Dr Geoffrey A. Best This is Me

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1. 1. Wood, Ian: Churchill - The Churchill Centre

   www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/p - [Cached]

   Published on: 4/11/2006   Last Visited: 12/8/2007

   by Geoffrey Best, London, Hambledon
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   Churchill: A Study in Greatness, by Geoffrey Best, London, Hambledon, 370 pp., illus., first English edition published at ,19.95 ($30), CC Book Club price $25.
   ...
   Geoffrey Best is well placed to adopt the Olympian stance necessary to eschew subjectivity in this most emotive of historical fields. A former history professor at Edinburgh and Sussex universities, he is a senior member of St Antony's College, Oxford. Unlike some academic historians, he has a felicitous turn of phrase. I defy anyone who starts his chapter on 1940, "His Finest Hour," not to finish it in a sitting.
   
   Unfortunately, this book has been published just too early for Best to be able to include reference to the second volume of David Irving's Life of Churchill (expected in August).
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   His subtitleBest finally favours.
   
   Yet this is by no means an uncritical, Fifties-style hagiography. Best admits Churchill's "innocence of false modesty" (that is, his vanity); his error in rejoining the Gold Standard in 1925 at a level which dangerously overvalued the pound; his "over-the-top" rhetoric before the rise of Hitler; and he states that Churchill's pro-King stance during the abdication crisis "suggested that there was something amiss in his head." These are today's standard views, perhaps, but this eminently sane book is, in its quiet and dignified way, occasionally ferociously politically incorrect. The analysis of Churchill's anti-independence Indian policy includes the opinion that Mahatma Gandhi's "own non-violence often served as a signal for the violence of others." The strategic bombing of German cities, Best writes, "gave German civilians the same opportunity" as British civilians of joining the dangers of the front line so long endured by their fighting men.
   
   Best agrees with the view I propagated in 1994 of Churchill as an unashamed white supremacist, something which caused outrage at the time but is now generally accepted, especially if placed in its historical and social context.
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   Best writes: "These suppositions are simply not believable by anyone who has taken the measure of the mentality of Adolf Hitler, the principles of National Socialism, and the directions in which military technology was developing."
   
   Full of wise summations of difficult issues, this book represents far more than the jeu d'esprit that the author claims for it in his introduction. If he finds Churchill's schooldays "a bit of a puzzle," for example, or believes that there "is no generally agreed conclusion" to the debate over the sinking of the French fleet at Oran in June 1940, he has the intellectual self-confidence to say so.
   
   By encouraging his readers to come to their own conclusions, Best subtly guides us towards his own mature and overwhelmingly pro-Churchill ones.

2. 2. Awards - The Churchill Centre

   www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/p - [Cached]

   Published on: 12/8/2007   Last Visited: 12/8/2007

   2002 Geoffrey Best for Churchill: A Study in Greatness

3. 3. Churchill: A Study in Greatness - Leadershop @ LeadershipNow.com

   www.leadershipnow.com/leadersh - [Cached]

   Published on: 4/1/2003   Last Visited: 9/23/2007

   Geoffrey F. A. Best
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   Geoffrey Best illuminates both his strengths and his weaknesses, looking past the many received versions of Churchill, in a biography that balances the private and the public man and offers a clear insight into what made him truly great.
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   Geoffrey Best is one of Britain's most distinguished historians. His many books include War and Law since 1945, Humanity in Warfare, and Mid-Victorian Britain. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard and at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C., and is currently a Senior Member of St. Antony's College, Oxford.