Correlli Barnett

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Correlli Barnett CBE (born June 28 1927 in Norbury, Surrey) is an English military historian, who has written also on the United Kingdom's industrial decline.

Barnett attended Trinity School of John Whitgift in Croydon and then Exeter College, Oxford where he gained a second class honours degree in Modern History with his special subject being Military History and the Theory of War, gaining an MA in 1954. Barnett worked as historical consultant and writer for BBC television series The Great War (1963-64). He has contributed numerous articles to various newspapers arguing against the 2003 Iraq War.

He is the author of The Desert Generals, a book that attacked the perceived cult of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and assessed the roles of his sacked predecessors as commanders in the North Africa campaign.

Barnett's The Pride and Fall sequence:

The Collapse of British Power
The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation
The Lost Victory: British Dreams, British Realities, 1945-50
The Verdict of Peace: Britain Between Her Yesterday and the Future

The Audit of War is Barnett's best known work. In sum, the sequence describes the decline of British power during the twentieth century, a decline attributed by the author to a change in the values of England's governing élite from the late eighteenth century, and one which was encouraged by evangelical and non-conformist Christianity. He has been criticised for being overly-negative about Britain's war effort, with his emphasis on production inefficiencies, in the light of overall British victory. He also published Britain and Her Army 1509-1970, which as a survey combines the political, the social and the military over the grand sweep of Britain's post-medieval history.

Books

The Hump Organisation (1957)
The Channel Tunnel (with Humphrey Slater, 1958)
The Desert Generals (Kimber, 1960)
The Swordbearers: Supreme Command in the First World War (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1963)
The Battle of El Alamein (Macmillan, 1964)
Britain and Her Army, 1509 - 1970 (A Lane, 1970)
The Collapse of British Power (Eyre Methuen, 1972)
The First Churchill: Marlborough, Soldier and Statesman (Eyre Methuen, 1974)
Strategy and Society (Manchester University Press, 1976)
Human Factor and British Industrial Decline: An Historical Perspective (Working Together Campaign, 1977)
Bonaparte (Allen & U, 1978)
The Great War (Park Lane Press, 1979)
The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (Macmillan, 1986)
Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War (W W Norton & Co Inc, 1991)
The Lost Victory: British Dreams and British Realities, 1945-50 (Macmillan, 1995).
The Verdict of Peace: Britain between her yesterday and the Future (Macmillan, 2001)
Post-conquest Civil Affairs: Comparing War's End in Iraq and in Germany (Foreign Policy Centre, 2005)
Pétain (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, forthcoming).

External link

[Correlli Barnett - David Higham Associates]

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