Saturday 12 December 2009
Finger Lickin' Good?
Is this the same Andrew Roberts whose books are much admired by the noted polymath George W Bush, contain repeated misspellings of the same place names, assume that historical figures with the same name were the same person, repeatedly refer to the Red Army marching eastwards across Europe, and suggest that Amritsar is in the south of India?
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He got a First from Cambridge.
ReplyDeleteMore than half his lifetime ago. The streets are lined with people like that. He does not hold a higher degree, and he has never held an academic position. Considering his output and its fan base, no wonder. He merely happens to be too rich to need to work, that's all.
ReplyDeleteWhen, in an article for The American Conservative, I showed up Roberts's fraudulent erudition for good and all (in his later books, that is - there were some merits in his very early biographies of Lords Salisbury and Halifax), I was told (sometimes by well wishers) that Roberts would threaten to sue me for thousands of pounds, as he had already threatened to sue the left-wing journalist Johann Hari, who had censured him. It is absolutely impossible that Roberts would not have seen my take-down of him.
ReplyDeleteBut ... nothing occurred. No screams of rage from Roberts threatening to call his lawyer. No public assumption on his part that I had a homosexual crush on him (he accused Hari of having this). Nothing. Zip, zilch, nada, the square root of Sweet Fanny Adams.
In other words, like every bully who ever lived, Roberts is a coward. To the limited extent that my piece inspired any reaction other than praise, it was from Roberts's American and, in particular, Australian fanboys - sometimes purportedly Catholic - for whom Roberts has now replaced the Virgin Mary as the sole repository of Immaculate Conception.
As for the anonymous (why anonymous?) remark that Roberts got a First from Cambridge, I seem to recall that exactly the same could be said of more than one Cambridge-"educated" spy for the USSR.