Roger Louis, Kerr Professor of English History and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin, former president of the American Historical Association, honorary CBE, editor-in-chief of the Oxford History of the British Empire, is one of those infuriating Americans who know more about our history than we do ourselves. In his fastness deep in the heart of Texas he runs a British Studies seminar. Since the university is also home to one of the finest collections of British 20th-century manuscripts to be found either side of the Atlantic, scholars from all over the world flock to work there. Professor Louis then strikes ruthlessly, bullying or cajoling the visitors into lecturing to his seminar. Over 30 years of its existence an extraordinary galaxy of all that is brightest and best in English letters has been subjected to such treatment. This is the fourth volume to be published of the resultant lectures.
In his introduction Louis points out that a lecture differs from a scholarly essay in that it ‘allows greater freedom in the expression of personal or subjective views. It permits and invites greater candour.’ There is another factor too. When one pays for an expensive meal by credit card in Tasmania or Baffin Island one secretly believes that the bill will never come home to roost and be debited to one’s account. In the same way, lecturers in darkest Texas never believe that the pundits will one day catch up with what they have said. They know that their audience will be intelligent and well informed but also that it is unlikely to contain experts in their own particular field. The temptation is great, not to be irresponsible, but to use broader brush- strokes than they usually allow themselves, to fly an occasional kite so as to see what reactions it provokes. If Alan Danchev, one of the most intelligent and balanced of contemporary historians, had been addressing his students at Nottingham, would he have turned quite so blind an eye to the bile and querulous self-pity which permeates Alanbrooke’s diaries? And was the editing of these diaries by Arthur Bryant really such a ‘travesty of the original’? Comparing his selection with the unexpurgated version, I was surprised how faithful Bryant was to the spirit of Alanbrooke’s text.
The subjects of these lectures are as disparate as the style of the lecturers, but sometimes they interrelate intriguingly. In his lecture Danchev alludes to the ‘brilliant miniature’ of Alanbrooke in Anthony Powell’s novel The Military Philosophers. Ferdinand Mount, who was Powell’s nephew, quotes the passage at length in his fascinating study of Dance to the Music of Time, in which he reflects how ‘the temporal atmospherics — the Zeitgeist or the vibes — are rendered in the book and what light they shed on that extraordinary period in our history’. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, for his part, in a lecture in which he daringly suggests that Evelyn Waugh was a kind and generous man, more convincingly maintains that the war trilogy was ‘truly Waugh’s masterwork … the finest English fiction to come out of the war’. Its only serious rival, he considers, are the three volumes of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time which cover the period of the second world war.
Of the 21 lectures reproduced in this volume, five have literary themes, five or six have loose connections with the idea of empire, the rest cover a wide spectrum of military, social and political life. Any idea that the seminar is open only to cosy anglophiles is dispelled by Richard Drayton, from Guyana, who ferociously attacks Anglo-American policy towards his country and cites it as proof that the myth of ‘liberal’ imperialism is an inadequate cloak for economic exploitation and political chicanery. He attacks Niall Ferguson with especial relish. ‘No professional historian of the British Empire,’ he states, shares ‘Ferguson’s simple and sunny view of its later history, but it was sweetly in tune with the British historical unconscious.’ In another lecture, Ferguson, neither particularly simple nor sunny when it comes to economic matters, uses the evidence of bond prices to argue that the first world war came as a surprise to those well-informed financiers and bankers whom Marxist historians would claim were its creators, and therefore that the war was not so obviously inevitable as is today conventionally accepted.
David Cannadine on C. P. Snow, Katharine Whitehorn sticking up for the Fifties, Anne Chisholm on Frances Partridge: not one of these 21 lectures is a dud and almost all of them are interesting and entertaining. The paradigm, perhaps, is John Darwin on Jack Gallagher, a figure little known outside academic circles yet of immense significance in the study of imperial history. Darwin’s lecture is a model of lucidity and good sense, telling the listener all that is essential about Gallagher’s theses and painting a sympathetic and lively portrait of the man himself. One day William Roger Louis is going to have to leave three quarters of these lectures on the cutting-room floor and produce a volume of Best of Britannia. Darwin’s lecture must be among the chosen; the selection of 20 or 30 others is going to be exceedingly difficult and make Louis a lot of enemies.
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