Monday 16 April 2012

Seasons in the Sun

It's nice to see Dominic Sandbrook's new book, Seasons in the Sun, on the Wilson-Callaghan years of the 1970s, getting such positive reviews, including this fine Book of the Week piece in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph:


But hold, what's that down in the corner, in the Read On section? Excellent - it's a plug for my own Crisis? What Crisis? Still available in paperback.

1 comment:

mcx said...

I have to say that I don't much care for DeGroot's review, I have posted something on the Telegraph's site to the effect that to compare the driver of the train to the "clueless" Harold Wilson is not only tasteless, but it fails to live up to the any of the rules of evidence that a historian (and so DeGroot considers himself, I've read his Sixties unplugged and it is an odd book, full of unsubstantiated claims and straw-people that he sets up without footnotes and them knocks down). More importantly, it fails in the historian's duty to respect their subjects, even if they are dead tube train drivers. No, especially if they are the powerless who might not otherwise have a voice, very basic EP Thompson stuff.

He goes on to call Harold Wilson an alcoholic. This is based on a series of references (about 9 of them) in Sandbrook's book, all but one of which of suggest that Wilson could hit the bottle on occasion, and only one of which says he come to rely on it near the end. But, and this my problem with Sandbrook, all of these are based on one source, Bernard Donoughue's Downing Street Diaries. I will be taking the review to task properly on my blog, which I naturally plug here. It is a single-issue blog on critically assessment Sandbrook's Seasons' in the Sun (weneedtotalkaboutdominic on wordpress, the address weneedtotalkaboutdominic.wordpress.com)