Reading history

I’ve been on a bit of a reading tear lately with a focus on the first and second world wars. (You remember them—they were in all the newspapers.)

Most of the stuff I’ve been ingesting has been academic in focus, and here’s what I’ll say about that: those professors just LURV their long paragraphs. I mean, we’re talking many that run on for a page. Even back in the day when I was in academia I had a low tolerance for this sort of thing—it’s literally hard to read then that amount of text is piled up.

A major offender is A.J.P. Taylor, even though he’s writing for the general reader. But I have more charges to file against him. In The First World War, an Illustrated History, he proposes that Archduke Franz Ferdinand “set the fuse” for the war when he married Countess Sophie Chotek.

(He married her for love, without the approval of the Hapsburg court, and in that petrified environment she was not allowed to be by his side at any official function. But in his role as Inspector General of the Austro-Hungarian army, he could have his consort receive all honors due an IG’s wife. So when the chance arose to review the army in Bosnia in June 1914 he snatched it and took Sophie with him.)

It’s quite a stretch to make such a direct connection and as far as I know he’s the only historian ever to do so.

But then I pulled out The Origins of the Second World War, in which Taylor shows himself to be not only pompous and condescending, but also the biggest apologist for Hitler this side of David Irving.

Seems Hitler never wanted the war, it was entirely the result of actions by everyone else (French, British, Italians, Americans, Soviets, other Germans, possibly even Ecuadoreans), but not Hitler.

Obviously I’m not the first person to pick this up, because in the second edition he spends considerable time defending his position: basically all the other historians are wrong & he’s right and so there! “I have a clean record here.”

So—pomposity and petulance as well as painfully long paragraphs. Not a winning combination.