Quote Of The Day

BBC history magazine asks historians to name over rated figures from the past:

Churchill was chosen by the historian and former BBC journalist Christopher Lee, not on the basis of a wartime record which has already seen him chosen as Britain's most celebrated hero, but because of his ministerial and political failings much earlier in his career.

Quite a few of his Tory colleagues might have concurred with Lee's view of Churchill's hopeless judgment and over-zealous use of the military, at least right up until the summer of 1940. "If it had not been for the fact that he led Britain to victory in the second world war we would have scant memory of [him]," Lee reckons.

Well true.

One of them should have nominated Muhammed, just for the laughs as the BBC go into panic mode.

Renowned Historians

I must admit I found the tone of the BBC interview with David Irving a little bit surprising:

The renowned historian David Irving has watched the revolutions of 2011 with excitement - and notes that it's now the middle class, not the working class, that is making waves.

He has lived his life in the shadow, or the glow, of upheavel.

Born just months before the Anschluss of 1938, he was a Nazi for most of his adult life - as well as an innovative and influential writer and thinker.

He has been a historian of revolution, and at times an advocate of revolutionary change.

Now in his mid-nineties, his continuing passion for politics is reflected in the title of his most recent book How to Change the World - and in his keen interest in the Arab Spring.

As you can probably guess I've changed a couple of details in the report.

ps. Is this a euphemism?

"I certainly felt a sense of excitement and relief," he says, talking to me in his north London home, which is strolling distance from Hampstead Heath.

History Fail

Michael Tomasky gives his readers a quiz to test their historical knowledge. Question 1 is:

1. Arguably the first great work of history in the Enlightenment era was by Edward Gibbon and in six volumes described:

a. The Greco-Roman wars
b. The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
c. The "Mohametan" conquest of Iberia

He believes the answer is so obvious that "If you didn't get this one, you should have stopped right then and there.". However Edward Gibbon did not describe the "Rise and Fall" of the Roman Empire but the "Decline & Fall" as the name of his great work indicates. Gibbon starts at a point where Rome was near the peak of its powers.

Orlando Figes- Too Stupid To Troll

Academic feuds are notoriously unpleasant and vicious, so the fact that historian Orlando Figes wrote psuedonymous reviews of his rivals works on Amazon isn't remarkable.

What is incredible is that he is such a complete moron who can't even troll properly. He posts a number of comments praising himself and trashing his rivals which might be enough to raise suspicions that he might be him. So how did he cover his trail? He used the nom de plume "Historian" as well as "Orlando Birkbeck". Orlando is a historian at Birkbeck just in case you hadn't guessed.

How can anyone that stupid be a professor?

History Boys

After reading this critique of the late American historian Arthur Schlesinger I had intended to compare him unfavourably to another left wing historian A.J.P. Taylor whose political views were positively obnoxious, but whose personal politics did not drive his works. However it was an exceedingly dull post and had too many caveats and exceptions to be of any use to anyone. The article does offer get to the heart of what is wrong with Schlesinger's brand of liberalism that dominates the American left.

It's one thing to favor a bad policy, as liberals did in the controversy over busing in the 1970s. It's something else to castigate all opponents of busing as racists, and deny even the possibility that decent, intelligent people might have legitimate misgivings about that dubious policy. This "punitive, ram-it-down-their throats quality," in Nicholas Lemann's phrase, belonged to a politics that antagonized people on purpose, because they were deemed to have it coming.

The belief that your opponents aren't merely wrong but evil remains a core trait of the left to this day.

Onto A.J.P. Taylor, one of his political stances was an intense hostility to Germany. A claim in his Wikipedia entry, which I can't find else where, is that:

He held fierce Germanophobic views. In 1944, he was temporarily banned from the BBC following complaints about a series of lectures he gave on air in which he gave full vent to his anti-German feelings

The BBC banned someone for insulting Germany during World War 2? Whilst I could imagine the modern BBC being shocked at the thought of being judgmental I hadn't realised that this trend was so deep rooted. Actually given that the BBC was riddled with loyal Stalinists back then it suggests that Taylor's views must have been pretty wild to cause offence back then.