as a "great book". But Mr Roberts's work is less a history than a giant political pamphlet larded with its author's prejudices, with sneers at those who do not share them and with errors. Mr Roberts has the Red Army marching "eastward" across Europe in 1945 (one of three such reversals of geography); Britain's women's navy mis-spelled as "WREN"; similarly "Srebenica", "Götterdämmarung", Walter Laqueur as "Lacquer"; and, if you please, Luigi Barzini, an Italian journalist who in 1983 wrote "The Europeans", as a character in Henry James's 1878 novel of the same name.
So far, so trivial. Less so are Germany's atrocities in (today's) Namibia being displaced to Angola; the Lusitania as an "American" liner; "only" the English-speaking armies being "still capable of mounting any kind of offensive in 1918"—the year of a huge German one. Britain's 1945 election was "postwar"; and the list of prime ministerial adulterers "while in office" includes John Major—whose one publicly known affair ended two years before he moved into Downing Street.
If the common reader can spot these errors, what about an expert? Was American opinion really as "galvanised" by the torpedoing of the Lusitania as by Pearl Harbour and September 11th 2001? Outraged, yes, but it took two years and German resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in early 1917 (which Mr Roberts strangely postpones to that September) to bring America to war—surely the longest reaction-time in the history of galvanism. In boyish zeal, he rehashes the dubious British claims to have invented television and the jet engine. A Brit was just ahead of a German in the laboratory, but Germany had a jet flying 18 months earlier.
His broad judgments tend to be odder still. He thinks the right to bear arms "the final bulwark of American citizens' rights". So America has no Supreme Court? He approves of the Versailles treaty after the first world war (indeed he says it should have been tougher) and of American support for some vile regimes and ghastly civil wars in Latin America. He is nostalgic for the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and in deep mourning for the British one. It certainly had real merits, but was the Delhi durbar of 1911 really "the proudest day of the English-speaking peoples' mission [sic] in India"? In Amritsar in 1919, ten minutes' firing by troops into a banned gathering killed almost 400 Indians, even by the official count. Mr Roberts gives five pages to this massacre, saying it restored order. Not even in those days did the home government accept that excuse. ...