Waffen SS: the asphalt soldiers (1970 )
Opening Moves: August 1914 (1975)
The face of battle (1978 )
The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme (1983)
History of Warfare (1993)
Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America (1997)
War and Our World (1998)
The Book of War: 25 Centuries of Great War Writing (1999)(ed)
Winston Churchill: A Life (2002)
His Telegraph obituaries are the source for most of the following points. His significance was summarized briefly: "Sir John Keegan....achieved an international reputation as a military historian, then discovered a talent for writing rapid analyses of international crises as the defence editor [1986 onwards] of The Daily Telegraph."
The Daily Telegraph wrote more than one lavish obituary, partly because Keegan was one of their own, and so we get a nice picture of the man:
John Desmond Patrick Keegan was born on May 15 1934, and after the declaration of war was taken to the depths of rural England where his Irish father, a south London schools inspector who had been a gunner in the First World War, had responsibility for some 300 evacuated children. Well beyond the sound of enemy gunfire, John enjoyed an idyllic childhood, untouched by any personal experience of the tragedy of conflict.....
The family’s return to down-at-heel post-war London, where he was sent to the Jesuit-run Wimbledon College, was not a happy experience. In 1947 tuberculosis began to affect one hip. He was placed in an open-air ward of a hospital in Surrey, where the young patients had to wear pullovers and mittens in the worst winter of the century during the day, and were provided with the protection of flapping canvas screens lowered around them at night. He was allowed home after eight months.
The hip grew worse again, and he found himself taken back to hospital, encased in a plaster corset. This time he was not among children, but cheerful cockney veterans in a men’s ward of St Thomas’s, near Westminster Bridge. The Anglican chaplain taught him Greek; a polio victim coached him in French; and, thanks to a well-stocked library, Johnnie, as he was known there, was able to read much history and almost the entire works of Thomas Hardy.....
The hip grew worse again, and he found himself taken back to hospital, encased in a plaster corset. This time he was not among children, but cheerful cockney veterans in a men’s ward of St Thomas’s, near Westminster Bridge. The Anglican chaplain taught him Greek; a polio victim coached him in French; and, thanks to a well-stocked library, Johnnie, as he was known there, was able to read much history and almost the entire works of Thomas Hardy.....
On emerging from hospital two years later, his hip immobilised with a bone graft, Keegan won a place to read History at Oxford. ...Keegan was tutored in the Middle Ages by Richard Southern and in the 17th century by the Marxist Christopher Hill. Although there was no chance of a military career, he observed the confidence of those who had done National Service and decided to take “Military History and the Theory of War” as a special subject.
[Later after]...a long tour of the battlefields of the American Civil War with his future brother-in-law Maurice Keen, the medieval historian, he returned home to find work writing political reports for the American embassy in London for two years, then obtained a post as a lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. It was Keegan’s first proper job.
...
[Keegan's] first major book, The Face of Battle (1976), asked: what is it like to be in a battle? Instead of adopting a commander’s perspective, seeing every conflict as an impersonal flow of causation, currents and tendencies in the way favoured by contemporary historians, Keegan concentrated on the experience of the common soldier. After elegantly discussing why history is usually written by victors and the limitations of survivors’ accounts, he examined three battles: Agincourt in 1415, Waterloo in 1815 and the Somme in 1916. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including priests’ eyewitness accounts of the first, a post-conflict questionnaire sent out by an officer after the second, and the flood of letters, diaries, poetry and official reports written during the last, he described what in the past had all too often been skated over: the deep fears, the lust for killing, the willingness to risk one’s life for a comrade — characteristics common to the soldiers of all three battles. He evoked the sights, sounds and smells of war, vividly bringing home the experience for both veterans and civilian readers.
The book was an immediate success, and has never been out of print. It marked out Keegan as the most sparkling writer among the talented lecturers of the Sandhurst war studies department. This led to some jealousy, but he was able to use the vital addition to his income to educate the two sons and two daughters born to him and his wife Susanne Everett, later the biographer of Alma Mahler and Oscar Kokoschka.
....[In 1986, he joined the Telegraph staff as an expert on the military] and ... he quickly settled in at the paper’s Fleet Street office . In addition to taking some plodding first steps in news reporting, he produced three or four elegant leaders a week as well as longer, signed comment pieces. There was also the chance to write book reviews and a fine account of Waterloo .
.....
He also brought his unrivalled grasp of the reality of military engagements to the frequent flare-ups which succeeded the fall of communism. He was proved entirely justified in dismissing the doubts expressed by Left-wing journalists about the abilities of the Allied coalition during the Gulf War of 1990, and treated himself to a crow of triumph afterwards. This was recognised by an OBE in 1991,
.....
John Keegan was knighted in 2000, and among the professional honours heaped on him, he was made a visiting fellow at Princeton and a member of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. He was invited to give the Lees Knowles lectures at Cambridge and the Reith Lectures for the BBC, which were published in 1998 as War and Our World. Perhaps the most remarkable recognition came during the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Normandy campaign, when he was invited to brief President Bill Clinton at the White House.
He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Historical Society.
A man of unfailing good nature and tolerance, Keegan settled at a 17th-century manor house in Wiltshire, where he produced a column in the Telegraph Magazine recording life at the village of Kilmington. He wrote of its farmers and modern craftsmen, the changing seasons and the discovery of a bomb in a field. Most popular with readers were his stories of Edgar, the Keegan family’s self-assured Maine Coon cat, who pursued pheasants and rabbits with untroubled ruthlessness.
In 2009 Keegan published The American Civil War, a combination of narrative and critique which emphasised, above all, the importance of the continent’s geography in the conflict.
In his last years John Keegan was confined to a wheelchair after a bone clicked in his back while he was taking part in a parish pilgrimage. Even though he had to have a leg amputated, he continued for some time to be driven up to the Telegraph’s office on Wednesdays, to write leaders and other articles, to answer his post and take part in the leader-writers’ afternoon conference.
The book was an immediate success, and has never been out of print. It marked out Keegan as the most sparkling writer among the talented lecturers of the Sandhurst war studies department. This led to some jealousy, but he was able to use the vital addition to his income to educate the two sons and two daughters born to him and his wife Susanne Everett, later the biographer of Alma Mahler and Oscar Kokoschka.
....[In 1986, he joined the Telegraph staff as an expert on the military] and ... he quickly settled in at the paper’s Fleet Street office . In addition to taking some plodding first steps in news reporting, he produced three or four elegant leaders a week as well as longer, signed comment pieces. There was also the chance to write book reviews and a fine account of Waterloo .
.....
He also brought his unrivalled grasp of the reality of military engagements to the frequent flare-ups which succeeded the fall of communism. He was proved entirely justified in dismissing the doubts expressed by Left-wing journalists about the abilities of the Allied coalition during the Gulf War of 1990, and treated himself to a crow of triumph afterwards. This was recognised by an OBE in 1991,
.....
John Keegan was knighted in 2000, and among the professional honours heaped on him, he was made a visiting fellow at Princeton and a member of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. He was invited to give the Lees Knowles lectures at Cambridge and the Reith Lectures for the BBC, which were published in 1998 as War and Our World. Perhaps the most remarkable recognition came during the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Normandy campaign, when he was invited to brief President Bill Clinton at the White House.
He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Historical Society.
A man of unfailing good nature and tolerance, Keegan settled at a 17th-century manor house in Wiltshire, where he produced a column in the Telegraph Magazine recording life at the village of Kilmington. He wrote of its farmers and modern craftsmen, the changing seasons and the discovery of a bomb in a field. Most popular with readers were his stories of Edgar, the Keegan family’s self-assured Maine Coon cat, who pursued pheasants and rabbits with untroubled ruthlessness.
In 2009 Keegan published The American Civil War, a combination of narrative and critique which emphasised, above all, the importance of the continent’s geography in the conflict.
In his last years John Keegan was confined to a wheelchair after a bone clicked in his back while he was taking part in a parish pilgrimage. Even though he had to have a leg amputated, he continued for some time to be driven up to the Telegraph’s office on Wednesdays, to write leaders and other articles, to answer his post and take part in the leader-writers’ afternoon conference.
So we have a brief history of the historian, thanks in part to an article by Rowan Pelling.
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