History

Books of the Ages

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:51:01 +0000

Author:Michael Burleigh

I was one of the historians History Today magazine recently asked to choose their top history books of the last 60 years. Reading the editor's brief too cursorily, I picked Frederic William Maitland's Domesday Book and Beyond, published in 1897. In the related poll where readers chose their greatest historians, I was pleased that Fernand Braudel edged aside ghastly old Eric Hobsbawm, but there was something depressing about the contemporaneity of the choices. Isn't Robert Conquest a "great historian" for God's sake? So I am going to have another go at my favourite history books, sustenance for Standpoint readers in the dark months (and even darker times) ahead.

Don't Mention the War

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:54:31 +0000

Author:Noel Malcolm

Secret scribe: Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1940

Hugh Trevor-Roper had a remarkably Good War, though it cannot have seemed very good to begin with. Recruited into a minor branch of military intelligence, he found himself working in a poky commandeered cell in Wormwood Scrubs, combing intercepted radio signals for evidence of German spies in England. This, in itself, was a complete waste of time; but it led him to the radio transmissions of the Abwehr (the German secret service), whose codes he managed to break.

It Was All Rot About All Souls

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:49:14 +0000

Author:Andrew Roberts

War and peace: Winston Churchill and Lord Halifax differed on appeasement but All Souls played no part

In 1955 the Tory politician Bob Boothby denounced All Souls College, Oxford, for having been "the intellectual HQ of appeasement", saying: "It would be difficult to overstate the damage done to this country at that disastrous dining table." This view might have been shrugged off by the college as the ignorant rant of an outsider had not its ultimate insider, Dr A.L. Rowse, who had dined at that same table more than almost any other fellow in the Thirties, published a book in 1961 entitled All Souls and Appeasement that substantiated Boothby's accusations.