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Sir Alistair Allan Horne (born November 9, 1925) is a British historian of modern France. He is the son of Sir James Horne and Lady Auriol Horne (formerly Auriol Hay).

As a boy during World War II, he was sent to live in the United States. He attended Millbrook School, where he befriended William F. Buckley, Jr., who remained a life-long friend until Buckley's death on February 27, 2008. Horne served in the RAF in 1943–44 and with the Coldstream Guards from 1944–1947. He worked as a foreign correspondent for The Daily Telegraph from 1952–1955. He is an Honorary Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford.

Horne is the biographer of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a work originally published in two volumes. In early June 2008 he finished a soon-to-be-published authorised biography of Henry Kissinger (author's statement, Paris, June 13, 2008).

As a result of the Iraq War, his 1977 book A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 has recently been of interest to American military officers. It was also recommended to U.S. President George W. Bush by former United States Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. In October, 2006 the book was republished^[1] and in January 2007, by phone from his home in England, Alistair Horne was part of an Iraq War discussion panel on the Charlie Rose Show on PBS.

Summoned to the Bush White House

According to the July 2, 2007 edition of the Washington Post, Horne reportedly met with President Bush sometime in mid-2007 at the administration's request. Staff writer Peter Baker reported that they discussed philosophy and history. He also quoted Horne to have said that, "You think about prime ministers and presidents being surrounded by cabinet officials and aides and so forth, but at the end of the day, they're alone. They're lonely. And that's what occurred to me as I was at the White House. It must be quite difficult for him [George W. Bush] to get out and about."^[2] He described his visit in a Daily Telegraph article.^[3]

Work

• Return to Power: A Report on the New Germany. New York: Praeger, 1956.
• The Land is Bright. 1958.
• Canada and the Canadians. Toronto: Macmillan, 1961.
• The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1962.
• The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune, 1870-1. London: Macmillan, 1965.
• To Lose a Battle: France 1940. London, Macmillan, 1969.
• Death of a Generation Neuve Chapelle to Verdun and the Somme 1970
• The Terrible Year: The Paris Commune, 1871. London, Macmillan, 1971.
• Small Earthquake in Chile: A Visit to Allende's South America. London: Macmillan, 1972.
• A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962. London: Macmillan, 1977.
• Napoleon, Master of Europe 1805-1807. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979.
• The French Army and Politics, 1870-1970. New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1984.
• Harold Macmillan. New York: Viking Press, 1988.
• A Bundle from Britain. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993.
• Montgomery, David (co-author). Monty: The Lonely Leader, 1944-1945. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
• How Far from Austerlitz?: Napoleon, 1805-1815. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.
• Horne, A. (ed.).Telling Lives: From W.B. Yeats to Bruce Chatwin. London: Papermac, 2000.
• Seven Ages of Paris. London: Macmillan, 2002.
• The Age of Napoleon. New York: Modern Library, 2004.
• La Belle France: A Short History. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
• The French Revolution, Carlton Books, 2008
• Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year, Simon & Schuster, June 2009.

Quotes

• (speaking of aerial combat in World War I) "Never since the Middle Ages and the invention of the longbow had the battlefields of Europe seen this kind of single combat. When the champions of either side met to fight spectacular duels in and out of the clouds, the rest of the war seemed forgotten; even the man in the trenches paused to watch, as the hosts of Greece and Troy stood by when Hector and Achilles fought."
  • From The Price of Glory.

• "On the whole, my sympathies have instinctively been with Israel."
  • The Daily Telegraph, August 4, 2006.^[4]

• "Bush, an honourable man, might have made a good President - without Iraq. His fault was to heed too often the voices of the Zionist lobby in Washington. Never before has the Israeli tail wagged the American dog quite so vigorously; the results threaten to prove as disastrous for Israel as for the Western alliance."
  • The Daily Telegraph, July 15, 2007.^[5]

References

External links

• Soviet Moscow on the Potomac
• Bush's favorite historian, interview by Gary Kamiya in Salon, 8 May 2007.