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In
1994 I published 'Eminent Churchillians', the title a nod
to Lytton Strachey's revisionist masterpiece 'Eminent Victorians'.
I wanted to draw some uncomfortable truths about the 1940-55
era to public attention, and as a result the book created
quite a stir. My first bestseller, it received no lukewarm
reviews - people seemed either to love or to hate it.
Each chapter has a
very different point to make:
'The House of Windsor and the Politics
of Appeasement' centres on the anti-Churchill stance adopted
by the Royal Family between 1935 and 1940, which in certain
different circumstances could easily have denied him the premiership.
'Lord Mountbatten and the Perils of Adrenalin'
makes the case for the impeachment of the last Viceroy of
India, on the grounds that his cheating over the India-Pakistan
frontier and his headlong rush towards partition led to around
one million deaths in Punjab and the North-West Frontier in
1947-48.
'The Tories Versus Churchill During the
'Finest Hour'' examines the depth of hostility to Winston
Churchill amongst his Conservative and National Government
colleagues, even while he was delivering his great wartime
speeches as prime minister.
'Churchill, Raced and the 'Magpie Society'
explores the way in which successive Conservative Governments
between 1951 and 1960 privately deplored the way in which
mass New Commonwealth immigration was changing the nature
of British society, but did nothing to control immigration
until that change was well underway.
'Walter Monckton and the 'Retreat from
Reality'' castigates the appeasement of the trade unions by
the Conservatives in the 1950s, which led to many of the industrial
relations problems which so nearly wrecked Britain economically
in the 1970s.
'Patriotism: The Last Refuge of Sir Arthur
Bryant' exposed the Nazi sympathies of one of Britain's best-loved
and most admired popular historians.
These were harsh, aggressive and uncompromising
essays, written by an Angry Young Historian, in terms so unmeasured
that I would probably hesitate to adopt them today. Yet I
believe each of my arguments still stands, and indeed some
of them - such as that Lord Mountbatten readjusted the India-Pakistan
border in India's favour after the Radcliffe Commission had
drawn it - constitute the accepted historical version of events.
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