A Year of Reviews

This has been a year of unusually frequent reviews of books by and of friends and close acquaintances, and it is disappointing to see how bilious many of them have been. Sir Max Hastings' review of Andrew Roberts' biography of Napoleon in the Wall Street Journal on October 31 was wildly unjust and inaccurate. It mistakenly stated that Napoleon was solely responsible for the continuation of war in Europe from 1803 to 1814. Britain bankrolled and incited repeated wars of coalitions, but Hastings complacently asserted that (Britain's) "purposes in Europe at least were vastly more enlightened and above all peaceful than those of" Napoleon. (The "Europe at least" was to exempt its outrageous provocation of the United States on the high seas that brought on the unnecessary and inconclusive War of 1812.) Britain's purposes were to promote constant war by regimes much more reactionary and oppressive than Napoleon's. But for Britain's meddling, Italy, Spain, Russia, and France herself (which Napoleon set up as a constitutional monarchy just before Waterloo), would have moved long before they did into enlightened government; the Polish nationality would have been resurrected over a century before it was, and the Prussification of Germany might never have occurred. Hastings ignores Napoleon's patient toleration of subordinates' treachery, including Talleyrand, whom he credulously cites, and the "loyal" Marmont, whose conduct was so dishonorable his title was adapted to a new French verb meaning betray, ("raguser"). Hastings' priggish references to Napoleon's romantic life, like his criticism of the socio-economic prominence of those in Roberts' acknowledgements, are just churlish; (the author decides whom he should thank, not the reviewer, and it is Hastings, not Roberts, who "succumbs to self-parody.") And Hastings continues his unutterably tiresome habit of referring to the subject of the book, as he has in other reviews, as "the hero," as if Roberts were merely waving an incense pot. In fact, this is probably the best single book about Napoleon ever published in French or English. Max Hastings and I are former colleagues and he has many qualities, but they weren't on display in this shallow and nasty review.

With that said, Simon Heffer's dismissal of Sir Max Hastings' book (Catastrophe) about the start of World War I in the June 27-July 3 issue of the New Statesman, was slightly snappish, and particularly so given that it was largely a sequence of snide comments from other reviewers. Hastings is good at a soldier's eye view of war, unsteady in evaluating the conduct of generals, and, apart from the very worthy Winston's War about Mr. Churchill in World War II, hopeless at judging the conduct of statesmen. Journalists are rarely serious historians and even more infrequently successful at understanding the lot of people who actually have the responsibility of great events involving the lives of large numbers of people. Simon Heffer, who bears (legitimate) grievances at Hastings' treatment of him at the Daily Telegraph, wrote that Hastings was not "a serious scholar who fits his conclusions to the evidence," and that he is overly opinionated and reliant on the author's "own army of research assistants." More damning was Heffer's deployment of the comments of Christopher Clark, author of the widely (and deservedly) praised Sleepwalkers, directly competing with Hastings' 1914 book, that Hastings is "not a historian. He is a man who writes about the past." This is too disparaging, but is at least an arguable view, unlike Max's contemptible assault on Andrew Roberts' splendid Napoleon the Great. Sir Max has lived by the pen and if not more careful will be left for dead by the pen, to fester with his myth-making playmate Tom Bower, against whom my libel suit is a much anticipated event in Canada for 2015, (especially by me). His malicious novel about my wife and me nearly ten years ago, which the New York Times reviewed as a "sad little squeak" of a book, is the most massive libel since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Canadians will be leaping like salmon to be jurors at Bower's trial. I have had to delay proceeding in it until now to get more important litigation out of the way, including the five million dollar libel settlement I won against the original sponsors of the charges against me. But the reckoning for Bower's infamies is almost at hand.

Boris Johnson's The Churchill Factor is an entertaining pastiche of vignettes and a little analysis of Winston Churchill's techniques and most commendable habits, but if Max Hastings thinks Napoleon is Andrew Roberts' hero, it challenges the imagination to think how he might describe Boris' idolisation of Mr. Churchill. Boris's dismissal of Franklin D. Roosevelt as a swindler in Lend-Lease, (which Churchill described as the "most unsordid act in… history" and "an inspiring act of faith"), and as a tyro in international affairs duped out of Eastern Europe by Stalin, are outrageous falsehoods that even Max Hastings repudiated in Winston's War. Boris overlooks Churchill's opposition to the Normandy landings, his "naughty piece of paper" assigning Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria to Stalin in Moscow in October, 1944, and implies that the U.S. contributed only money to the war effort, overlooking the almost always victorious efforts of the 13 million-strong U.S. armed forces and the fact that the Allied armies on the Western Front in 1945 contained 72 American divisions to 15 British. Boris levitates a bit in portraying Churchill as "the most glorious political speaker of any age," almost the sole victor of World War II, as one of Britain's greatest reformers, winner of the Cold War, and founder of Ireland, Israel, and of Europe (while retaining his British non-federalist credentials). It's a lively read, as it could scarcely fail to be given the author and his subject, but it is not exactly history. I will not join the ranks of those who have presumed to mind-read and speculate on whether Boris was acting with careerist motives. I have enjoyed my professional and personal relations with all of these men, (that does not include Bower), but as historians they run an extensive gamut, from the exemplary Roberts to the solid and often elegant Heffer, to the more uneven but often flamboyant Hastings to the amiable, singular, and slightly unserious Johnson. But they are all distinguished in their different ways and it is rather sad that they could not be more generous in rating each other's work, in private comments as well as published reviews.