THE CHURCHILL COMPLEX
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP
IAN BURUMA
Atlantic Books, 309pp, £18.99
When Bismarck was asked to identify the pre-eminent fact in modern world history, he replied, ‘That America speaks English.’ And although, as Shaw noted, our common language sometimes separates us, without it there would be no ‘special relationship’. More’s the pity, said Christopher Meyer in the Spectator. Formerly Our Man in Washington, Sir Christopher banned the use of this ‘rhetorical tool’ by Embassy employees because it made us look ‘terribly needy’.
Meyer thought that Ian Buruma, briefly editor of the New York Review
of Books, writes ‘with a certain caustic panache’ about, eg, ‘Americans as they really are … America First is, as it has always been, their unshakeable, unsentimental, cold-blooded credo. They pay lip service to the Special Relationship to keep us sweet … but sneer at us in private for our pretensions.’
‘The price we have paid,’ says Buruma, ‘is our submission to American interests when our true vocation should lie in the nirvana that is the European Union.’
But Meyer wondered why Buruma bothered to canter over ‘such well-trodden ground’, a point taken up by Dominic Sandbrook in the
Sunday Times. He described much of the book as ‘soul-crushingly predictable’, and said Buruma’s ‘decision to focus on Prime Ministers and Presidents means he has nothing to say about the cultural and social dimensions of the Anglo-american relationship … It is like being stuck in a lift with nothing to read but the New
York Times. I do not mean that as a compliment.’