Michael Howard, Captain Professor: The Memoirs of Sir Michael Howard (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 221 pp., $44.95.
IN RECENT decades, a British invasion has been taking place in American academia. One history department after another has welcomed scholars from across the pond to instruct and enlighten Americans about the past. Some of the prize catches include Paul Kennedy, Simon Schama, Linda Colley, Jonathan Spence and, most recently, Niall Ferguson. But perhaps no one has occupied a more prominent position than Sir Michael Howard.
In his memoir Captain Professor, Howard, who recently retired from teaching at Yale, where he was the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History, recounts his illustrious career. Howard, who pioneered the study of war as an aspect of "total history", was awarded Britain's highest historical honor, the Regius Chair of Modern History at Oxford, before heading to Yale. He seems to have met or known everybody who was somebody, ranging from Winston Churchill to Henry Kissinger to Margaret Thatcher. Among his accomplishments were writing the definitive history of the Franco-Prussian War and helping establish the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Department of War Studies at King's College London. He belongs to a long line of British military historians, such as John Wheeler-Bennett, who have drawn on their deep historical knowledge to expound upon contemporary politics in vivid and forceful prose that is almost impossible to read without mounting excitement.
