At times, Roberts reads like 1066 and All That, without the jokes. People are either “disgraceful” or “noble.” Good things include Teddy Roosevelt, Kipling, Reagan, General Pinochet, Nixon, Blair, Thatcher, Eisenhower, Ulstermen generally and the inventiveness of the English-speaking people in creating penicillin and lethal weapons systems. Bad things are Lloyd George (good at war, bad at peace), Wilfred Owen, the French, the Irish (in the First World War, with justification), Keynes, Heath, Wilson, Carter, Clinton, the UN, the EU, Hollywood, Gandhi, Princess Diana and Mountbatten.
This is a dreadful pity because, when Roberts seriously thinks through the dilemmas facing the last generation of British imperialists as they came to terms with their need for American support and the inevitable ceding of power that entailed, his history comes to life. His portrait of Lord Lansdowne, the great Whig grandee who, in 1917, decided that there should be a negotiated peace with Germany to stop the slaughter, captures the central dilemma of the war. Roberts accords Neville Chamberlain the seriousness he deserves. He picks open Churchill’s private conflicting feelings about the US.
Roberts’ other great enemy is Europe. Britain, acting as “an abusive parent” to the Common-wealth, entered the former European Economic Community in 1972, under the “moral cowardice” of Heath, in “the dour, drab defeatist Seventies.” His subtext seems to be that British foreign policy should return to a version of the “splendid isolation” of 1900, but in partnership with American global isolationism.
In many ways, Roberts has written a most unEnglish book. Its rhetorical insistence — “In the last century, the Union Jack has flown on Everest and the Stars and Stripes on the Moon” — drowns out the reasoned and discriminating judgments, the measured understanding of the other sides’ perspective, that are the best of English virtues.
For those of us who believe that the Enlightenment values that have held Europe and America together for 400 years remain our best defense in the struggle with Islamic terrorist unreason, Roberts should not be permitted so crudely to limit the debate to either signing up to the Bush crusade or accepting the white feather.
The challenge ahead for the English-speaking peoples, and for many others, is too serious for that.
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