War Diaries 1939-1945
Field Marshal Alanbrooke, eds Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman
(Weidenfeld, £25)
The wartime Chief of Imperial General Staff's unexpurgated diaries were predictably hyped on publication because they "reveal" that Churchill wasn't perfect. Churchill seems to have wanted someone to stand up to him in theory, but the reality was often not pretty: "12 April 1945. We had to consider this morning one of Winston's worst minutes I have ever seen. I can only believe that he must have been quite tight when he dictated it . . . My God! How little the world at large knows what his failings and defects are!" Thanks to the editors' careful presentation of Alanbrooke's daily frustrations, we can have a better idea now.
Forgotten Victory: The First World War, Myths and Realities
Gary Sheffield
(Headline, £20)
Academic historians and TV documentaries have attempted before to demonstrate that the first world war was not "futile", that British tactics developed through the war to achieve victory, and that Field Marshal Haig was not a callous butcher. Yet the perception persists that the Great War was "bad". Sheffield again sets out the arguments for an interpretation not exclusively based on the war poets, Alan Clark and Blackadder. The myth can take on ludicrous forms, as when John Prescott, in an introduction to a book about Hull soldiers, refers to "senior officers well behind enemy lines"; Sheffield passes by the "presumably unintentional suggestion that Haig and co defected to the Germans". One can only hope that his compassionate, clearly argued book will displace the Prescott version.
The Flame of Freedom: The Greek War of Independence 1821-1833
David Brewer
(John Murray, £25)
The British had a unique bond with the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman empire, from Shelley and Byron's support to the involvement of the British in the combined fleet at the Battle of Navarino, but the war has slipped out of our popular consciousness. There have (contrary to the publisher's claims) been English-language histories over the past 50 years, but this version, winningly told and handsomely illustrated, should become the starting point for any curious traveller. Brewer is careful to show the in-fighting among the rebels as well as their courage, and clear-sighted enough to set the war in its wider political context, as a clash of Great Powers.
Paris Between Empires 1814-52
Philip Mansel
(John Murray, £25)
Between the fall of Napoleon and the proclamation of his nephew as Napoleon III in 1852, Paris was a centre of political intrigue, high art and low morals. Philip Mansel elegantly weaves together the accounts of such witnesses as Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael and Stendhal to give a thematic overview of the Bourbon capital. He concentrates on the upper classes, and is at his best when his characters throw themselves into their roles as tragic heroes. When the Duc de Berri was fatally stabbed by a Bonapartist outside the Opera, he had the presence of mind to make his final speech: "I am dead! I am dead! I have the dagger!" In fact, he took six hours to die, an episode poignantly evoked here.
Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story
John Bossy
(Yale, £18.95)
Microhistory has a tendency to concentrate on the twigs at the expense of the tree, but when done successfully, as here, it is wonderfully rewarding. This is Bossy's second book about cloak-and-dagger activity in the French embassy in Elizabeth I's London. Elizabeth set her spy network to discover which way Catholic France might lean if England went to war with Spain, and her spymaster, Walsingham, came up with the goods, as Bossy's detective work shows. This is microhistory with macrohistorical context, minutely argued and sympathetically written.
Backing Hitler
Robert Gellately
(Oxford, £19.99)
Professor Gellately has combed through the German media of the 1930s and 1940s to conclude that "the great majority of the German people soon became devoted to Hitler and they supported him to the bitter end in 1945". Unlike Daniel Goldhagen, who argued that historic German anti-Semitism permitted the worst crimes of the regime, Gellately shows that popular support "was attained for many reasons, some of the most important of which had nothing to do with the persecution of the Jews". The book is overwhelmingly argued, if sometimes haltingly written.
