In the field

Nigel Hamilton

• Washington Despatches, 1941-45: Weekly Political Reports from the British Embassy edited by H.G. Nicholas
  Weidenfeld, 700 pp, £20.00, August 1981, ISBN 0 297 77920 6
• British Intelligence and the Second World War, Vol. II by F.H. Hinsley, E.E. Thomas, C.F.G. Ransom and R.C. Knight
  HMSO, 850 pp, £15.95, September 1981, ISBN 0 11 630934 2
• Mars without Venus: A Study of Some Homosexual Generals by Frank Richardson
  William Blackwood, 188 pp, £5.95, September 1981, ISBN 0 85158 148 X
• Soldiering on: An Unofficial Portrait of the British Army by Dennis Barker
  Deutsch, 236 pp, £8.50, October 1981, ISBN 0 233 97391 5
• A Breed of Heroes by Alan Judd
  Hodder, 288 pp, £6.95, September 1981, ISBN 0 340 26334 2
• War in Peace: An Analysis of Warfare Since 1945 edited by Robert Thompson
  Orbis, 312 pp, £9.95, September 1981, ISBN 0 85613 341 8

Some weeks ago Sir Isaiah Berlin gave a broadcast in which he described his first visit to the legendary Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in Moscow in 1945 – a visit cut short in its prime by the bellowing of Randolph Churchill in the courtyard outside, hotly pursued by the Russian Secret Police. Alas, such humorous anecdotes will not be found by Berlin devotees in his latest book, Washington Despatches. Berlin was actually on his way to Moscow as Press Attaché when he was dismissed by the British Ambassador, Sir Stafford Cripps, then greedily snapped up by our men in New York: by 1942 he had become a member of the Survey Section of the Embassy in Washington. Each week he drew up a political commentary for despatch to London, but any hopes of witnessing the formidable Berlin intellect at war in the corridors of US power will be disappointed. Although – a trifle immodestly – he claims in his Introduction that his material was considered by Denis Brogan in London to be ‘the Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinths of American politics’, it is hard to see Berlin as Theseus in these reports, which veer from matters of local American concern (labour troubles etc) to generalities so general one can only yawn one’s way through. The burning issues of America’s entry into the war, the loss of the Philippines, the disastrous first eight months of 1942, the whole question of the Second Front, the great conferences at Yalta and Tehran, the agonising questions of post-war Europe, of Palestine and – still so agonising today – of Poland, are dealt with summarily, drily, in no way memorably. Why should this gifted man have failed to deliver something more rewarding?