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Guy Rundle
posted 6 November 2006

The Swedish Academy is famous for the people who it didn't give the Nobel literature prize to - Tolstoy, Borges, Sontag are high on that list - but equally bizarre are the ones who got it, from Sully-Prudhomme, to Carl Spitteler, and who of course can forget the great Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson? But surely among the oddest recipients was Winston Churchill, who received the medallion in 1953 - really, as a sort of thank you for saving Europe, but ostensibly for his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

In this multi-volume extravaganza, Churchill, using material generated by a team of researchers, argued for bringing the long-separated histories of the British Empire and the United States together once more, in order to see a range of common, distinctly Anglomorph virtues. For Churchill, the English-speaking peoples were the central source of liberalisation, moderation, modernity and fairness, the virtues of the French and Germans being confined largely to art and thought, those of smaller nations yet to be discovered. Evelyn Waugh had described Winnie as a master of 'sham-Augustan' prose, but his history of the English-speaking peoples is noticeably less glutinous than works such as his history of the Second World War - principally because it was written with a purpose, that of reminding both sides of the Atlantic of their common destiny - one that had been sorely tested by British disappointment at American isolationism in the 1930s, and the FDR new dealers' hostility to the British Empire. The work being a history, Churchill resisted the temptation to take it up to the present-day, stopping instead at 1900. Conservative historian Andrew Roberts, in adding to the project, has had no such compuction, his 700 pages bringing the story up to the invasion of Iraq. Not for the first time in this irritating volume, we find that the master knew something the amenuensis has missed.

Roberts is your standard British history machine, pumping out, op-ed pieces, TV series, personal appearances and doorstopper books, including lives of Tory leaders Lords Salisbury and Halifax, and a lot of Churchilliana. But this overview of the anglomorph century has a less reflective purpose - it becoming apparent not too far in that Roberts has taken on the case for the defence of both the British and American empires at a time when they have been under attack for decades, both from a general anti/post-colonialism, and in particular as a result of the Iraq debacle.

A fair enough aim, since much anti-imperialist criticism in the years since the decline of Marxism has been utopian and anachronistic, but Roberts hasn't learnt what good lawyers know - if you're going to defend someone against charges of mass murder, confess to a few lesser charges. But here the English-speaking peoples can do no wrong. America's pre-Second World War ceaseless and repeated invasions of Latin America are purely altruistic - to protect them from European interference, rather than the US from socialist movements. The death-toll in the British concentration camps during the Boer war is ascribed to the inmates' use of home remedies; the notorious Amritsar massacre of 400 Indians in the 1920s is defended as a over-reacting blunder that prevented many more deaths, a British victory in Suez would have been better for the world, and the dropping of the A-bomb in 1945 was for purely military rather than political purposes. All arguable, but Roberts will not countenance any ambivalence or foreground any alternative accounts or evidence.

Other events are simply virtually omitted - Australia's wrenching 1916 struggle over conscription (because it puts the lie to the idea that the Empire leapt to the defence of the mother country) and the 1948 Jewish uprising in Palestine, because the terror directed against the British does not fit easily with his pro-Israel politics. Frequent detours are made purely to hammer home a Cold War point - the Pinochet coup of 1973 gets more pages than all coverage of New Zealand.

Literature, art, ways of life get little attention, except when there is a political dimension - thus there is no account of the rise of analytic philosophy, surely one of the English-speaking people's greater achievements, but the French movement of deconstruction gets the usual confused gloss because it is erroneously held to be at the root of anti-Americanism. Elsewhere, Roberts' cultural jingoism can be silly - Martin Luther King's strategies come not from Ghandhi, but from a 'British tradition of non-violence', while the unique English-speaking people's genius for invention is instanced by John Logie Baird who created an unsuccessful form of television (which was supplanted by a Russian-designed model). Churchill was of an era when one could get away with such chauvinism - today it sounds like a Fry and Laurie sketch.

But there is another and more important difference between Roberts' project and Churchill's, for the latter was expounding an essentially positive and optimistic vision of what he believed was possible for the future. Roberts' book is defensive and reactive from the start, anticipating criticisms, rushing forward to current incidents to damn past ones - the suffragettes are compared with suicide-bombers - and, towards the end, losing all narrative cohesion as the text rushes around putting out fires from Iraq to New Orleans. Begun, one suspects, during in a more hubristic year, it has been completed at a time when the major project of the English-speaking peoples is widely perceived as a disaster. The book is entirely defined by the blows it anticipates receiving, and thus seems more expressive of a lack of confidence at the heart of such Toryism. We are still waiting for a clear-eyed conservative defence of empire - one that can incorporate in a positive vision of the imperial project, an acknowledgement of the great violence done.