April 15, 2007
Andrew Roberts IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:30 PM EST I haven’t read Roberts’s book either, so I’m in very good company. But I wonder if Andrew Roberts wasn’t somewhat constrained by the fact that his book is explicitly a sequel to Winston Churchill’s four-volume work of the same name that stopped in 1900. To be sure he must have found Churchill’s worldview congenial or he wouldn’t have taken on the task, but he is a tough act to follow, after all. I imagine that Johann Hari and Caroline Elkins have no use for Churchill any more than they do for Roberts, of course, his having saved the world and won a Nobel Prize for literature hardly compensating for his imperialist and capitalist views. Like campus hooligans, these sort of truly and unnecessarily personally nasty reviews always seems to come from the left. Maybe Ann Coulter has written some book reviews I haven’t read, however. I agree with Fredric Smoler that it is easy, especially with a book of this length and breadth, to compile a list of mistakes that should have been caught in manuscript. I just got an e-mail from a reader of one of my books pointing out, very politely, a stupid mistake on my part (I know, I really do, that radios don’t have electric motors in them). But—maybe I’m getting old—it seems to me that editors and copyeditors just don’t seem to try to catch them anymore. Spelling and punctuation gets fixed, but if the author writes that the sun rose in the west, well, that, it seems, is not their department anymore.
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