Letters to the Editor
Side Lines of History Sir Lewis B. Namier Mental Hospitals Mrs. S. E. Marshall Pop' Fiction Howard Wyce Teaching History 1. H. Whyte, David Henschel Purchase Tax Anomalies R. B. Browning De-Federating in Central Africa Thomas Fox-Pitt The Liberal Revival Ivor R. M. Davies Crise de Conscience Professor D. W. Brogan The German 'Miracle' Dr. T. Balogh SIDE LINES OF HISTORY SIR,—Professor Desmond Williams, in reviewing my book Vanished Supremacies, writes about the essay on 'The Downfall of the Habsburg Monarchy': 'Sir Lewis frankly avows the existence of a practical pur- Pose in writing this essay; . . its value is somewhat diminished by the obvious practical motives which underlay its construction.' I say in my introduction that the essay was 'the fruit of war-work in Intelli- gence Departments'; to which I add : 'it is remark- able how much perception is sharpened when the work serves a practical purpose of absorbing in- terest.' This remark clearly refers to the work of which the essay was 'the fruit,' and not to the writing of the essay : which was done a year later, when no `practical purpose' remained other than to establish and elucidate what had happened.
2. Among my 'selection, of titles,' Professor Wil- liams quotes : 'Amitie amoureuse between Franz Joseph and Catherine Schratt.' Whatever my `frivolity of attitude,' I never produced a title of such Portentous clumsinesi.
3. `Namier mentions that Napoleon used the formula="My health is good"—over forty times. What is more natural for any husband than that he should seek to reassure a distant wife on such a point?' The formula I quote as used by Napoleon, with certain intermissions, more than fifty times between June, 1812, and October, 1813, is 'My health is good, my affairs are going well.
4. Professor Williams, criticising me for neglect of the 'wide variety of attitudes and behaviour' among the German Nationalists in Austria, asks : 'What about Otto Steinwender, Karl Lueger, Heinrich Friedjung and Ernest Plener?' The variety becomes indeed staggering when Lueger, the leader of the clerical Christian Socialists, is included among the German Nationalists.—Yours faithfully, 60 The Grampians, W6
L. B. NAMIER
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