Professor Roger Louis’s own expertise is in British imperial history; he edited the three-volume Oxford History of the British Empire. For years past, he has run seminars at the Harry Ransome Humanities Research Center at Austin, Texas, which holds ample stores of British literary and historical manuscripts; he invites leading dons and critics from Great Britain to discuss their current work, and has secured some unusually fine papers. This is his third collection of their essays; it covers many aspects of the history of this country during the 20th century.
Old-fashioned, party-centred, parliamentary history hardly appears. David Butler gives an account of how studies of general elections have developed, and produces the origin of the word psephology: coined by Frank Hardie at Pembroke high table in Oxford for R. B. McCallum, the author of the first of the Nuffield studies that Butler has carried on. Great men do not make much of a showing, either; though Peter Marsh discusses acutely the impact of Joseph Chamberlain’s business career on his political insights, and Kenneth Morgan looks at the young Lloyd George as a pro-Boer, coupling him in that role with the staider Keir Hardie. Shula Marks presents a view of Smuts, dominated by fears of the black man, a long way from the imperial image on which white historians and sculptors have brought most of us up.
The Great War against the Kaiser’s Germany appears only in a deft appraisal by Max Egremont of Siegfried Sassoon; the war against Hitler only in a discussion by Jose Harris of Keith Hancock’s series of civil histories of how it was conducted from Whitehall. The Suez debacle is re-examined by Keith Kyle, turned historian after a spell as a foreign correspondent in Washington at the time it happened – a particularly lively cross-cut between history and personal observation.
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