What is a historian? Is it someone who writes about the past? Or is it someone with three PhDs to their name? There are some interesting things happening in the world of books about military history.  There are now some excellent and highly accessible histories coming out from the world of academia. While full-time writers have to knock out a constant stream of books to support themselves, academics have more time to produce their books and often enjoy better access to research material – and the help of bright young research assistants.
But does that mean than anything not written by an academic has no worth whatsoever? I think not. Universities are too often dens of orthodoxy. As the costs of a university education skyrockets they are filled with people from much the same increasingly narrow background, range of experience and outlook on life. It always was a myth that any bright Scottish kid could go to university and make full use of the brains that they were given. Things are only getting worse. The world will be a sadder and less informed place if history can only be written by people from a very narrow section of society.
I know of one writer whose contributions to an on-line encyclopaedia were expunged by some self-appointed moderator because he was not a “historian”. Who says? Was it the lack of a PhD? I have a feeling that Winston Churchill won a Nobel Prize for one of his histories. And yet I don't recall which university he went to. Perhaps if one is a minor member of the aristocracy, one does not need a degree to be considered a historian. I'm going to suggest that there is a lot a good history out there that's not written by a professor. The late John Prebble's histories are not above criticism but his contribution to many Scots' understanding of their country's past was and still is immense. I think he was a historian. I would hope that his books got a lot of people interested enough to find out more and maybe even form their own opinions on past events. My experience as a reporter convinced me that going to university made no difference either way, for better or worse, to someone's ability and skill as a journalist. I suspect the same is true of historians.

It seems that the latest piece of “must-have kit” for Afghanistan is a pair of bomb-proof underpants. The shorts, woven from the latest light-weight ballistic fibre, protect a soldier's wedding tackle from being shredded by a Taliban landmine. I don't know how well they work.
I seem to recall hearing that some British bomb-aimers in the Second World War stuffed car hub-caps down the front of their trousers to protect their manhood from stray Ack-Ack shrapnel as they lay in the nose of their aircraft. I also remember sitting on a spare flack jacket for much the same reason during one of my own visits to Afghanistan.
What didn't occur to me was that I might be putting the lives of the soldiers of who took me out on their patrols there at risk. Just over a year ago a Canadian woman journalist “embedded” with Canadian troops in Afghanistan called Michelle Lang was killed by a massive landmine which blew up the armoured car she was travelling in. Four army reservists from Alberta died in the same explosion. The vehicle was also carrying a female Canadian government civil servant, Bushra Saeed, and it now seems that it was targeted by the Taliban because of the presence on board of the two women. The women in civilian clothing had been chatting and taking notes in a village near the stretch of booby-trapped road and may well have struck Taliban supporters among the villagers as quite possibly “high value” targets of some kind. The landmine was triggered by a command wire after another armoured car had passed over it. It takes quite lot of buried explosive to destroy a heavily armoured LAV III vehicle and I'd be surprised if the local people the women were chatting with earlier didn't know about the landmine. The journalist had been taken there because it was supposed to be a showcase community for what was possible in Afghanistan if only the Taliban could be expelled. I won't go into the fact that more people can name the journalist killed than can remember the name of even one of soldiers who died with her- Garrett Chidley, George Miok, Zachery McCormack, and Kirk Taylor. I just hope lessons have been learned from this tragedy. I know it's made me think.

This one's been bugging me a while: as far back at the Beijing Olympics. There was a suggestion that there should be a boycott. A member of Team Canada was interviewed and declared there was no-way the Canadian Government could tell her not to go to Beijing. Fair enough: as long as she had never received a penny in taxpayer money to support herself. And these days most Olympic level sports people do receive taxpayer support. I felt like shouting into the radio speaker, which is crazy, that she could go to Beijing once she'd paid back very penny she'd taken from the taxpayer.
Note I said “sports people” and not “athletes”. A lot of the events in the Olympics do not require any athleticism. On the other hand, there are events that do require athleticism but are not sports. To my mind, anything that has to be judged is not a sport. There is a clear winner in a real sport – first across the line, greatest height jumped, etc, etc.
And why am I forced to financially support these folks' sports ambitions? Olympic success often brings them millions in endorsements or, at worst, a coaching job for life. But what do I get out of it? A warm fuzzy feeling when they win a Gold? Well, I don't. To me sporting achievement is personal. If I'm playing or someone I know is playing, I take an interest. Beyond that I don't care if the fastest woman in the world is Canadian, Russian or Malaysian. Having the fastest woman in the world setting a new record in a Canadian vest doesn't make Canada a better country. In fact, the woman was probably born in Trinidad and spends all year training in the United States. Someone running around a track several times does not, in my book, make the world a better place to live in. A society should be judged on how it treats its young, old and sick. I'd rather see my tax dollars spent on protecting the vulnerable than making some self-obsessed muscle-bound fool a millionaire. And let's forget that in modern sport, that person may well be a drug-taking cheat who just hasn't been caught yet. Hardly a role model or an inspiration.

Regular readers of this blog may recall I mentioned a play-ground game popular when I was a kid – Best Man Falls, in which I and my little school friends simulated dying for The Queen in various violent ways – victims of grenades, bazookas, machine guns, etc.
Someone was asking me about other playground games and whether we played Cowboys and Indians or anything like that. We did; Japs and Commandos. But usually by the time enough kids had been recruited, the school bell was ringing and we had to go back to class. I hadn't wondered until recently why the antagonists were Japs and Commandos. Most of our fathers and grandfathers would have fought against the Germans or Italians (and maybe a very few against the Vichy French), not the Japanese. The Chindits were more famous British Empire troops when it came to fighting the Japanese. And yet we chose to be Commandos. When I was given two boxes of toy soldiers (Airfix 1/32nd scale), they were Japanese and Commandos.
There's probably a PhD in why we were fixated in the sixties on the Japanese as enemies. Perhaps, despite the Holocaust, the Germans were being rehabilitated and it wasn't the done thing to kill them, even in play. But since when have primary school kids been politically correct? I don't think any of us had ever seen a Japanese person and yet they were the bogeymen of our childhood game. I seem to recall that though we had not encountered any Japanese people we were aware of men in our area whose homes we were not supposed to play near. Some were nightshift workers but some others, we were told, had been prisoners of the Japanese and could not stand loud noise. We were told many of them had been tortured. And these were the lucky ones, the Japanese usually killed prisoners, the wounded and the sick. I was reading a book recently which tells how British Empire troops were not slow to retaliate in kind and came to regard the Japanese as a kind of vermin, albeit a brave and dangerous kind of vermin. I wonder how many of you have seen that picture from a Second World War vintage Time Magazine of a pretty American girl admiring a Japanese skull that her boyfriend had sent her from the fighting in the Pacific. I don't recall Time publishing any photos of young women with German skulls. It would appear that there were some things that were acceptable when it came to the Japanese that were not when it came to the Germans or Italians. Twenty years after the end of the war, it was the Japanese who would die in our playground games.

This book reviewing is an interesting game. I'm not sure I would ever take a book review seriously again. A book came out recently on a subject I reckoned I knew more about that most.  I put my name forward to a well known publication as a possible reviewer. I didn't hear back. I suggested another potential reviewer who also knew the subject matter well. Again nothing. The book was reviewed. The reviewer's ignorance of the subject matter was a surprise. Then it occurred to me that the journal in question didn't want someone who knew the subject to review the book. It's all very cosy. Most book reviewers and many books page editors are writers themselves. If they give someone a bad review, they may get a bad review as payback, either from the writer of the book or one of the author's friends.
What's the point of reading a review by someone who is unable to say what in the book is true and what's not? I'm not talking about matters of factual interpretation, but about basic geography. The book in question was reviewed in several places; I'd say it got saturation coverage and overall enjoyed very good reviews. In all but one review I came across the reviewers' ignorance of the subject matter was staggering, though not entirely surprising in view of the way I'd been treated when I suggested myself as a reviewer. Certainly the book was not as ground-breaking as many of the reviewers seemed to think. The one reviewer who gave the book the thumbs-down was, not surprisingly, someone who knew something about the subject and was not a member of the literary mafia.
Another little thing about book reviews is a print journalist's desire to write something that won't end up within a few days wrapping up fish and chips or lining the bottom of the budgie's cage. What better than being included in those little mini-reviews which appear on the back of the paperback edition - “A splendid tale splendidly told” or “A masterful grasp of complicated events.” Now, you don't end up on the back of the book if you write something negative.
I've been lucky so far with Book Briefing on this site because I've liked most of the books reviewed. But I'm finding one book I'm reading at the moment a real hard slog. It's just possible that one day the author may be asked to review a book of mine. Should I review the book? Watch this space. OK. No need to wait. I will review the book. It's a question of credibility. Come to think about it, this book review thing is a lot like the Hans Christian Andersen story about the Emperor's New Clothes. It took a child with no fear of the consequences or hidden agenda to tell the truth; that the royal personage's new gossamer-light suit was a big con and he was in fact stark naked.