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A true collector’s edition. Hard Cover. Condition refurbished and very good. No Jacket. 359-page with nine maps

Sir Arthur Wynne Morgan Bryant, CH, CBE (18 February 1899 – 22 January 1985) was an English historian, columnist for The Illustrated London News and man of affairs. His books included studies of Samuel Pepys, accounts of English eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history, and a life of George V. Whilst his scholarly reputation has declined somewhat since his death, he continues to be read and to be the subject of detailed historical studies. He moved in high government circles, where his works were influential, being the favourite historian of three prime ministers: Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Harold Wilson.

Bryant’s historiography was often based on an English romantic exceptionalism drawn from his nostalgia for an idealised agrarian past. He hated modern commercial and financial capitalism, he emphasised duty over rights, and he equated democracy with the consent of “fools” and “knaves”.

Andrew Roberts claims that Bryant’s work on Samuel Pepys gave insufficient credit to the scholarly work of Joseph Robson Tanner (1860–1931). J. H. Plumb gives this account of how G. M. Trevelyan passed Tanner’s notes to Bryant:

he found Bryant’s book [on Charles II] convincing and, equally exciting for Trevelyan, beautifully written. […] Trevelyan thought Arthur Bryant ideal for the job (he quickly accepted the task) and the notes were handed over. The notes reached 1689 and so did Bryant’s biography; the last decade of Pepys’s life went unrecorded.

Roberts also claimed that Bryant remained in indirect contact with the Nazis in early 1940, after the outbreak of World War II, and that these ties had been requested by the Foreign Secretary.

Although professional historians were frequently negative about his best-sellers, Bryant’s histories were explicitly praised by prime ministers Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Churchill, Attlee, Macmillan, Wilson, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher.

J. H. Plumb, one of Bryant’s detractors, wrote:

What Bryant longed for, his one abiding disappointment of life, was professional recognition. He would have given anything for an Hon. D. Litt at Cambridge, perhaps more for a Fellowship of the British Academy. He never had the slightest chance of either. […] Bryant of course had gifts. He wrote far better than nearly all professional historians. […] He over-wrote certainly, and there was often a note of falsity, even of vulgarity, but largely his failure was of intellect.

Plumb’s verdict is that Bryant killed off ‘patrician history’:

Like Churchill, but unlike Trevelyan, Bryant inflated patrician history so much that he destroyed it. Indeed, he vulgarised it to a degree that made it incredible.

Plumb cites Trevelyan’s possible heirs as Wedgwood and A. L. Rowse.

Another detractor is the British historian Andrew Roberts, who has said.

Bryant was in fact a Nazi sympathiser and fascist fellow-traveller, who only narrowly escaped internment as a potential traitor in 1940. He was also, incidentally, a supreme toady, fraudulent scholar, and humbug.

Roberts’s polemical essay, prompted by the opening of archive material on Bryant, has been followed (and rebutted) by Julia Stapleton’s full academic study. Bryant’s first biographer was Pamela Street, a neighbour of his in Salisbury, who on occasion had collaborated with Bryant in his historical works, and who was a daughter of farmer-author A. G. Street. Her book appeared during Bryant’s lifetime.

Bryant was aware of the liabilities of writing fast-moving, grand, rather literary narratives. With more self-awareness than some scholars may give him, Bryant answered his critics to some extent when he wrote in 1962,

In these days of specialized and cumulative scholarship, for one man to try to survey a nation’s history in all its aspects is an act of great presumption. It involves problems of arrangement and writing so baffling that it is seldom attempted, and with reason, since, through compression and generalization on the one hand and the selection of misleading detail on the other, it can so easily lead to over-simplification and misrepresentation. I am very conscious of the imperfections of a work that seeks to cover a field of knowledge so much wider and deeper than any single mind can master. Yet, if my work has any virtue, it is that it attempts, however imperfectly, just this. For if the ordinary reader is to understand his country’s past, someone must essay the task or the truth will go by default. Because of this I had thought of calling my book The Tower of Memory. Unless those responsible for a nation’s policy–in a parliamentary democracy the electors–can climb that tower, they cannot see the road along which they have come or comprehend their continuing destiny (The Age of Chivalry, 14).