Likewise, his attacks on a left-liberal consensus in media, law and academia — which he sees as providing ideological and practical succour to terror — sometimes cross the line from argument to rant. Academics who once studied ‘the comparative history of parliaments or war finance ... are now more likely to be experts on gay and lesbian body art, serial killers or the persecution of witches, rivalling television in their populist pursuit of the lurid or trivial’. Deploring the ‘creed of multiculturalism’ and ‘cultural self-repudiation’, he states that ‘in Britain an entire television station, Channel 4, was progressively devoted to propagating it with programmes that are nowadays difficult to parody within the degraded tacky rubbish which it commissions’. This is the language of the tabloid columnist, not of the historian.

There’s no doubt Burleigh is onto something, but he’d draw more blood if he used less rage.

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