Paul Addison

Paul Addison, who died in 2020, taught history at Edinburgh, where he directed the Centre for Second World War Studies. His books include The Road to 1945 and two biographies of Churchill.

Letter

Looking it up

7 July 1988

Paul Addison writes: N.P.B. Freeman has detected an error in my review of the final volume of Martin Gilbert’s life of Churchill. I wrote that there was no reference in the book to the fact that Walter Monckton was ever Minister of Labour. Freeman points out that there are two footnotes in which Monckton was identified as such. While I agree that there is no substitute for complete accuracy, the...
Letter

A Conservative Disposition

9 October 1986

SIR: Maurice Cowling protests (Letters, 6 November) that I ‘totally misunderstand’ his political opinions. He is not, he claims, ‘out of step’ with the Conservative Party, but on the contrary blends Biffenite scepticism with Thatcherite conviction. He also claims that I have attributed to him religious beliefs that he does not hold. Although, he explains, he has adopted certain Tractarian or...
Letter

Upper-Class Casualties

24 July 1986

SIR: Alan Brien casts doubt (Letters, 18 September) on my assertion that a disproportionate number of the three-quarters of a million British servicemen killed in the First World War were from the upper classes. What, he asks, can be the authority for such a statement? I did, in fact, make it clear in my review that I was reporting one of the key findings of Jay Winter’s The Great War and the British...
Letter

Darling Clem

17 April 1986

SIR: Trevor Burridge takes issue (Letters, 5 June) with my review of his biography of Attlee. My comments, he claims, boil down to the charge that Attlee was no Superman, and are best explained by my longing for a new Lloyd George to deliver us from the rule of the Iron Lady.Not so. My argument was that nostalgia for yesterday’s radicalism, and regret at the passing of the English gentleman, have...

Pieces about Paul Addison in the LRB

‘We’re Not Jittery’: Monitoring Morale

Bernard Porter, 8 July 2010

When Chamberlain took the British to war in September 1939, he had little idea of how they would respond. Very few of those in authority did. In their introduction to this important collection of...

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Sunny Days

Michael Howard, 11 February 1993

Peter Hennessy has chosen for the dust jacket of Never Again a picture that exactly captures the mood of 1945. A returning British serviceman is being welcomed home by his wife and small son....

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Outbreak of Pleasure

Angus Calder, 23 January 1986

Towards the end of the Second World War, the Common Wealth Party produced a striking leaflet – ‘Again?’ – to play on the widespread fear among British voters that victory...

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