Sir Arthur Bryant and National History in Twentieth-Century Britain is a significant new study of the work of the popular historian and journalist Sir Arthur Bryant (1899-1985). Since his death, scholarly interest in Bryant has focused on his Nazi sympathies in the late 1930s. Julia Stapleton broadens our understanding of the man and the writer. Stapleton illuminates Bryant's romantic ideal of his nation. She explores the historian's success in writing for a broad middlebrow audience, aided by his firsthand experience of two world wars; and she traces the decline of Bryant's authority beginning in the 1960s as the discipline of history diversified and new ties were forged between professional historians and popular readerships. Stapleton suggests that Bryant prefigured and sustained a form of nationalism that remained nascent within the British population (though not always its elites) deep into the twentieth century, as the Falklands episode and the recent resurgence of English national identity well illustrate. Twenty years after his death, when history has scaled new heights of popularity, a study of the historian whose work made perhaps the largest public impact in twentieth-century Britain could not be more timely.

"Stapleton's careful study of Bryant's career, thought, books and journalism is not a biography: we learn next to nothing about Bryant's personal life; but for thoughtful readers its focus is more valuable as a result, as we are able to study the travails of romantic Tory nationalism through one of its foremost exponents." - The Social Affairs Unit

"This is a thoroughly researched, clearly written study of the attitudes and influence of Sir Arthur Bryant...Julia Stapleton does not offer a full biography of Bryant, but thoughtfully explores Bryant's efforts to "revive the role of 'national historian'.... Stapleton succeeds admirably, showing how Bryant projected romantic conservative views on the past, often to great popular approval, but not always as a partisan of the Tory Party." - H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Reviews Online

"In her brilliant, richly textured, ably supported, and continually judicious study of Bryant's career and intellectual development, Julia Stapleton reveals him as a complex figure who sought to represent and sustain an inherent patriotism. . . . Stapleton's important study offers much to those interested in intellectual history and historiography. It is a considerable achievement and one of the most interesting books I have read for some time." - Times Higher Education

"Sir Arthur Bryant is nowadays a largely forgotten figure. Julia Stapleton's new study, based on his papers at King's College London, and other archival materials, undertakes to situate Bryant in the wider context of the melancholy fate of 'Englishness' in British national history in the course of his life.… Stapleton's account of his life is both balanced and considerate, particularly her persuasive rebuttal of charges that he was a keen Nazi sympathizer in the 1930s, his views at the time being less pro-Hitler than reflective of a historian's convictions about how best to engage a German people who had been unjustly humiliated by an undercurrent of loss perhaps inescapable in a tale cast against a background imagery of decline and fall." - Times Literary Supplement

"Stapleton does an excellent job in presenting a highly complex individual. Bryant emerges as a very English Tory, who did not really fit into the Conservative Party any more after 1945....." - H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Reviews Online, (H-Soz-U-Kult)

"Stapleton does an excellent job in presenting a highly complex individual. Bryant emerges as a very English Tory, who did not really fit into the Conservative Party any more after 1945." - H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Reviews Online, (H-Soz-U-Kult)