Acquisitions (93): Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill: Thoughts and Adventures (1933)

•

Frank Owen Salisbury: The Freedom Portrait (29/11/1944)

Winston Churchill: Thoughts and Adventures (1932)
[Bookmark, Devonport - 18/5/2023]:

Churchill, Winston. Thoughts and Adventures. 1932. London: Thomas Butterworth, Ltd., 1933.

Winston Churchill: The Second World War (1948-53)
[photograph: David Mason (2023)]

In Defence of Narrative History

Churchill with his command of English is very readable. But he was not a historian in the academic sense. He was too closely involved with events for the necessary objectivity. And he liked to blow his own horn. So what you get is his personal interpretation of events.

- Erich Szentgrothy

So reads one of the responses to a question about the readability of Winston Churchill's Second World War memoirs on Facebook's "Fans of the Folio Society" page - to which I belong, though I'm afraid I seldom contribute to it.

This correspondence about Churchill's merits - or lack of same - as an historian did interest me, though. "Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, so he can't have been too shabby as a writer," opined one commentator. Another remarked that she found his war memoirs:

very readable apart from the stuff about internal UK politics of the time (mainly because I’m not interested in that, but even those parts are still very well written ...)

But there were two phrases that stood out for me in Erich Szentgrothy's initial comment: "not a historian in the academic sense" and "too closely involved with events for the necessary objectivity."

It started me wondering whether any great works of narrative history (in particular) have actually been written by historians "in the academic sense"? Also, as a corollary, whether academic historians, as a class, are particularly noted for their "necessary objectivity"?

I hasten to say that, as someone trained in literary rather than historical studies, I tend to judge such works as texts rather than as attempts to represent reality - they're both, of course, but it's easier for me to focus on the first than the second aspect.

Also, for me, a stated bias is probably as close to "objectivity" as one can hope to get. So to critique a Tory Prime Minister who was also his nation's war leader for giving only "his personal interpretation of events" does seem a little odd, to say the least.

I remember, back in those grand days when structuralism was still a thing, that the final refutation of the utility of semiotic textual analysis consisted of the fact that no two semioticians could ever agree on the interpretation of any given sample.

The same, I'm afraid, applies to historiography - not so much as a discipline as a gauge of "objectivity". No two historians can ever agree on their reading of an event, let alone an era. The question always comes down to which pieces of evidence each of them finds most relevant: in other words, to cherry-picking the bits they need to refute their opponent's case.

Hegelian Dialectic

There always is such an opponent, of course. The dialectic structure inherent to Western Academic discourse demands it. Thesis provokes antithesis, only to merge into synthesis, which in terms provokes another antithesis, and so on in our Hegelian dream of an ordered yet ceaselessly dynamic intellectual cosmos.

Marxist historian E. H. Carr's famous textbook What is History? gives useful guidance about the distinctions between the two basic types of historical evidence (as he sees them, at any rate):

Carr divided facts into two categories: "facts of the past", that is, historical information that historians deem unimportant, and "historical facts", information that historians have decided is important. Carr contended that historians quite arbitrarily determine which of the "facts of the past" to turn into "historical facts", according to their own biases and agendas.

"The truest poetry is the most feigning," as Shakespeare puts it on one of his most feigning and artificial plays, Love's Labour's Lost, a text forever haunted by its alleged sequel, Love's Labour's Won, which may or may not ever have existed.

All in all, the idea of listening to someone who was actually there - for all the dangers involved, not least that they might be principally concerned "to blow their own horn" - begins to look quite acceptable when set alongside these avowed, preexisting biases of the professionals.

Mind you, there are many different types of history, and to confine this discussion to narrative history doesn't really do justice to the immense army of archaeologists, climatologists, economists, and other experts who now feed into the immense discipline of historiography.

Nevertheless, since such "story-based" history is often seen as the bastard step-child of the more scientific aspects of the craft, I thought it might be interesting to list some of the major narrative histories which seem to me - at least so far - to have stood the test of time. I've been careful to note the professions of each of their authors: not a single academic historian among them, I'm afraid - and all of them undoubtedly biassed one way or another:

E. H. Carr: What is History? (1961)

1. Herodotus [Tourist / Travel-writer]
   • Histories (c.430 BCE)
2. Thucydides [General / Politician]
   • History of the Peloponnesian War (c.431–404 BCE)
3. Julius Caesar [Politician / General]
   • The Gallic Wars (c.58-52 BCE) & The Civil War (c.49-48 BCE)
4. Tacitus [Politician]
   • The Histories & The Annals (c.100 CE)
5. The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega [Soldier]
   • The Royal Commentaries (1609-1617)
6. Earl of Clarendon [Lawyer / Politician]
   • History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1702-1704)
7. Edward Gibbon [Politician / Traveller]
   • The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788)
8. Thomas Carlyle [Journalist / Philosopher]
   • The French Revolution: A History (1837)
9. Thomas Babington Macaulay [Lawyer / Politician]
   • The History of England from the Accession of James the Second (1848-59)
10. James Cowan [Journalist / Bookman]
    • The New Zealand Wars (1922-1923)
11. Shelby Foote [Novelist / Soldier]
    • The Civil War: A Narrative (1958-1974)
12. Winston Churchill [Politician / Journalist]
    • The World Crisis (1923-31) & The Second World War (1948-53)

[I made a start on this subject in an earlier post on some of the great 19th-century North American narrative historians, so if you notice their absence from the list below, it's certainly not from any lack of respect for their fascinating works. On the contrary, in fact.]

Richard J. Evans: In Defence of History (1997)

•

Herodotus (c.484–c.425 BCE)

Herodotus:
Histories (c.430 BCE)

The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories (2007)

Robert Strassler, ed. The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories. Trans. Andrea L. Purvis. Introduction by Rosalind Thomas. Pantheon Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 2007.

I wrote a post a few years ago about my love for the Landmark series of Classical Historians. The truth is, though, that my addiction to Herodotus dates way back to my teens, when I picked up a copy of Aubrey de Selincourt's excellent Penguin Classics translation and started to read it.

It seemed to be a positive mine of saucy stories and recondite information. I didn't get to the end that first time, but the second time I got all the way through, and was staggered by just how capacious and fascinating one book could be.

I've read it a couple of times since then: first when I bought the wonderfully annotated and illustrated Landmark edition, and then again when I decided to buy Tom Holland's new translation. I'd so enjoyed his book Persian Fire, that I thought he might really make something altogether new of Herodotus. As it turned out, his new version, while adroit and well-written, did not really seem to me to add much to de Selincourt's tried-and-true classic. In fact, if it weren't for all their other useful features, I'd prefer de Selincourt's translation to the rather clunky one used for the Landmark edition.

It's hard to know what else to say about Herodotus's history. It must certainly be one of the most entertaining books ever written. Nor is there any truth in that old "father of lies" canard. Herodotus quite frankly admits to simply repeating what he's been told - in various different places at various different times by a variety of informants. Often he adds that he himself finds the story unbelievable.

Many of these "unbelievable" stories are the ones of most value to subsequent archaeologists and other researchers, though, so one can but commend his wisdom in recording them regardless of his own views.

One can trust his first-hand accounts of places he's been and things he's seen himself. When it comes to the rest of his information, he is at the mercy of his informants, but is as scrupulous as any other investigative reporter in trying to get as close as he can to the truth.

Believers in historical objectivity tend to slight Herodotus for his (alleged) credulity. In fact he shows a very advanced grasp of the nature of evidence, and the various ways in which one can investigate even quite distant events by listening to a variety of informants. One is tempted to claim that he's more the father of history as it should be than as it actually is.

Herodotus: The Histories (1954)

Herodotus
[Hēródotos]
(c.484-c.425 BCE)

Primary:


1. The Histories. Trans. Aubrey de Selincourt. 1954. Ed. A. R. Burn. 1972. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
2. The Histories. Trans. Aubrey de Selincourt. 1954. Rev. John Marincola. 1996. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
3. Strassler, Robert B., ed. The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories. Trans. Andrea L. Purvis. Introduction by Rosalind Thomas. Pantheon Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 2007.
4. The Histories. Trans. Tom Holland. 2013. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2014.

Secondary:


5. de Selincourt, Aubrey. The World of Herodotus. London: Secker & Warburg, 1962.
6. Holland, Tom. Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West. 2005. Abacus. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2008.
7. Kapuściński, Ryszard. Travels with Herodotus. 2004. Trans. Klara Glowczewska. 2007. London: Penguin, 2008.
8. Renault, Mary. The Lion in the Gateway: the Story of the Persian Wars. Illustrated by C. Walter Hodges. 1964. Harmondsworth: Longman Young Books, 1974.

Aubrey de Selincourt: The World of Herodotus (1962)

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Thucydides (c.460–c.400 BCE)

Thucydides:
The Peloponnesian War (c.431-404 BCE)

The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (1996)

Robert B. Strassler, ed. The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to The Peloponnesian War. Trans. Richard Crawley. 1874. Introduction by Victor Davis Hanson. 1996. Free Press. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2008.

Herodotus and Thucydides - it's one of the great pairings in world literature. Two contemporaries, often known to each other, who embody two warring conceptions of the same art: Tolstoy & Dostoyevsky, Goethe & Schiller; Shakespeare & Jonson; Ibsen & Strindberg; Eliot & Williams; Freud & Jung - it's not so much a matter of choosing between them (though most of us tend to have a prejudice one way or the other), as of understanding the nature of the polarities they represent.

Where Herodotus is deliberately expansive and wide-ranging in his sources, Thucydides is as concentrated and precise as he can possibly be. Rather than the former's attempt at a history of the entire centuries-long conflict between Greece and Asia, the latter has chosen to write about one particular war between Athens and Sparta, a war which he himself took part in, whose consequences were not entirely clear when he himself died.

Thucydides, like Herodotus, must have had numerous correspondents and informants, but he prefers to weigh up their testimony offstage, without dramatising the actual process of collection, unlike his older contemporary.

The result is a marvellously dead-pan masterpiece. It's a tragic tale, but even the most horrific parts - the failure of the siege of Syracuse, for instance, or the outbreak of the plague in Athens - are narrated by him in as sober a manner as possible.

His work can be hard to get through; it lacks the human interest and local colour of Herodotus. But his analysis of the nature of men and politics remains relevant to this day. I must confess that it did defeat me for quite some time, until - in fact - I purchased a copy of the Landmark edition. As I said in my earlier post on the subject:

what made it so good were the detailed maps and frequent cross-references, which made it possible to follow the various campaigns and get some sense of their relative strategic importance. Without a comprehensive knowledge of Greek geography, it's hard to know how else one could really understand what was actually going on in each battle.

It is, in fact, the masterpiece of that particular series. The others are all good, and all useful, but only their Thucydides is truly indispensable - to me, at any rate.

The Landmark Thucydides

Thucydides
[Thoukydídēs]
(c.460–c.395 BCE)

Primary:


1. History of the Peloponnesian War. Trans. Rex Warner. 1954. Ed. M. I. Finley. 1972. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
2. Strassler, Robert B., ed. The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to The Peloponnesian War. Trans. Richard Crawley. 1874. Introduction by Victor Davis Hanson. 1996. Free Press. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2008.

Secondary:


3. Renault, Mary. The Last of the Wine. 1956. London: Four Square, 1964.
4. Warner, Rex. Pericles the Athenian. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1963.

Andrew Hamilton: Robert B. Strassler (2014)

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Gaius Julius Caesar (c.100—44 BCE)

Julius Caesar:
The Gallic Wars (c.58-52 BCE) & The Civil War (c.49-48 BCE)

The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works (2017)

Kurt A. Raaflaub, ed. & trans. The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works: Gallic War, Civil War, Alexandrian War, African War, and Spanish War. Series editor: Robert A. Strassler. Pantheon Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 2017.

I suppose the one thing everyone knows about Julius Caesar's war memoirs is that he always referred to himself in the third person: "the general" was what he usually called himself. In effect, he was his own war correspondent, as he sent back an account of each year's fighting for circulation among his clients and potential supporters in Rome.

This cannot, then, be said to be historiography in the traditional sense. As a practising politician, he was mostly intent on preparing for the next step after his governship in Transalpine Gaul.

It's a somewhat chilling chronicle for contemporary readers. Caesar takes pride in the sheer number of adversaries he kills, towns and villages he destroys, and kingdoms he tramples. But then, it's all (apparently) for their own good, so one mustn't get too sentimental about it.

I suppose it underlines the vital point that an effective ruler must also be an skilled propagandist. Scholar-statespeople all the way from Ramses II and Cleopatra to King Alfred and Catherine the Great (not to mention Winston Churchill himself) have imbibed this vital lesson, and - as a result - had a considerable advantage over their rivals, both at the time and in the eyes of posterity.

None of the subsequent Roman emperors could rival Julius Caesar in this respect. His nephew Octavian left a kind of official autbobiography in the form of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti [Things done by the Divine Augustus], but it's not on the scale of Caesar's war memoirs. Some of the other Julio-Claudians were also writers - Claudius and Nero prominent among them - but one of their works (possibly fortunately in the latter case) have survived to come down to us.

Caesar crossing the Rubicon

Gaius Julius Caesar
(c.100–44 BCE)

Primary:


1. War Commentaries. Trans. Rex Warner. Mentor Books. New York: New American Library, 1960.
2. Raaflaub, Kurt A., ed. & trans. The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works: Gallic War, Civil War, Alexandrian War, African War, and Spanish War. Series editor: Robert A. Strassler. Pantheon Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 2017.

Secondary:


3. Augustus. Res Gestae Divi Augusti: The Achievements of the Divine Augustus. Ed. P. A. Brunt, P. A. & J. M. Moore. 1967. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
4. Holland, Tom. Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic. 2003. Abacus. London: Time Warner Book Group UK, 2006.
5. Lucan. Pharsalia: Dramatic Incidents of the Civil Wars. Trans. Robert Graves. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956.
6. Warner, Rex. Julius Caesar: A One-Volume Edition of the Two Novels The Young Caesar and Imperial Caesar. 1958 & 1960. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1967.

Stephen Ely Tabachnick: Rex Warner (2001)

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Publius Cornelius Tacitus (c.56–c.120 CE)

Tacitus:
The Histories & The Annals (c.100)

Tacitus: The Annals and the Histories (2009)

Tacitus. Annals, Histories, Agricola, Germania. Trans. Alfred John Church & William Jackson Brodribb. 1864, 1869, 1877. Introduction by Robin Lane Fox. Notes Revised by Eleanor Cowan. Everyman's Library, 311. A Borzoi Book. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

Tacitus is in the front rank of Roman historians. He was able to write with reasonable frankness and objectivity about the Julio-Claudian dynasty because they had, by then, been supplanted by the Antonines.

Nevertheless, there were clearly limits on what could be said about them, even at this late date. He was too young to remember them personally, so was reliant on his informants and the seemingly abundant collections of official documentation then available in Rome.

Probably his most pored-over work is the Germania, since it offers some of the only information available about the nature of the early Germanic tribes in Europe, before the age of the great migrations at the end of the Western empire.

Together with the gossipy Suetonius, he offers the clearest account of the beginnings of imperial rule in Rome. It's a sordid and unedifying picture, for the most part. And yet one can see that his object all along is neither sensationalism nor moral instruction, but simply an investigation into what happened and why. It's probably for this reason that he's become an historian's historian: one of the few chroniclers of the Ancient World who can still be said to be methodologically compatible with modern understandings of historiography.

Cornelius Tacitus: Annals of Imperial Rome

Publius Cornelius Tacitus
(c.56–c.120)

Primary:


1. Annals, Histories, Agricola, Germania. Trans. Alfred John Church & William Jackson Brodribb. 1864, 1869, 1877. Introduction by Robin Lane Fox. Notes Revised by Eleanor Cowan. Everyman's Library, 311. A Borzoi Book. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.
2. The Annals of Imperial Rome. Trans. Michael Grant. 1956. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
3. The Histories. Trans. Kenneth Wellesley. 1964. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
4. The Agricola and The Germania. Trans. H. Mattingly. 1948. Ed. S. A. Handford. 1970. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.

Secondary:


5. Holland, Tom. Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar. Little, Brown. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2015.
6. Suetonius. Lives of the Caesars I: Julius / Augustus / Tiberius / Caligula. Vol. 1 of 2. Trans. J. C. Rolfe. 1913. Rev. ed. 1951. Rev. Donna W. Hurley. Introduction by K. R. Bradley. Loeb Classical Library. London & Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
7. Suetonius. Lives of the Caesars II: Claudius; Nero; Galba, Otho, and Vitellius; Vespasian. Titus, Domitian. Lives of Illustrious Men: Grammarians and Rhetoricians; Poets. Vol. 2 of 2. Trans. J. C. Rolfe. 1914. Rev. ed. 1951. Rev. Donna W. Hurley & G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library. London & Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
8. Suetonius Tranquillus, Gaius. The Twelve Caesars. Trans. Robert Graves. 1957. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962.
9. Suetonius Tranquillus, Gaius. The Twelve Caesars: An Illustrated Edition. Trans. Robert Graves. 1957. Rev. Michael Grant. Ed. Sabine McCormack. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

Tacitus: The Agricola and The Germania (1975)

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Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca (1539-1616)

The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega:
The Royal Commentaries (1609-17)

The Incas: The Royal Commentaries of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1961)

The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. The Incas: The Royal Commentaries of the Inca. 1609-1617. Ed. Alain Gheerbrandt. 1959. Trans. Marie Jolas. New York: The Orion Press, Inc., 1961

This is one of the classic works of world historiography. Its author was the son of a conquistador and a high-ranking Incan woman, and so grew up fluent in both Quechua and Spanish. His view of the conquest is - not surprisingly - an equivocal one, since, as a Roman Catholic, he had to see the destruction of the native religion and culture as a good thing, but as a mestizo, his heart remained with his own people and their sufferings.

His best-known book, the Comentarios Reales de los Incas, was published in Lisbon in 1609.

It was based mostly on stories and oral histories told him by his Inca relatives when he was a child in Cusco ... The Comentarios have two sections and volumes. The first was primarily about Inca life. The second, about the conquest of Peru, was published in 1617.

- Wikipedia

Banned in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the Spanish crown, and not republished in Latin America until 1918, the immense value of his work was not really understood until quite recently. It has now been acknowledged as the first great work from the Americas to form part of the world literary canon.

El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega: Commentarios reales (1609-1617)

Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca
(1539-1616)

Primary:


1. The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. The Incas: The Royal Commentaries of the Inca. 1609-1617. Ed. Alain Gheerbrandt. 1959. Trans. Marie Jolas. New York: The Orion Press, Inc., 1961.

Secondary:


2. Bingham, Hiram. Lost City of the Incas: The Story of Machu Picchu and its Builders. London: Phoenix House Limited, 1951.
3. Hemming, John. The Conquest of the Incas. 1970. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
4. Hemming, John. The Search for El Dorado. 1978. A Sunrise Book. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979.
5. Hemming, John. Machu Picchu. Wonders of Man. London: The Reader’s Digest Association Ltd. / New York: Newsweek Books, 1981.
6. Prescott, William H. History of the Conquest of Peru, with a Preliminary View of the Civilization of the Incas. 1847. 3 vols. Bohn’s Standard Library. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1874.
7. Blacker, Irwin R., ed. Prescott’s Histories: The Rise and Decline of the Spanish Empire. The Essence of Ferdinand and Isabella / The Conquest of Mexico / The Conquest of Peru / Philip II. 1836, 1843, 1847 & 1858. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1963.
8. Gardiner, C. Harvey, ed. The Literary Memoranda of William Hickling Prescott. 2 vols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961.
9. Zárate, Agustín de. The Discovery and Conquest of Peru: A Translation of Books I to IV of Agustín de Zárate’s History of these Events, supplemented by eye-witness accounts of certain incidents by Francisco de Jerez, Miguel Estete, Juan Ruiz de Arco, Hernando Pizarro, Diego de Trujillo, and Alonso de Guzman, who took part in the conquest, and by Pedro Cieza de León, Grarcilaso de la Vega ‘the Inca’, and José de Acosta, later historians who had first had sources of information. Trans. J. M. Cohen. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

Alain Gheerbrant (1920-2013)

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Peter Lely: Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon (1609-1674)

The Earl of Clarendon:
The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1702-04)

Clarendon: The History of the Great Rebellion (1967)

Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon. The History of the Great Rebellion. Ed. Roger Lockyer. London: Oxford University Press / The Folio Society, 1967.

The sheer scale and complexity of the English Civil War period demanded a history on an epic scale, and what better task for a disgraced premier than to write such an account of his own life and times?

Given his role as a supporter of the King's cause, objectivity is not to be expected in this chronicle of the "great rebellion" (as he called it). For a more intimate picture of the views held by the other side in the conflict, one would have to go to Carlyle's edition of Cromwell's Letters, or Lucy Hutchinson's biography of her puritan husband, Colonel Hutchinson.

Winston Churchill's own favourite account of these turbulent times was Daniel Defoe's novel The Memoirs of a Cavalier. In fact, he refers to Defoe's astute mixture of factual information with personal narrative as the model for his own multi-volume World War I and World War II Memoirs. Defore is, of course, writing fiction, not autobiography, but the tone of his writing (as in the later and more celebrated Journal of the Plague Year) offered Churchill a way of reporting on his own experience without abandoning a larger perspective on events as they unfolded.

As for Clarendon himself, this is what Scottish historian and philosopher David Hume had to say about him in his own History of Great Britain (1756):

Clarendon ... will always be esteemed an entertaining writer, even independent of our curiosity to know the facts, which he relates. His style is prolix and redundant, and suffocates us by the length of its periods: But it discovers imagination and sentiment, and pleases us at the same time that we disapprove of it. He is more partial in appearance than in reality: For he seems perpetually anxious to apologize for the king; but his apologies are often well grounded. He is less partial in his relation of facts, than in his account of characters ... An air of probity and goodness runs through the whole work; as these qualities did in reality embellish the whole life of the author.

- Wikipedia

All in all, not too bad an epitaph for any historian.

Clarendon: The History of the Great Rebellion (1967)

Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
(1609-1674)

Primary:


1. Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon. The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, Together with an Historical View of the Affairs of Ireland. 1646-48; Rev. & expanded 1671-74. 1st ed. 1702-1704. Now for the First Time Printed from the Original Ms. Preserved in the Bodleian Library, to Which are Subjoined the Notes of Bishop Warburton. 1826. 7 vols. Oxford: At the University Press, 1849.
2. Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon. The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Begun in the Year 1641. 1702-04. Ed. William Dunn Macray. 6 vols. 1888. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
3. Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon. The History of the Great Rebellion. 1702-1704. Ed. Roger Lockyer. London: Oxford University Press / The Folio Society, 1967.
4. The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, Lord High Chancellor of England, and Chancellor of the University of Oxford. Written by Himself. Printed from his Original Manuscripts, given to the University of Oxford by the Heirs of the late Earl of Clarendon. 1668-1670. 3 vols. 1759. Oxford: At the Clarendon Printing-House, 1761.
   1. The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, Containing an Account of his Life from his Birth to the Restoration in 1660
   2. The Continuation of the Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, Being a Continuation of His History of the Grand Rebellion, from the Restoration to his Banishment in 1667
   3. The Continuation of the Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, Being a Continuation of His History of the Grand Rebellion, from the Restoration to his Banishment in 1667
5. Ollard, Richard, ed. Clarendon's Four Portraits: George Digby, John Berkeley, Henry Jermyn, Henry Bennet. Hamish Hamilton Ltd. London: Penguin, 1989.

Secondary:


6. Carlyle, Thomas. Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches: with Elucidations. 1845. 2nd edition. 1846. 3 volumes complete in one. London: Ward, Lock & Co., n.d.
7. Defoe, Daniel. Memoirs of a Cavalier. 1720. Introduction by G. A. Aitken. 1908. Everyman’s Library, 283. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1933.
8. Fraser, Antonia. Cromwell: Our Chief of Men. 1973. London: Panther Books, 1975.
9. Gardiner, S. R. History of the Great Civil War, 1642-1649. 1886-1891. 4 vols. Introduction by Christopher Hill. London: The Windrush Press, 1987.
   1. 1642-1644
   2. 1644-1645
   3. 1645-1647
   4. 1647-1649
10. Hibbert, Christopher. Cavaliers and Roundheads: The English Civil War, 1642-1649. A Robert Stewart Book. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993.
11. Hill, Christopher. God's Englishman: Radical Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. 1970. Pelican Biographies. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
12. Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. 1972. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
13. Hill, Christopher. Milton and the English Revolution. 1977. London: Faber, 1979.
14. Hutchinson, Lucy. Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson Written by His Widow Lucy. Ed. Harold Child. Dryden House Memoirs. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1904.
15. Hutchinson, Lucy. Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. Ed. Rev. Julius Hutchinson. 1806. Introduction by Margaret Bottrall. Everyman’s Library, 1317. 1908. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1968.
16. Royle, Trevor. Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638-1660. 2004. Abacus. London: Time Warner Book Group UK, 2005.
17. Wedgwood, C. V. Montrose. 1952. Brief Lives, 3. London: Collins, 1953.
18. Wedgwood, C. V. The Great Rebellion: The King’s Peace, 1637-1641. London: Collins, 1955.
19. Wedgwood, C. V. The Great Rebellion: The King’s War, 1641-1647. 1958. London: Collins Fontana, 1970.
20. Wedgwood, C. V. The Trial of Charles I. 1964. London: Collins, 1964.

C. V. Wedgwood: The English Civil War (3 vols: 2001)

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Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)

Edward Gibbon:
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1609-17)

Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (3 vols: 1995)

Edward Gibbon. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ed. David Womersley. 3 vols. 1994. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.

I wrote quite a long post about Edward Gibbon some years ago, à propos of Jorge Luis Borges' claim that "Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels."

In it I chronicle my own struggles, over many years, to get to the end of his work - for a long time I kept on bogging down in Gibbon's exhaustive account of the ins-and-outs of Justinian's immense summary and collation of Roman Law, the Institutes.

In the end I got past it, though - as I did the longueurs of another great work of narrative history, Thomas Hodgkin's Barbarian Invasions of the Roman Empire (1880-1899).

Giibbon's dry wit keeps one going through many long, detailed pages, but it's unwise to switch into auto-pilot, as I often find myself doing without meaning to when reading such reference works. There are hidden traps of interpretation concealed in his most seemingly innocuous and perfunctory passages. You miss them at your peril.

One of the great advantages of David Womersley's magisterial edition is that it sweeps away the debris of "corrections" and extra annotations added to Gibbon's original by generations of editors. That, and the fact that Womersley includes Gibbon's spirited defence of the alleged "bias" in his account of the early Christian church. It's hard to beat him at his own game, and contemporary theologians took him on at their peril.

Was he irreligious? Well, yes and no. After many early religious travails, and an unsuccessful attempt to convert to Catholicism, Gibbon himself seems to have settled on Enlightenment scepticism as the only rational approach to life. This led him to portray the early Christians as they in fact were: a violent, hairy rabble of sectarian zealots. This of course led to conflicts with the church's own historians, who had long ago settled to their own satisfaction which of these sects were "right" and which were "wrong" in their views on such weighty matters as the dual nature of Christ, the nature of the eucharist, and the structure of the trinity.

His work may be somewhat outmoded in matters of detail, and certainly he exhibits an unfortunate prejudice against the Byzantine Empire, but (as I concluded my account of him ten years ago):

if you have the slightest curiosity in how Western civilisation went from Marcus Aurelius to Pope Alessandro Borgia, with extensive divagations down every interesting byway in the history of over a thousand years, then Gibbon is your man.

Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88)

Edward Gibbon
(1737-1794)

Primary:


1. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ed. Oliphant Smeaton. 6 vols. Everyman’s Library. 1910. London: J. M. Dent / New York: E. P. Dutton, 1928.
2. The History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire. 1776-88; 1910. Ed. Betty Radice & Felipé Fernández-Armesto. 8 vols. London: Folio Society, 1983-90.
   1. The Turn of the Tide. Ed. & with an introduction by Betty Radice (1983)
   2. Constantine and the Roman Empire. Ed. & with an introduction by Betty Radice (1984)
   3. The Revival and Collapse of Paganism. Ed. & with an introduction by Betty Radice (1985)
   4. The End of the Western Empire. Ed. & with an introduction by Betty Radice (1986)
   5. Justinian and the Roman Law. Ed. & with an introduction by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (1987)
   6. Mohammed and the Rise of the Arabs. Ed. & with an introduction by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (1988)
   7. The Normans in Italy and the Crusades. Ed. & with an introduction by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (1989)
   8. The Fall of Constantinople and the Papacy in Rome. Ed. & with an introduction by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (1990)
3. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ed. David Womersley. 3 vols. 1994. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.
   1. Volume the First (1776) and Volume the Second (1781)
   2. Volume the Third (1781) and Volume the Fourth (1788)
   3. Volume the Fifth (1788) and Volume the Sixth (1788)
4. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Abridged and Illustrated. 1776-1788, 1979. London: Bison Books Ltd., 1988.
5. [with Simon Ockley]. The Saracens: Their History, and the Rise and Fall of Their Empire. 1776-88, 1708-18. The Chandos Classics. London: Frederick Warne and Co., n.d. [c.1880]

Secondary:


6. Bonnard, Georges A., ed. Gibbon’s Journey from Geneva to Rome: His Journal from 20 April to 2 October 1764. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1961.
7. Craddock, Patricia A., ed. The English Essays of Edward Gibbon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.
8. Hodgkin, Thomas. The Barbarian Invasions of the Roman Empire. [aka 'Italy and her Invaders', 1880-1899]. Introduced by Peter Heather. 8 vols. London: The Folio Society, 2000-03.
   1. The Visigothic Invasion. 1880. Rev. ed. 1892 (2000)
   2. The Huns and the Vandals. 1880. Rev. ed. 1892 (2000)
   3. The Ostrogoths, 476-535. 1885. Rev. ed. 1896 (2001)
   4. The Imperial Restoration, 535-553. 1885. Rev. ed. 1896 (2001)
   5. The Lombard Invasion, 553-600. 1895 (2002)
   6. The Lombard Kingdom, 600-744. 1895 (2002)
   7. The Frankish Invasion, 744-774. 1899 (2003)
   8. The Frankish Empire. 1899 (2003)
9. Low, D. M., ed. Gibbon’s Journal to January 28th, 1763. London: Chatto & Windus, 1929.
10. Sheffield, John, Lord, ed. The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esq., with Memoirs of His Life and Writings Composed by Himself: Illustrated from His Letters, with Occasional Notes and Narrative. Complete in One Volume. London: B. Blake, 1837.
11. Sheffield, John, Lord, ed. Autobiography. Introduction by J. B. Bury. The World’s Classics. London: Henry Frowde / Oxford University Press, 1907.

Edward Gibbon: The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire (8 vols: 1983-90)

•

John Everett Millais: Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

Thomas Carlyle:
The French Revolution (1609-17)

Thomas Carlyle: The French Revolution (1895)

Thomas Carlyle. The French Revolution: A History. 1837. 3 volumes complete in one. London: Ward, Lock & Co., n.d.

The one story everyone knows about Carlyle's History of the French Revolution is that John Stuart Mill's parlourmaid burnt the first volume of the manuscript - all that had been written so far - by mistake. I don't know if it was Carlyle's or Mill's idea that it should be lent to him for comment, but they both had abundant reason to regret the decision!

This must have affected it in some way, but of course it will never be possible to know precisely how. Carlyle says that he'd dispersed most of the books he'd been using, and had burnt all his rough notes, as was his habit when engaged on work of this kind. So the whole weary task had to be done again before he could plunge into the increasingly exciting action of volumes 2 and 3.

Is the story true? There's no real reason to doubt it. To a modern reader, Carlyle's historical method seems to consist mainly of phrase-making and the repetition of particular leit-motifs. Robespierre is always the "sea-green incorruptible", Danton the "giant" or "Titan of the Revolution", Louis is the "well-beloved" (with increasing degrees of irony).

As for his prose style, well, a little of it certainly goes a long way. Here's a reasonably representative passage where he attempts to justify his use of "hysterics" in describing the events of this period:

It is unfortunate, though very natural, that the history of this Period has so generally been written in hysterics. Exaggeration abounds, execration, wailing; and, on the whole, darkness. But thus too, when foul old Rome had to be swept from the Earth, and those Northmen, and other horrid sons of Nature, came in, 'swallowing formulas' as the French now do, foul old Rome screamed execratively her loudest; so that, the true shape of many things is lost for us. ... Here, in like manner, search as we will in these multi-form innumerable French Records, darkness too frequently covers, or sheer distraction bewilders. One finds it difficult to imagine that the Sun shone in this September month, as he does in others. Nevertheless it is an indisputable fact that the Sun did shine; and there was weather and work, — nay, as to that, very bad weather for harvest work! An unlucky Editor may do his utmost; and after all, require allowances.

The History of the French Revolution. Vol. III: The Guillotine

John Stuart Mill himself described the end result as "not so much a history as an epic poem", and that might be the best way to read it. It had a huge influence on Carlyle's contemporaries, particularly Dickens' Tale of Two Cities, but possibly more on the novelists and poets of the age than on the historians.

Thomas Carlyle: The French Revolution: A History (3 vols: 2021)

Thomas Carlyle
(1795-1881)

Primary:


1. The French Revolution: A History. 1837. 3 volumes complete in one. London: Ward, Lock & Co., n.d.
2. Sartor Resartus / Lectures on Heroes / Chartism / Past and Present. 1833-34, 1841, 1840, 1843. 3 volumes complete in one. London: Chapman & Hall, 1888.
3. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Republished. 1839. 7 volumes in 4. 1869. London: Chapman & Hall, 1872.
   1. Vols. 1 & 2
   2. Vols. 3 & 4
   3. Vols. 5 & 6
   4. Vol. 7
4. History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great. 1858-65. 10 volumes complete in 5. London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1888.
5. Reminiscences. 1881. Ed. Charles Eliot Norton. 1932. Everyman’s University Library. Introduction by Ian Campbell. London: J. M. Dent, 1972.
6. Selected Works, Reminiscences and Letters. Ed. Julian Symons. 1955. The Reynard Library. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963.

Secondary:


7. Carlyle, Jane Welsh. I too am here: Selections from the Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle. Ed. Alan & Mary McQueen Simpson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
8. Campbell, Ian. Thomas Carlyle. London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1974.
9. Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. 1859. Ed. George Woodcock. Penguin English Library. 1970. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
10. Hibbert, Christopher. The French Revolution. 1980. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
11. Loomis, Stanley. Paris in the Terror: June 1793-July 1794. London: Jonathan Cape, 1964.
12. Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. 1989. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004.

Thomas Carlyle: Collected Works (34 vols: 1870)

•

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859)

Thomas Babington Macaulay:
The History of England (1609-17)

Lord Macaulay: History of England (2 vols: 1895)

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron Macaulay. The History of England from the Accession of James the Second. 1848-59. A New Edition in Two Volumes. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1877 & 1871.

It's hard to work out why this history has become so famous. It was a bestseller at the time, perhaps because of the vividness of Macaulay's style and the colourful way in which he described these long-dead disputes of the late 17th century - long-dead, and yet, in his view, crucial to the foundations of the liberal England whose unwritten constitution he was so in awe of.

As the editors of Wikipedia sum up, succinctly:

The History is famous for its prose and for its confident, sometimes dogmatic, emphasis on a progressive model of British history. According to this view, England threw off superstition, autocracy and confusion to create a balanced constitution and a forward-looking culture combined with freedom of belief and expression. This model of human progress has been called the Whig interpretation of history.

Macaulay had his own ideas on how history should be written, ideas he expounded in an 1828 Edinburgh Review article:

It may be laid down as a general rule ... that history begins in novel and ends in essay.

In other words, the ideal historian should be equally governed by both "Reason and the Imagination":

History, it has been said, is philosophy teaching by examples. Unhappily, what the philosophy gains in soundness and depth the examples generally lose in vividness. A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque. Yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own.

Herodotus was "the earliest and the best" of historians due to his combination of these two factors, but his work "was composed, not to be read, but to be heard" - it therefore combines gossip, travelogue, and anecdote with the immensely detailed listings of peoples, places, and events.

To write history respectably — that is, to abbreviate despatches, and make extracts from speeches, to intersperse in due proportion epithets of praise and abhorrence, to draw up antithetical characters of great men, setting forth how many contradictory virtues and vices they united, and abounding in "withs" and "withouts" — all this is very easy. But to be a really great historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions. Many scientific works are, in their kind, absolutely perfect. ... But we are acquainted with no history which approaches to our notion of what a history ought to be — with no history which does not widely depart, either on the right hand or on the left, from the exact line.

- Macaulay: On History (1828)

Until, one is tempted to add, his own.

The real problem with Macaulay as a historian is his prior selection of heroes and villains. William III is his beau ideal of a king; James II an out-and-out bounder and villain. The former's undoubted complicity in the Machiavellian scheming which led to the massacre of Glencoe is dismissed by Macaulay. King James's conduct in peace and war is presented as uniformly foolish when not it's downright villainous.

It's really, in many ways, a terribly unfair book. But so readable! I don't know what Victorian Tories made of it, but his political supporters - and a whole generation of subsequent historians - ate it up with a spoon. Nor, just because he overstated his case, should one assume that Macaulay was always in the wrong in weighing up these complex past controversies. One must expound some point of view, after all, and at least his is coherent and unabashedly clear.

Thomas Babington Macaulay: History of England to the Death of William III (4 vols: 1967)

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron Macaulay
(1800-1859)

Primary:


1. The History of England from the Accession of James the Second. 1848-59. A New Edition in Two Volumes. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1877 & 1871.
2. History of England to the Death of William III. 1848-59. Introduction by A. G. Dickens. 4 vols. London: Heron Books, 1967.
3. Essays & Lays of Ancient Rome. Popular Edition. London: Longmans, Green and Co., n.d.
4. Miscellaneous Writings & Speeches. Popular Edition. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1889.
5. Prose and Poetry. Ed. G. M. Young. The Reynard Library. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1952.

Secondary:


6. Churchill, Winston S. Marlborough: His Life and Times. 1933, 1934, 1936, 1938. 4 vols. London: Sphere Books, 1967.
7. Field, Ophelia. The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. 2002. Rev. ed. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2018.
8. Trevelyan, Sir George Otto. The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. 1876. Preface by G. M. Trevelyan. 2 vols. The World's Classics, 401-02. London: Oxford University Press / Humphrey Milford, 1932.
9. Trevelyan, G. M. England Under Queen Anne. 3 vols. 1930-34. The Fontana Library. London: Collins, 1965.
   1. Blenheim (1930)
   2. Ramillies and the Union with Scotland (1932)
   3. The Peace and the Protestant Succession (1934)
10. van der Zee, Henri & Barbara. William and Mary. London: Macmillan London Ltd., 1973.

Sir George Otto Trevelyan: The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (2 vols: 1876)

•

James Cowan (1870-1943)

James Cowan:
The New Zealand Wars (1609-17)

James Cowan: The New Zealand Wars (1983)

James Cowan. The New Zealand Wars: A History of the Maori Campaigns and the Pioneering Period. 1922. Introduction by Michael King. Wellington: P. D. Hasselberg, Government Printer, 1983.

This is probably the most surprising inclusion among these canonical works. The majority even of New Zealanders won't have heard of James Cowan, let alone looked into a copy of the New Zealand Wars.

It is, nevertheless, a unique and irreplaceable work. Cowan grew up on the borders of the King Country in the late nineteenth century, when New Zealand still had an internal border between two quite distinct polities.

To the south lay the Māori lands of the Waikato and central North Island, to the North Auckland and the territories presided over by the British crown. Cowan became fluent in Māori at an early age, but his childhood on the frontier made it impossible for him ever to regard the native race of New Zealand as simple subjects of the Empire. He understood their separateness and the subtleties of their point of view.

When it came to writing his history, he could draw on twenty years of experience as a reporter, which gave him the synthesising and analytical skills needed to make sense of the innumerable interviews he undertook with the survivors of each side in the conflict. Crucially, though, he chose at times not to construct a single synthetic account of each battle. His appendices often contain contradictory perspectives on the same event. In this refusal to resolve all such issues from his own, inevitably imperfect knowledge, he seems very modern at times.

When it came to the actual writing, though, he chose as his model the narrative histories of the great Americans: Motley, Prescott, and, in particular, Francis Parkman.

Is his book out of date? Conceptually, undoubtedly. He was certainly a subscriber to the view that racial conflict in New Zealand was a thing of the past, and that a synthesis between the two races, Māori and Pākehā was on the point of being consummated.

In another sense, though, it can never be superseded. He was the last writer to be able to speak to so many eye witnesses of the conflict, and to walk over battlefields which no longer exist in their original form. His intimate knowledge of the people and the landscapes cannot now be reproduced. And his training as a reporter saved him from many of the most egregious errors of the historiography of his day: the implicit bias in favour of economic and 'scientific' analysis over the need for a compelling narrative - the refusal to admit that sometimes warring views must simply be served up to the reader, rather than being settled offstage by the historian.

In many ways, in fact, he has more in common with the eternally inquisitive and open-minded Herodotus than with modern academic historians.

James Cowan: The New Zealand Wars (1922)

James Cowan
(1870-1943)

Primary:


1. The Adventures of Kimble Bent: A Story of Wild Life in the New Zealand Bush. Christchurch, Wellington & Dunedin, N.Z.: Whitcombe & Tombs, Limited, 1911. Facsimile edition. Christchurch: Capper Press, 1975.
2. The New Zealand Wars: A History of the Maori Campaigns and the Pioneering Period. 1922. Wellington: R. E. Owen, Government Printer, 1955-56.
   1. 1845-64
   2. The Hauhau Wars, 1864-72
3. The New Zealand Wars: A History of the Maori Campaigns and the Pioneering Period. 1922. Introduction by Michael King. Wellington: P. D. Hasselberg, Government Printer, 1983.
   1. 1845-64
   2. The Hauhau Wars, 1864-72
4. The Old Frontier: Te Awamutu / The Story of the Waipa Valley. Te Awamutu: The Waipa Post Printing and Publishing Company, 1922.
5. [with Sir Maui Pomare]. Legends of the Maori. 2 vols. Vol. 1: Mythology, Traditional History, Folk-lore and Poetry. By James Cowan. Illustrations by Stuart Peterson. 1930. Papakura: Southern Reprints, 1987.
6. Tales of the Maori Coast. Wellington: Fine Arts (N.Z.) Limited, 1930.
7. Tales of the Maori Coast. 1930. Facsimile edition. Christchurch: Capper Press, 1976.
8. Tales of the Maori Bush. 1934. Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1966.
9. Settlers and Pioneers. Centennial Surveys. Wellington: Department of Internal Affairs, 1940.
10. Tales of the Maori Border. Foreword by Peter Fraser. Tribute by Alan Mulgan. Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1944.

Secondary:


11. Belich, James. The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict. 1986. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986.
12. Binney, Judith. Redemption Songs: A Life of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki. Auckland: Auckland University Press & Bridget Williams Books, 1995.
13. Brathwaite, Errol. The Flying Fish: The First Book of Maori Wars and Williams Dragoons. London & Auckland: Collins, 1964.
14. Brathwaite, Errol. The Needle’s Eye: The Second Book of Maori Wars and Williams Dragoons. London & Auckland: Collins, 1965.
15. Brathwaite, Errol. The Evil Day: The Third Book of Maori Wars and Williams Dragoons. London & Auckland: Collins, 1967.
16. Gudgeon, Thos Wayth. The Defenders of New Zealand: Being a Short Biography of Colonists who Distinguished Themselves in Upholding Her Majesty's Supremacy in these Islands / Lieutentant-Colonel McDonnell, A Maori History: Being a Native Account of the Maori-Pakeha Wars in New Zealand. Auckland: H. Brett, Printer and Publisher, Shortland Street, 1887.
17. Hilliard, Chris. The Bookmen’s Dominion: Cultural Life in New Zealand 1920-1950. AUP Studies in Cultural and Social History, 3. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006.
18. King, Michael. The Penguin History of New Zealand. Auckland: Penguin, 2003.
19. Shadbolt, Maurice. The New Zealand Wars Trilogy: The House of Strife; Monday’s Warriors; Season of the Jew. 1993, 1990, 1986. Auckland: David Ling Publishing Limited, 2005.
20. Wood, Gregory. Revisiting James Cowan: A Reassessment of The New Zealand Wars (1922-23). Massey University: MPhil Thesis, 2010.

James Belich: The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (1986)

•

Shelby Dade Foote Jr. (1916-2005)

Shelby Foote:
The Civil War: A Narrative (1958-74)

Shelby Foote: The Civil War (1961)

Shelby Foote. The Civil War: A Narrative. 3 vols. 1958-74. London: Pimlico, 1993.

Since the appearance of Ken Burn's influential documentary The Civil War in 1990, which made Shelby Foote a star, his epic narrative history of the war has somewhat fallen from grace.

It's true that he does consciously go out of his way to present a more Southern view of the so-called "irrepressible conflict" than such Northern historians as Bruce Catton and Allan Nevins in their own multi-volume works. Too, his view that the two undoubted geniuses produced by the civil war were Abraham Lincoln and Nathan Bedford Forrest is no longer seen as an amusing paradox, but rather a clear statement of "Lost Cause" belief.

Certainly he was a man of his own time and place. Stuart Chapman's critical biography of Foote reveals the complexity of his upbringing and self-positioning in the America of Jim Crow and the early Civil Rights movement.

For myself, I find it far too facile to arrange the writers and thinkers of the past into convenient columns of "right-thinking" and "aberrant". It's perhaps going too far to say that tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner, but being a liberal Southerner in the mid-twentieth century was not an easy row to hoe.

The fact that he's been criticised roundly by both sides for his views is surely some kind of testimony to his even-handedness? He's no apologist for racism by any means: no hagiographer of Southern rights, unlike General Lee's biographer Douglas Southall Freeman.

If the time comes when we're unable to accept the value of trying to understand points of view different from our own, then we might as well close up shop on all types of historical writing, contemporary or ancient. Shelby Foote as a complex and fascinating man, and his book faithfully reflects both its author's perplexities and the conclusions he came to.

More than any other history of the Civil War I've read, it ends up embodying the unresolved heart of the conflict. You miss it at your peril.

Shelby Foote in Ken Burn's Civil War (1990)

Shelby Dade Foote, Jr.
(1916-2005)

Primary:


1. The Civil War: A Narrative. 3 vols. 1958-74. London: Pimlico, 1993.
   1. Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958)
   2. Fredericksburg to Meridian (1963)
   3. Red River to Appomattox (1974)
2. Shiloh: A Novel. 1952. London: Pimlico, 1992.

Secondary:


3. Catton, Bruce. Bruce Catton's Civil War: Three Volumes in One: Mr Lincoln's Army / Glory Road / A Stillness at Appomattox. 1951, 1952, 1953. New York: The Fairfax Press, 1984.
4. Catton, Bruce. The Centennial History of the Civil War. 3 vols. 1961-65.
   1. The Coming Fury. 1961. A Phoenix Press Paperback. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2001.
   2. Terrible Swift Sword. 1963. New York: Fall River Press / London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2009.
   3. Never Call Retreat. 1965. New York: Washington Square Press, 1967.
5. Catton, Bruce. Grant Takes Command. Maps by Samuel H. Bryant. 1969. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Limited, 1970.
6. Catton, Bruce, & William Catton. Two Roads to Sumter: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis and the March to the Civil War. 1963. Phoenix Press. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., n.d.
7. Chapman, C. Stuart. Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003.
8. Davis, William C., & Bell I. Wiley, ed. The Civil War: The Compact Edition. Fort Sumter to Gettysburg. The Image of War, 1861-1865, 1: Shadows of the Storm / 2: The Guns of ’62 / 3: The Embattled Confederacy. 1981 & 1982. Introduction by William C. Davis. Civil War Times. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 1998.
9. Davis, William C., & Bell I. Wiley, ed. The Civil War: the Compact Edition. Vicksburg to Appomattox. The Image of War, 1861-1865, 4: Fighting for Time / 5: The South Besieged / 6: The End of an Era. 1982 & 1983. Introduction by William C. Davis. Civil War Times. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 1998.
10. Freeman, Douglas Southall. Robert E. Lee: A Biography. 4 vols. 1934-35. Hudson River Editions. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962, 1988, 1943.
11. Freeman, Douglas Southall. Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command. 3 vols. 1942-43. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970-72.
    1. Manassas to Malvern Hill (1942)
    2. Cedar Mountain to Chancellorsville (1943)
    3. Gettysburg to Appomattox (1944)
12. Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. 2005. Simon & Schuster Lincoln Library. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
13. Grant, Ulysses S. Personal Memoirs and Selected Letters. Ed. Mary Drake McFeeley & William S. McFeeley. The Library of America, 50. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1990.
14. Guernsey, Alfred H., & Henry M. Alden. Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War: Contemporary Accounts and Illustrations from the Greatest Magazine of the Time. With 1000 Scenes, Maps, Plans and Portraits. 1866. The Fairfax Press. New York: Crown Publishers. Inc., n.d.
15. Harwell, Richard B., ed. The Civil War Reader: The Union Reader / The Confederate Reader. 1957-1958. Smithmark Civil War Library. New York: Smithmark Publishers Inc., 1994.
16. Henderson, Lieut.-Col. G. F. R., C.B. Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War. 1898. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909.
17. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Army Life in a Black Regiment and Other Writings. 1870. Ed. R. D. Madison. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997.
18. Holzer, Harold, ed. The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now. The Library of America, 192S. The Bicentennial Edition. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2009.
19. Lee, Captain Robert E. Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee. 1904. Introduction by Gamaliel Bradford. New York: Smithmark Publishers Inc., 1995.
20. Lincoln, Abraham. The Living Lincoln: The Man, His Mind, His Times, and the War He Fought, Reconstructed From His Own Writings. Ed. Paul M. Angle & Earl Schenk Miers. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955.
21. Lincoln, Abraham. Speeches and Writings 1832-1858: Speeches, Letters and Miscellaneous Writings / The Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher. 1989. The Library of America, 45. The Bicentennial Edition. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2009.
22. Lincoln, Abraham. Speeches and Writings 1859-1865: Speeches, Letters and Miscellaneous Writings / Presidential Messages and Proclamations. Ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher. 1989. The Library of America, 46. The Bicentennial Edition. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2009.
23. Longstreet, General James. From Manassas to Appomattox: Memoirs of the Civil War in America. 1896. Introduction by Jeffry D. Wert. Perseus Books Group. Boston: Da Capo Press Inc., 1992.
24. McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. The Oxford History of the United States, VI. Ed. C. Vann Woodward. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
25. Morgan, Sarah. The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman. 1913. Ed. Charles East. 1991. A Touchstone Book. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
26. Nevins, Allan. Ordeal of the Union. 8 vols. 1947-71. New York & London: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975.
    1. Ordeal of the Union, Volume I: Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847–1852 (1947)
    2. Ordeal of the Union, Volume II: A House Dividing, 1852–1857 (1947)
    3. The Emergence of Lincoln, Volume I: Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos, 1857–1859 (1950)
    4. The Emergence of Lincoln, Volume II: Prologue to Civil War, 1859–1861 (1950)
    5. The War for the Union, Volume I: The Improvised War, 1861–1862 (1959)
    6. The War for the Union, Volume II: War Becomes Revolution, 1862–1863 (1960)
    7. The War for the Union, Volume III: The Organized War, 1863–1864 (1971)
    8. The War for the Union, Volume IV: The Organized War to Victory, 1864–1865 (1971)
27. Sandburg, Carl. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years. 2 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, Inc., 1926.
28. Sandburg, Carl. Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. 4 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1939.
29. Shaara, Michael. The Killer Angels. Maps by Don Pitcher. 1974. New York: Ballantine Books, 1975.
30. Sherman, William T. From Atlanta to the Sea. 1875. Ed. B. H. Liddell Hart. 1961. London: The Folio Society, 1962.
31. Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. London: Andre Deutsch Limited, 1962.
32. Woodward, C. Vann, ed. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War. 1981. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993.

Ken Burns: The Civil War (1990 / 2015)

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Winston Churchill (1904)

Winston S. Churchill
The World Crisis (1923-31) & The Second World War (1948-53)

Winston Churchill: The World Crisis (1923-31)

The World Crisis. 1923-31. 5 vols. Introduction by Martin Gilbert. 2005. London: The Folio Society, 2007.

So, after all that, what of Winston Churchill himself?

He wrote a number of history books of various types - four collections of his despatches as a war correspondent; two biographies (one of his father, and the other of his distant ancestor John Churchill); an autobiography of his early life; a 4-volume history of the English-Speaking Peoples; and (perhaps most significantly) an 11-volume history of his involvement in the two world wars.

The whole kit and caboodle was collected in a limited edition, 38-volume set after his death. However, this was not quite so useful a service as it might seem. As Richard M. Langworth comments in his article "The Sordid History of the Collected Works"

The Collected Works are less important than their spectacular appearance suggests. However incomplete, they do constitute the first collected edition. But lacking the original texts, they are not bibliographically compelling: “expensive reprints,” as one cynic put it. Collectors prefer to hold a book in the form Sir Winston first gave it to the world (errors and all). So the Works will never replace first editions.

I have to confess to having read all of these books - with the exception of Thoughts and Adventures (1932), which I bought just the other day - at one time or another. The History of the English-Speaking Peoples I saved up for carefully at an impressionable age, as a pre-teen, buying volume after volume at what then seemed the extortionate price of $6 each. I don't think I'd find it quite so compelling now, but it's still sitting there on the shelf.

The Marlborough biography is a brilliant piece of work, but so - somewhat less expectedly - is the life of his father. Churchill does a good job of the solid political biography, and dramatises the tragedy of Lord Randolph Churchill's fall from power with unexpected subtlety and compassion.

The most valuable of the lot are undoubtedly the two sets of war memoirs, which together add up to an immensely useful UK political insider's history of his own times. There is, to be sure, much he's blind to or overlooks, but then the same could be said of any autobiographer.

The unvarnished nature of the narrative proves actually to be one of its principal strengths. He is, like that other practical politician Julius Caesar, playing to the gallery much of the time, but (again like Caesar) the audience he has in mind is as much posterity as his own contemporaries.

Winston Churchill: Collected Works (38 vols: 1973-76)

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
(1874-1965)

Primary:


1. Frontiers and Wars: His Four Early Books, Covering His Life as Soldier and War Correspondent, Edited into One Volume. ["The Story of the Malakand Field Force" (1898); "The River War" (1899); "London to Ladysmith via Pretoria" (1900); "Ian Hamilton's March" (1900)]. 1962. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
2. Lord Randolph Churchill. 2 vols. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1906.
3. The World Crisis. Introduction by Martin Gilbert. 2005. London: The Folio Society, 2007.
   1. 1911-1914 (1923)
   2. 1915 (1923)
   3. 1916-1918 (1927)
   4. The Aftermath (1929)
   5. The Eastern Front (1931)
4. My Early Life: A Roving Commission. 1930. The Fontana Library. London: Collins, 1959.
5. Thoughts and Adventures. 1932. London: Thomas Butterworth, Ltd., 1933.
6. Marlborough: His Life and Times. 2 vols. 1947. London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1966 & 1969.
   1. Book One: Consisting of Volumes I and II of the Original Work (1933 & 1934)
   2. Book Two: Consisting of Volumes III and IV of the Original Work (1936 & 1938)
7. Great Contemporaries. 1937. The Fontana Library. London: Collins, 1965.
8. The Second World War. 6 vols. London: Cassell & Co., Ltd., 1948-54.
   1. The Gathering Storm (1948)
   2. Their Finest Hour. 1949. 5th Edition (1955)
   3. The Grand Alliance (1950)
   4. The Hinge of Fate. 1951. 2nd Edition (1951)
   5. Closing the Ring (1952)
   6. Triumph and Tragedy. 1954. 2nd edition (1954)
9. The Second World War. And an Epilogue on the Years 1945 to 1957: Abridged One-Volume Edition. 1948-1954. Ed. Dennis Kelly. London: Cassell, 1959.
10. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. 1956-58. 4 vols. London: Cassell, 1972.
    1. The Birth of Britain (1956)
    2. The New World (1956)
    3. The Age of Revolution (1957)
    4. The Great Democracies (1958)

Secondary:


11. Beevor, Antony. The Second World War. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2012.
12. Bryant, Arthur. The Turn of the Tide, 1939–1943: A Study Based on the Diaries and Autobiographical Notes of Field Marshall The Viscount Alanbrooke. London: Collins, 1957.
13. Bryant, Arthur. Triumph in the West, 1943–1946: A Study Based on the Diaries and Autobiographical Notes of Field Marshall The Viscount Alanbrooke. London: Collins, 1959.
14. Churchill, Randolph & Gilbert Martin. Winston S. Churchill. 8 vols. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1966-88.
    1. Randolph Churchill: Youth, 1874-1900 (1966)
    2. Randolph Churchill: Young Statesman, 1901-1914 (1967)
    3. Martin Gilbert: The Challenge of War, 1914-1916 (1971)
    4. Martin Gilbert: The Stricken World, 1916-1922 (1975)
    5. Martin Gilbert: Prophet of Truth, 1922-1939 (1976)
    6. Martin Gilbert: Finest Hour, 1939-1941 (1983)
    7. Martin Gilbert: Road to Victory, 1941-1945 (1986)
    8. Martin Gilbert: Never Despair, 1945-1965 (1988)
15. Gilbert, Martin. Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years. London: Macmillan London Limited, 1981.
16. Holt, Thaddeus. The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War. 2004. Rev. ed. 2007. Introduction by Michael Howard. 2 vols. London: The Folio Society, 2008.
17. Johnson, Air Vice Marshall J. E. 'Johnnie', & Wing Commander P. B. 'Laddie' Lucas, ed. Glorious Summer: The Story of the Battle of Britain. Stanley Paul and Co. Ltd. London: Random Century, 1990.
18. Liddell-Hart, Basil H. History of The First World War. 1930. Rev. ed. 1934. London: Pan Books, 1972.
19. Liddell-Hart, Basil H. History of The Second World War. 1970. London: Pan Books, 1982.
20. The Penguin Hansard. Vol. 1: From Chamberlain to Churchill. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940.
21. Taylor, A. J. P. The First World War: An Illustrated History. 1963. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.
22. Taylor, A. J. P. The Origins of the Second World War. 1961. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
23. Tuchman, Barbara W. The Guns of August. 1962. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1963.
24. Wilmot, Chester. The Struggle for Europe. 1952. London: The Reprint Society Ltd. by arrangment with Wm. Collins, Sons and Co. Ltd., 1954.
25. Zamoyski, Adam. Warsaw 1920: Lenin's Failed Conquest of Europe. HarperPress. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.

Randolph Churchill & Martin Gilbert: Winston S. Churchill (8 vols: 1966-88)

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John Burrow: A History of Histories (2007)

Burrow, John. A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century. 2007. Penguin History. London: Penguin, 2009.

All in all, I don't regret the time I've spent poring over the works of any of the twelve writers above. Their lack of 'professionalism' and academic qualifications as historians is not really a problem for me. I quite understand that histories of this type are of little use to the increasingly specialised denizens of academic institutions. History is too vital a subject to be confined solely to them, however.

Just as one can end up learning more of the Napoleonic era from Tolstoy or even C. S. Forester's Hornblower books than from exhaustive tabulations of European economic trends in the early industrial era, so - in line with Macaulay's view that "history begins in novel and ends in essay" - I'd recommend going straight to the fountainhead of Thucydides or Tacitus before turning to the latest analytical account of some trifling aspect of the Ancient World.

It is, however, definitely a "both and" than an "either or" situation. The combination of meteorology and social history in the book pictured below gave me more incidental insights into the infamous "haunted summer" of Lord Byron, Dr. Polidori, & Percy and Mary Shelley on Lake Geneva than any number of strictly literary analyses!

William K. & Nicholas P. Klingaman: The Year Without Summer (2014)

Klingaman, William K. & Nicholas P. Klingaman. The Year without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano that Darkened the World and Changed History. St. Martin's Griffin. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2013.

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• category - History: Authors

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