Talk:Arthur Bryant

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Contents 1 Allegations of Nazism 2 This article is a hatchet job. 3 Attlee 4 POV

[edit] Allegations of Nazism

So many people in Britain hate those who are successful. It is always easy to find a few (Roberts, Plumb) who will heap filth upon someone more successful than themselves. Roberts has heaped cheap 'Nazi' jibes on others before and has treated people with total disrespect. The best put-down to Roberts were the two letters published in The Daily Telegraph on 16 August 2003, from Daphne Guinness, and Lord Moyne. The fact remains that Bryant was an extremely popular historian and brought easily readable history to millions who might otherwise not have read it. We don't actually know that he specifically went to Germany to "celebrate Hitler's birthday". (Germany was a popular holiday destination, especially as the Reichsbahn offered special rates for foreign passport holders). Presumably he could have gone to the North Pole and still done that. My grandparents were in Berlin in 1936 and 1938 and visited the (old) Chancellery where they signed Hitler's birthday book. They were not Nazis but they thought it all rather thrilling. One tires of all this endless Nazi garbage. 81.131.143.196 18:36, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] This article is a hatchet job.

This article is nothing more than a dressed-up hatchet-job. It should have the warning label, such as appears on the entry for Douglas MacArthur, pasted prominently at the top of the page, stating that it appears to be non-neutral. (TEMPLATE NOW APPLIED) How can one take an article seriously that quotes a page from the "Spartacus" web site? As for Andrew Roberts, while a serious writer, he is far from a disinterested or neutral commentator, as the contributor above points out. J.H. Plumb falls into the same camp, and in fact in Plumb's case it may have been sheer envy of Bryant's success, commercial and public. Bryant's reputation may justly have declined from the apogee it once enjoyed, but her certainly doesn't deserve the calumny heaped upon him by this article.

One specific point calls for refutation. The article suggests that Bryan't two volumes of Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke's war-time diaries are slanted against Winston Churchill. On the contrary, having read both Bryant's edition and the full Alanbooke diaries published a couple of years ago, I think that the unexpurgated diaries show Alanbrooke to have been significantly more acerbic about and critical of Churchill than Bryant "allowed" him to be in the two edited/redacted volumes.

Philiphurst 19:26, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Attlee

We read:

Of his 1980 book, The Elizabethan Experience, the historian C. V. Wedgwood said: "[...]" ¶ Also, Earl Attlee, K.G., O.M., said: "...as in all your historical works, you throw a bright light on the past. As a lover of history and of England I can enjoy your writing more than that of any living historian. You carry on a great tradition."

This implies to me that Attlee was commenting on the 1980 book. I had only previously been aware of one Attlee: Clem, who predeceased its publication. I've no reason to think that his son, Earl in 1980, had the [rare] O.M. (offhand I don't know what "K.G." means).

Something is very wrong here. At the very least, this is both a pompous and a vague way to refer to a specific Attlee.

Further: although I know little about historiography the article leaves a strange taste and the comments on this talk page above have a certain persuasiveness. -- Hoary (talk) 23:34, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

And did Bryant ever write such a book? Not The Elizabethan Deliverance? If the title is wrong, can we give any credence whatever to this purported transcription of a blurb? -- Hoary (talk) 11:04, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Another editor has now changed the book title and the Attlee.

I no longer believe a word of this. For one thing, would Attlee junior have got the O.M.? (These have always been rare.) I think that conscientious editors have been trying too hard to guess the meaning of what was carelessly written here much earlier. Rather than iron out inconsistencies to produce a plausible result that could be entirely wrong, I thought it better to delete the whole section: which I've just now done. -- Hoary (talk) 04:36, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] POV

The POV tag seemingly relates to the apparent disproportionate criticism of the subject from a group of others. I personally agree that, based on the information available to me, that material is likely excessive, given that the information I found on such matters in the three sources I consulted has been added and specifically cited. I would not object to significantly reducing the amount of content in the extant "Controversy" section, as it seems to me to be possibly excessively long and in violation of WP:Undue weight. Other opinions? John Carter (talk) 15:12, 3 April 2008 (UTC)