September 11, 2015

Finest Hour 165, Autumn 2014

Page 19

By ANDREW ROBERTS

Martin Gilbert has a respect for what used to be called “the general readership,” which, despite everything, does still exist.

“Chronology, chronology,” Martin Gilbert once said to me, “chronology is all: it’s the key to proper history-writing.” He is right, and for all that some fashionable modern theories of history like to play around with chronology, adopting thematic or determinist approaches, Martin’s theory is still by far the best one, and I suspect always will be. His insistence on telling the reader what happened next, with utter integrity, rather than trying to extrapolate political or philosophical theorems from events, allows a narrative to emerge that permits the reader to exercise his or her own judgment about the events described.

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Martin’s history-writing is therefore directly in the tradition of the great historians of the past, people who trusted their readers rather than hoping to lecture, change, indoctrinate, or let alone mislead them. In that sense he is a far greater teacher than the likes of Eric Hobsbawm, E.H. Carr, André Deutsch, E.P. Thompson, Manning Clark, Christopher Hill, Howard Zinn and others whose representations of the past were driven by a desire to impose an overarching ideology, rather than simply telling their readers what actually happened. Perhaps for that very reason, Martin has never really been properly acknowledged by academia for what he undoubtedly is: one of our greatest living historians.

Unlike some other historians, Martin is always too much of a genuine and natural democrat to want to indoctrinate; he has a respect for what used to be called “the general readership,” which despite everything does still exist. He believes that having been given the facts— and there is no greater dispenser of facts alive today than he—a reasonable person will come to morally defensible, intelligent conclusions. In a sense it’s a basis of the civilisation about the defence of which so many of Martin’s books dwell. It lies at the heart of the Judeo-Christian concepts of open debate and free interaction of ideas, to which Martin dedicated perhaps the most active (certainly in terms of numbers of books published) intellectual life of any front-rank historian.

Martin’s Jewishness is a vitally important part of his life and work, which comes out no more powerfully than in his books on the Holocaust. In them, the reader is allowed to sense the horrific evils of totalitarianism without gratuitously or condescendingly spelling them out. The sheer humanity of Martin’s books spring directly from his lifelong commitment to and celebration of Judeo-Christian values. Wherever he could find examples of people acting decently, even in the most unpromising circumstances, he made sure to let the stories be told.

Chronology is of course epicentral to Martin’s official biography of Winston Churchill. As Martin explained to me when I first met him—when I was writing a biography of Lord Halifax in the late 1980s—it is only by trying to know what Churchill knew at any one time that one can possibly judge him, and that could only be achieved through a mastery of the sometimes massively complex chronology of his life and career.

That is why Martin created the vast card-index system chronicling virtually every day of Churchill’s life. Who knew what, when, and how they acted upon information is the very stuff of history; only through it can what Churchill called “the grievous inquest of history” sit in fair judgment.

Which is also why Martin was such a good choice as a member of Sir John Chilcot’s Inquiry into the Iraq War. Here Martin was in the service of the nation just as much as any of the heroes about whom he wrote in his books on the two world wars.

A giant of historiography who rejects the modish approaches and cleaves to chronology, narrative and the very best practices of his profession; a Stakhanovite worker in the sheer number of works he published, every one of which is of high quality; a true believer in the superiority of Judeo-Christian values over totalitarianism; a friend who would always help fellow historians, however junior. That is Sir Martin Gilbert.

Dr. Roberts is an historian and journalist, the author of numerous books on Churchill’s life and times. His newest book is Napoleon: A Life.