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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."
- "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