Arthur Bryant
Sir Arthur Wynne Morgan Bryant, CH, CBE (18 February 1899 – 22 January 1985) was an English historian, columnist for The Illustrated London News and man of affairs.
He moved in high government circles, where his works were influential, being the favourite historian of three prime ministers: Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Harold Wilson.
He hated modern commercial and financial capitalism, he emphasised duty over rights, and he equated democracy with the consent of "fools" and "knaves".
[4] In 1919, he read Modern History at Queen's College, Oxford, obtaining distinction in the honours courses offered to ex-servicemen in 1920.
[2] Bryant started work at a school operated by the London County Council, where he developed a strong sense of social justice and became convinced that education would be an effective way of uniting the people.
[2] In 1929, after cataloguing the Shakerley family library, he was asked by a friend in publishing to produce a new biography of Charles II of England.
Yale Professor Frank W. Notestein suggested that he begin the work with Charles's escape following the Battle of Worcester, incorporating details of his earlier life into the narrative thereafter.
In January 1939, the National Book Club published a new English edition of Mein Kampf, for which Bryant wrote a foreword praising Hitler (with reservations: he denounced Nazi persecution of Jews) and comparing him to Benjamin Disraeli.
Unfinished Victory was a book which Bryant had published in January 1940; it dealt with recent German history, and explained sympathetically how Germany had rebuilt herself after World War I. Bryant asserted that certain German Jews had benefited from the economic crises and controlled the national wealth, and although he criticised the destruction of Jewish shops and synagogues, he declared that the Third Reich might produce "a newer and happier Germany in the future".
[7] Initially, most reviewers received the book positively, but after the 'phoney war' ended, public and elite opinion turned sharply against appeasement of any sort.
His English Saga, published at the end of that year, described England as "an island fortress...fighting a war of redemption, not only for Europe but for her own soul".
[8] Roberts says of his popular essays and books, "Bryant did a superb job in helping to stiffen the people's resolve by putting their sacrifices in historical context.
The shortcomings of these works, possibly combined with their unusual popularity, helped ensure that he never received the highest academic honours.
[2] His single major work in the decade was a two-volume collection of Alan Brooke, 1st Viscount Alanbrooke's diaries with additional commentary, The Turn of the Tide (1957) and The Triumph in the West (1959).
they are still considered essential reading for understanding the British Armed Forces during the war, although they have been superseded by the 2001 unexperguated edition, with criticism of people still alive in the 1950s.
He was a frequent lecturer, speaking at many of the leading cities and schools in Great Britain, as well as in the United States and fourteen European countries.
[13]Roberts also claimed that Bryant remained in indirect contact with the Nazis in early 1940, after the outbreak of World War II, and that these ties had been requested by the Foreign Secretary.
[14] Although professional historians were frequently negative about his best-sellers, Bryant's histories were explicitly praised by prime ministers Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Churchill, Attlee, Macmillan, Wilson, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher.
Another detractor is the British historian Andrew Roberts, who has said Bryant was in fact a Nazi sympathiser and fascist fellow-traveller, who only narrowly escaped internment as a potential traitor in 1940.
[16]Roberts's polemical essay, prompted by the opening of archive material on Bryant, has been followed (and rebutted) by Julia Stapleton's full academic study.
It involves problems of arrangement and writing so baffling that it is seldom attempted, and with reason, since, through compression and generalization on the one hand and the selection of misleading detail on the other, it can so easily lead to over-simplification and misrepresentation.
Unless those responsible for a nation's policy--in a parliamentary democracy the electors--can climb that tower, they cannot see the road along which they have come or comprehend their continuing destiny (The Age of Chivalry, 14).
