I happen to be a mild anglophile myself — becoming one was perhaps inevitable when you grew up in Eastern Europe in a certain milieu — and your review obviously made me interested in the book. I realise that it's impossible for you to cover all major topics and themes of this work, but I'll allow myself to ask a few questions:
- Does the author quote historical sources without any commentary, or does he take a more critical approach? I'm really interested in a work which explains how certain views of the British past, once held by the majority of historians, were a distortion of reality, or just plain wrong.
- How much did the author write about British dominions and dependencies like South Africa or Rhodesia?
- In your opinion, is his description of sir Oswald Mosley and the BUF objective and informative?
Anyways, thanks for continuing your work on HIVE. The Book Club should feel blessed to have people like you in their ranks. Cheers!
Hey again,
You'll have to excuse me for the somewhat late reply, it must've slipped through without me noticing. These are great questions. Though I wouldn't consider myself an Anglophile at all, I am interested in England/Anglosphere overall. You can't imagine world history without them.
1: Taylor is a revisionist through and through. For example, his view of British appeasement towards Hitler, and especially on Neville Chamberlain, is not negative at all. He thought it was the logical thing to do, and considered English diplomacy in the summer of 1939 to be a massive blunder on Britain's part. A remarkable observation to be made in 1965. He tried to do away with that over-emotional, Churchill-esque stance that many still keep today when talking about WWII.
2: Of all British colonies/dominions/territories, by far most attention goes to Ireland and India. South Africa is not mentioned much, and when it is, this is mostly because of Jan Smuts, who became a remarkable part of the British government for a couple of years during and after WWI. Rhodesia is not mentioned at all, like most African colonies ( excepting South Africa).
3: Mosley is mostly mentioned in his early years of political activism in the Labour party in 1930-1931. When he leaves, and later on forms the British Union of Fascist, he becomes electorally irrelevant. And Taylor tends to treat him as such; when you treat the history of a country of about 40 million people at the time, the BUF (about 20k members at its absolute peak) does not count for much. He was positive on Mosley's economic plans for the Labour party at the time (govt spending in infrastructure and the like to reduce unemployment, etc), which was reminiscent of both Roosevelt's New Deal and Hitler's infrastructural works. But don't read this book thinking you'll gain much info on Mosley. He's somewhat of a footnote.