If you do not have access to Ken Burn’s outstanding documentary on the US Civil War this is an okay introduction to the subject. It is a straightforward and relatively concise narrative of the war, started by the Southern States as a repudiation of a democratic election, the result of which offered a glimmer of a threat to their brutal slavery practices.

But there are better introductions to the subject, and there are certainly better books by John Keegan: This displays little of the novelty of Keegan’s “Six Armies in Normandy” or the insight of “Mask of Command”. Rather it seems to me to have been published to capitalise on Keegan’s reputation and little else.

It lacks editing with much repetition. Some of his judgements seem bizarre – the drawing of a lineal relationship between Sherman’s practice of total war, brutal as that was, and Hitler’s campaigns of the twentieth century is strange and certainly under-argued. But this is as nothing to his apparent endorsement (contradicting himself from a few pages earlier) of Bedford Forest’s judgement of the inferiority of black troops: citing a probable war criminal and subsequent Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan on this issue is both dubious and offensive irrespective Bedford Forest’s genius as a cavalry commander.

Towards the end of the book brief discussions of Walt Whitman and the impact of the Civil War on development of American revolutionary socialism redeem the book somewhat. It is a pity that Keegan did not explore the war from perspectives such as these rather than the more conventional approach that he adopted.

Overall a book to file under the “could do better” category for John Keegan. A reader looking for insights to the American Civil War could also certainly do better – time spent on Shelby Foote’s 3000 page magisterial work on the war, or Doris Kearns-Goodwin’s exquisite biography of Lincoln, Team of Rivals, would never be wasted.

In June 1944 in the French industrial town of Tulle the Germans declared they were going to execute 120 people in a reprisal for a defeat by the resistance. They began hanging them from the balconies and lamp posts of their own town. Having murdered 99 innocent men aged between 17 and 42 they stopped, possibly because they simply ran out of rope.

This sort of chilling anecdote regularly illuminates this fine narrative history of the French Resistance. The book strives to outline the breadth and depth of the French resistance, in the process remembering key figures such as Moulin in their full human complexity and capturing the excitement, horror, heroism and tragedy of this aspect of the struggle against the Nazis.

A central theme of the books is how the heroism of the Resistants was taken advantage of by De Gaulle, who derived the political benefits of the struggle while barely acknowleging the sacrifice of the resistants. Nevertheless, while always clear in his sympathies to the Resistants of both Left and Right, the author does not shirk from addressing some of the atrocities and excesses of those same people.

The climax of the book is, perhaps inevitably, the liberation of Paris, in many ways an aberration in the Second World War. Elsewhere, including parts of France, there was an almost total failure of the Allies to support the national insurrections against the Nazis, with terrible consequences from Prague to Warsaw.

Overall an excellent introduction to this period of history in all its bloodshed and confusion.

Summary: a fine account of the liberation of Paris

A detailed account, in the mould of Cornelius Ryan’s great second world war trilogy, of the 1944 Paris insurrection. The story of its initiation and its relief is drawn from the personal reminisences of participants and witnesses, French, American and German.

This leads to a gripping and at times very moving book. Though the vastness of the cast occassionally makes it difficult to keep track of characters this never detracts from the coherence of the sprawling narrative.

The account is broadly pro-de Gaulle in its sympathies, but otherwise the authors keep to themselves their views of the wider controversies associated with the relief of Paris, such as the decision by the resistance to stage an insurrection in the first place and the relationships between the resistance in France and de Gaulle’s government in exile. The arguments of various participants are outlined and examples of the tensions are recounted but the authors don’t exercise much their own judgements rather letting many of the real people speak for themselves and the readers decide.(For more on these controversies see Mathew Cobb’s The Resistance)

An exemplary work of journalism rather than history, and none the worse for it.

Summary: an intriguing investigation into the squalid end of a dubious man, but brilliant writer

The death of the playwright Christopher Marlow, supposedly in a pub brawl over a bill (“the reckoning”) has long been a source of speculation. Marlowe, after all, had a reputation as a spy and blasphemer that could have made him powerful enemies. Also, the death blow, a dagger wound to the eye penetrating the brain, suggested execution rather that a scrap: such wounds were often the way the coup de grace was delivered to fallen enemy, particularly if armoured, such as at Agincourt.

Taking the murder of Christopher Marlowe as its starting point this book delves into the evil world of the Elizabethan police state. For me the revelation of the book was not so much the explanation of the killing of Marlowe, convincing as that was. Rather it related to the nature of the totalitarian system that Elizabeth and her ministers sought to impose, so much so that they themselves originated many of the plots that they claimed to have uncovered, their purpose entrapment of real, or more often imagined, enemies. The book would be a fine companion to Alice Hodge’s excellent study of the Jesuit mission to England “God’s Secret Agents”, which explores the same milieu from the perspective of the hunted.

Marlowe emerges from the investigation an ambiguous character – probably a nasty manipulator and betrayer of some close to him, but, something that the author does not seem to have considered, perhaps someone ultimately sympathetic to the Catholic cause and caught up like so many others in the brutal machinations of the nascent police state.

Overall an exemplary demonstration of rigorous archival research and analysis to produce a highly coherent and readable account of a complex and confusing mystery.

Max Hastings’ Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45 is an elegantly written, consistently gripping account of Churchill’s tenure as wartime prime minister.

The author’s central purpose in the book is to demonstrate Churchill’s historical greatness. However, paradoxically, it is the clarity of this purpose that is the book’s central flaw. Mr Hastings’ effort to show the giant that was Churchill is such a dominant theme in the book that it tends to submerge some rather uncomfortable facts. For example: Churchill’s deeply ingrained racism and the degree of his culpability for the wartime Indian famine are only lightly touched upon; Hastings deals very superficially, and wholly in Churchill’s favour, with the persistent historical controversy regarding Churchill’s sacking of Auchinleck in North Africa in the immediate aftermath of the general’s successful reorganisation of the British Army into battle groups and his defeat of Rommel; he barely mentions Bill Slim and the fact that Britain’s greatest wartime general was relegated to the theatre that Churchill thought least of; and he excuses the prime minister’s flights of fancy and disasterous choices later in the war as the result, in large measure, of old age and stress.

This is not to deny the importance of Churchill as war leader: his insistence on continuing to fight after the fall of France was a demonstration of enormous moral courage; his understanding of the importance of drawing the USA into the war to have any hope of victory was more clear sighted than most of his contemporaries; his decision to sink the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir displayed the sort of ruthlessness that was essential to winning the war; his unsucccessful efforts at establishing a democratic Poland at the end of the war show a sense of decency and honour that contrast favourably with Stalin’s monstrousness and Roosevelt’s disinterest on this issue.

Mr Hastings book would have been even more interesting if he had allowed his portrait of Churchill to emerge from this sort of evidence rather than seeking to impose such an overwhelmingly heroic impression on much more complex material.

Nevertheless, it should be said that few readers could ever feel short-changed by Hastings’ historical writing, which is as ever humane and lucid, and the breadth and depth of his research is, as always, awesome.

Another Day of Life is one of the finest books about modern Angola and has a deserved reputation as a classic of modern war reportage. Kapuchinski was famed as the Polish Press Agency’s foreign correspondent and he travelled the world in the the 60’s and 70’s reporting on revolution and independence struggles in the Developing World. His eyewitness account of the coming of Angolan independence is one of his best works. The book, from the evacuation of the Portuguese, to the South African invasion and the beginnings of the Angolan civil war crackles with verisimilitude, and is rendered with a remarkable, almost poetic, elegance of language. 

He captures beautifully the city of Luanda and the surreality of its emptying of settlers in the face of decolonisation, the terror of road convoys through bloodily contested countryside, and ordinary rhythms of life that go on in the midst of cataclysm.

It is an extraordinary work of journalism, gripping as a thriller and moving as a tragedy. Beautiful.