Heroes-Big and Small

...The Dardanelles campaign, on the other hand, he considers the most brilliant strategic idea of the whole 1914-18 war...

...They marched together, the lot of them, on their melancholy, deliberate way to Munich and the war of 1939...

...frequent contributor, N. Y. "Times" "Nothing that the Marlboroughs did was on an ordinary scale,'" says Mr...

...one was a full-blown Victorian prig...

...Thus Rowse admits that the Antwerp expedition, in the first weeks of World War I, was an impulsive mistake...

...Frankly a hero-worshiper, he rejoices in having a genuine hero for his subject...

...Rowse often strains the American reader, for he presupposes intimate knowledge of British history, and more particularly of the British peerage...

...Nothing was more pervasive, more cohesive—or in the long run more disastrous to their world, their country and their order—than the sense of self-preservation among the Conservatives behind the men of the Thirties...

...As a historian, Mr...

...Most of the others did nothing in particular, and did it rather well...

...One has to be born to these things to understand them...

...Not that his book is a prolonged eulogy...

...No reader who has once encountered A. L. Rowse needs to be reminded that he is a masterly writer as well as a prodigiously industrious scholar...

...Fortunately, no special birth is necessary for the understanding of heroism...

...One was a diletante and connoisseur...

...one was a Regency rake...

...The Cecils, for example, have been prominent in English politics almost half as long again as the Churchills, but they have produced neither a Marlborough nor a Sir Winston...

...Most of the eight Dukes between the great Marlborough and the present incumbent tended to conform to the moral climate they lived in...

...I hope the survivors of them, when they look around, enjoy the world, the country, the order they made for themselves and us...

...He is not ashamed of having opinions of his own, and expressing them vigorously...

...As a biographer, though, he loves even the shortcomings of Baldwin and the "envious third-raters"—"those people with pretensions of their own who yet never achieve anything themselves"—because they enhance the stature of Sir Winston...

...Speaking of Consuelo Vanderbilt's difficulties with the titles of her in-laws, he admits that foreigners find the vagaries of English aristocratic nomenclature incomprehensible...

...Sometimes the opinions are obiter dicta, struck off in passing...

...Of this era he remarks simply, "It makes one sick to write about it...

...This book, like its predecessor on the history of the first Duke, amply supports the generalization...

...As a historian, moreover, he belongs to the great tradition...

...For instance, "Henry Fox was that rare thing in English politics, a candid cynic...

...it failed through timid leadership in the field, not through any fault in the original plan...

...But the Rowsean good humor stops short of Stanley Baldwin...

...Between those towering figures, though, lies a deep and diversified valley of second-rateness...

...He knew what people are, and he did not mind...

...Rowse plainly thinks of himself as a modern Thucy-dides recording the sunset of his country—a sunset brought about by the folly of her rulers...

...Brilliant writer though he is, Mr...

...Neville Chamberlain and the politics of the 1930s...

...Or this impression of old Disraeli watching young Randolph Churchill in Parliament: "He could never forget that he had been young himself and not altogether respectable—unlike Mr...

...Gladstone, who never had been young, while a touch of unrespectability would have made a man of him...

...He recognizes the flaws, the asperity and impatience, which in Churchill's earlier days made unnecessary enemies...

...Churchill's greatest weakness, in sum, was one which few politicians suffer from: "Ideas were much more apt to go to his head than with any average politician...

...Himself knowing every twig of the Churchill family tree as surely as an old-school Southern lady knew her cousins to the fifth or sixth degree, he alludes to the various Bland-fords, Sunderlands, and Marlboroughs with an off-hand brevity which keeps the reader desperately turning back to the genealogical chart...

...It is no part of a historian's purpose to show that his subject was always right, but rather how a great man learns from mistakes and matures with experience...

...Now, for the first time, the voluminous archives at Blenheim have been thoroughly studied to bring these dim figures back to the light of day...