Arthur Bryant
From Freepedia
Arthur Bryant (18 February 1899 - 22 January 1985) was a popular British historical writer, and columnist for the Illustrated London News. His reputation has suffered as details of a number of controversial episodes of his life have been made public.
He was born in Dersingham. His early reputation was made by books on Samuel Pepys; it has been suggested that he gave insufficient credit in them to the scholarly work of another, Tanner, on which they were largely based (see the account given by Andrew Roberts in Eminent Churchillians).
In the late 1930s he was noted for his efforts in the organisation of historical pageants. He was involved in an abortive effort to found a National Book Association, as a right-wing counter to the Left Book Club.
He also had very close contacts with Nazi Germany, in 1939 and after the outbreak of World War II. When these were discovered by the British government, he was left unprosecuted. He became instantly a hyper-patriotic writer.
He later edited the Alanbrooke diaries, in a way that has been considered to be slanted against Winston Churchill; a complete edition is now available.
He remained a successful writer all his life, but with no academic reputation.
Works
- King Charles the Second (1931)
- Macaulay (1932)
- Life of Samuel Pepys in three volumes: The Man in the Making, The Years of Peril, The Saviour of the Navy (1933)
- The Man and the Hour (1934)
- The Letters Speeches and Declarations of King Charles II (1935), editor
- The England of Charles II (1935), later Restoration England
- Postman's Horn, An Anthology of the Letters of Latter Seventeenth Century England (1936), editor
- The American Ideal (1936)
- George V (1936)
- Stanley Baldwin: A Tribute (1937)
- English Saga 1840–1940 (1940)
- The Years of Endurance 1793–1802 (1942)
- Dunkirk (A memorial) (1943), pamphlet
- Years of Victory (1944)
- The Battle of Britain. The Few (1944), with Edward Shanks
- Historian's Holiday (1946), Dropmore Press
- Trafalgar and Alamein (1948), with Edward Shanks and Field Marshal The Viscount Montgomery of Alamein
- The Summer of Dunkirk and The Great Miracle (1948), with Edward Shanks
- The Story of England: Makers of the Realm (1953)
- The Age of Elegance 1812–1822 (1954)
- The Turn of the Tide 1939–1943 (1957), Alanbrooke diaries
- Triumph In The West 1943–1946 (1959), Alanbrooke diaries
- Liquid History (1960), fifty years of the Port of London Authority
- Jimmy, the Dog of My Life (1960)
- The Age of Chivalry (1963)
- The Medieval Foundation of England (1965)
- The Fire and the Rose: Dramatic Moments in British History (1966)
- The Lion and the Unicorn: Historian's Testament (1969)
- Jackets of Green. A Study of the History, Philosophy and Character of the Rifle Brigade (1972)
- Leeds Castle — a Brief History (1980), Leeds Castle Foundation
- Set in a Silver Sea: A History of Britain and the British People, Vol 1
- The Elizabethan Deliverance
