History as a political allegory

Bush's imperial historian: White Man for the Job

by Johann Hari, The New Republic
Post date: 04.13.07, Issue date: 04.23.07

Last month, a little-known British historian named Andrew Roberts was swept into the White House for a three-hour-long hug. He lunched with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, huddled alone with the president in the Oval Office, and was rapturously lauded by him as "great." Roberts was so fawned over that his wife, Susan Gilchrist, told the London Observer, "I thought I had a crush on him, but it's nothing like the crush President Bush has on him."

At first glance, this isn't surprising. Roberts's latest work--"A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900"--sounds like a standard-issue neocon narrative. As a sequel to Winston Churchill's famous series, it purports to tell the story of how the "Anglosphere" (Great Britain, the United States, Australia, and friends) saved the world from a slew of totalitarian menaces, from the kaiser to the caliphate. It presents Bush as the logical successor to Churchill--only Bush is, of course, even better.

(The rest is here.)