In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War by David Reynolds

I once had the amazing good fortune to meet Cambridge historian David Reynolds, and I think I flummoxed him a little (in the good way) when I told him straight off that I was a great fan of his work. Britannia Overruled is a classic reference text for anyone interested in studying Anglo-American relations, and Rich Relations is an intriguing look at Anglo-American relations during the ‘American occupation of Britain’ in World War II. So perhaps in keeping with his Anglo-American theme, Reynolds’ book focuses on a true Anglo-American output — Winston Churchill — and more specifically, Churchill’s impressive six-volume history of the Second World War.

In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War by David Reynolds

One of the quotations often attributed to Churchill is the pithy and somewhat flippant declaration: ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it’. Brave words from any politician, but in a sense Churchill really did write the history that would later lionise his name. After the Conservative Party’s massive defeat at the polls in 1945, Churchill was left as the Leader of a tiny Opposition and faced with the need to earn some kind of income to offset the extremely high tax rates that the Labour Party had recently imposed. With reams of personal papers at his disposal — as well as a number of highly sensitive government documents that just happened to have come with him when he left Downing Street — he set out to write a detailed history of the war that had just been won.

There’s been so much written about Winston Churchill from just about every possible angle, from admiring hagiographies to damnation with only the faintest of praise. Reynolds’ approach to this study of Churchill after the war is both novel and utterly fascinating. Churchill is as much a larger-than-life figure in this day and age as he was during his lifetime…and so there’s something terribly human about a Churchill who is desperate to cut a good deal with his publishers, hoping to secure an advance on his writing to prevent having to sell his beloved Chartwell, or a Churchill who is worried that he might (A) die or (B) win the next General Election (both of which seemed to be equally unwelcome possibilities) before he can finish the next volume of his book. It’s a side of Churchill that isn’t often seen, even by historians.

Reynolds writes with equally painstaking detail about the writing process, picking through multiple drafts and identifying selections that were cut out to avoid offending living politicians or relationships with Britain’s allies, or even to conceal vital state secrets such as the truth about the codebreakers of Bletchley Park. It’s history at the nitty-gritty level, writing about the history of history being written — and in being written, how that history shapes people’s perceptions of the very immediate past and perpetuates that image into the future. It’s certainly not a surprise that the book won the 2004 Wolfson History Prize, because Reynolds proves that it is indeed possible to write a history book that can appeal to historians and ‘lay readers’ alike. As he says in his introduction, ‘…Churchill the historian has shaped our image of Churchill the Prime Minister’, and In Command of History deftly illustrates how successful Winston Churchill actually was in writing the history that would later be so kind to him.

Link: ‘The Prime Minister and His Trollope’

As I was dredging my hard drive earlier today, I came across a PDF file that I’d downloaded and saved more than three years ago and seem to have completely forgotten about since then. Seeing as how it directly pertains to the title of this blog, I’d be a fool not to post it — so here’s the original file at its original location.

Peter Catterall: ‘The Prime Minister and His Trollope: Reading Harold Macmillan’s Reading’ (Cercles Occasional Papers No. 1)

This is the sort of research that I really enjoy — finding some obscure half-detail on your subject and realising that it might be worth chasing after, and then discovering that you can actually produce a tidy piece of research from it. (In typical Catterall style, the footnotes are well worth reading in their own right.)

- SG

A Gentle Madness by Nicholas A. Basbanes

Switching topics away from political history for the moment (it’s not as if I’m going to run out of THOSE books any time soon) to one of my other favourite subjects — books themselves.

A Gentle Madness by Nicholas A. Basbanes

This is the first book in Nicholas Basbanes’ series of books about books and those who love books, and the title gives an indication of the type of people that Basbanes intends to examine in this particular volume. Several centuries ago, a noted scholar once referred to bibliophilia as a ‘gentle madness’ — and gentle it may be, but the love of books and the desire to possess them is a passion that is often all-consuming. The freakishly high amounts of money bid for certain rare books at auctions illustrates just how far people are willing to go to obtain, say, a well-preserved copy of a 42-line Gutenberg Bible, and naturally many book collectors consider themselves to be a world apart from someone who collects fine art or old wines or even something like Pez dispensers. Books have a certain pull that many people (yours truly included) often find difficult to resist, and through the centuries this pull has given rise to a number of bizarre situations — of people being murdered for their books, of collectors outbidding their own book dealers in a fast-paced auction, and one story of a man who spent the better part of a decade stealing books from university libraries and collections all over the United States. Again, gentle it may be, but a madness nonetheless.

The subject matter aside, it is fairly easy to tell that this is Basbanes’ first foray into his subject. I’ve read Patience and Fortitude and Among the Gently Mad, two of his other books in this particular series, and in comparison A Gentle Madness suffers a bit from a marked lack of organisation. The tale he tells of the history of book collecting tends to meander, and in parts it reads like little more than an auctioneer’s account book of the final prices paid for certain rare books in big-name auctions. It’s all well and good to know what books have been universally popular through the ages, but after a while it reads like a laundry list — or, to use a more poetic allusion, a paen to conspicuous consumption.

Interestingly enough, the other problem I found in A Gentle Madness was not something that the author could really control: The fact is, most of the bibliomaniacs he mentions in this book are not very nice people. Basbanes talks about an elderly woman (I hesitate to use the word ’spinster’, but it fits her all too well) who spent decades building up a collection of children’s books…but she refused to let a co-worker’s eight-year-old daughter come into the library where she kept her books, and according to friends seemed to lose all interest in a book once she had acquired it. That sort of book collecting makes me feel vaguely ill — you might as well walk along the beach and pick up seashells for free, if you have that kind of attitude toward book-collecting. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, what is more wretched than a collector of first editions who has lost the power to read them?

Basbanes’ book almost serves as a warning about the dangers of the bibliophile’s relentless drive to build the biggest and best collection of books that has ever existed before or since. If nothing else, A Gentle Madness acts as a not-so-gentle reminder that there is really no difference between a rabid collector of books and a rabid collector of shot glasses or Star Wars figures or limited-edition dinner plates with pictures of fluffy kittens on them. The former only thinks his collection is superior because of its intellectual nature — in reality, both kinds of collectors would do well to step back and examine their overall collecting habits once in a while.