V.G. Kiernan, who died in 2009, taught history at Edinburgh University for many years. He wrote about treason and Tory conceptions of loyalty in the LRB in 1987, noting that, in 1930s Cambridge, ‘it was about the defenders of the old order that a strong smell of treason hung.’ Of Guy Burgess, who helped induct him into the party there, he said: ‘He did what he felt it right for him to do; I honour his memory.’ After the war Kiernan was a member of the Communist Party Historians’ Group. His books include The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age, The Duel in European History and Tobacco: A History.
When the effects of drink are not extremely funny, they do have a tendency to be a bit grim. For every cheerful fallabout drunk there is a lugubrious toper or melancholy soak, draining the flask for no...
Victor Kiernan is here presenting essays produced over the last 45 years: the texts are only occasionally given recent additions. The topics include three essays on literature but are otherwise...
In 1759 the future Viscount Townshend challenged the Earl of Leicester to a duel. But Leicester refused to fight. He was, he claimed, too old and too ill; he could not hit a barn door with a...
Is it a good thing that a country, after almost forty years of accelerating decline, has nothing more satisfactory to look back upon than a victorious world war with relatively modest casualties?...
Every student and every teacher knows the importance of the ‘seminal article’, which packs into a few pages more ideas than many books. In the field of European history, one such...
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