A dreadful victory

The trouble with great historical narratives is the volume of detail they demand: tidal waves of personal and place names, of dates and sums of money, of CVs, menus, fashion notes, light brown hair and glacial moraines, which after 25 pages remind the untrained reader of the showing and telling of holiday snaps. Yet history without detail is worse than hot air, just a deflated party balloon caught on a hawthorn tree. Details have not merely to be included, but used as crampons up the rock-face of past time. Ways and means to ration and present them exist, and the most convenient is the footnote; it is a pity that Dr Barker’s publishers do not seem to have heard of it. They make her squeeze into the text stuff that holds up the narrative, and post shrivelled gobbets of information to the end-notes, where no one can see them. As a result this fine book is too long, and in places it drifts.