AMERICAN HISTORY OF BRITAIN

Press, Volume LXXX, Issue 24150, 8 January 1944, Page 4

AMERICAN HISTORY OF BRITAIN

The Making of Modem Britain. A Short History. By J. B, Brebner and Allah Nevins. Allen and Urn win. 243 pp. (7/6 net.) “Written for plain Americans,” and offering “the essential facts in concrete narrative form and intelligible patterns,” this excellent book pursues a timely purpose: to show that British history is in signal degree a record of the growth of freedom and representative institutions: of the achievements, under the law, of both individual energy and social enterprise; of the development of a firm insistence on justice, and of adequate mechanisms for securing it on equal terms to all. This book tries to show that many of the American traditions spring directly from British ideas, institutions, and practices. Many tests are suggested by those aims: for instance, in the treatment of British imperial expansion and policy, and of the problem of India particularly. The merit of the book is proved and heightened by every such trial of its balance,

TUNISIA Birth of an Army. By A. B. Austin. Gollancz, 160 pp. (8/6 net.) Though the author of this book was a newspaper correspondent in North Africa, it is not a collection of reports. It is something much better, and something that otherwise is not to be found between two covers—a review of the evolution, on all fronts, of the united force which was to wreck the plans of Rommel and von Arnim in Tunisia. That is, it turns from the Blh Army to the Ist. from British troops to American, from American to French; it shows how the appropriate tactical methods had to be learned and applied, by unit after unit, in varying conditions: it traces the progress of arms supply and arms co-ordination; it explains much that has hitherto remained obscure—e.g„ why the flank thrust from Gafsa against Rommel's corridor missed success. Few war books, if any, have given so good an account of any complex development.