[Clive]
A High Tory grapples with Robert Kagan's neoconservative history of America's role in the world. It goes without saying that Geoffrey Wheatcroft has doubts about the thesis of Dangerous Nation. But he still enjoys the asides:
One more throwaway nugget is the fact that from the 1860s to the 1880s, Chile had a larger navy than the United States; in his next volume Kagan will perhaps remind us that in 1939, the Belgian Army was larger than the American Army.
If you fancy an account of British conservatism, triumphs, scandals, gossip and all, Wheatcroft's The Strange Death of Tory England makes a ripping yarn. We'll see if David Cameron can bring the corpse back to life. There are certainly signs of a pulse at the moment. No wonder Britain's leading blue blog is in a cheerful frame of mind.