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The Vices of Integrity: E.H. Carr 1892-1982

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I am the author. You have listed my name as a reviewer! Please remove it as a reviewer. It looks ridiculous.

Very few biographies do exist about Ed. Carr. This biography by Haslam is definitely the best. Haslam himself being a student of Carr could not have made a better tribute to his and many other 'realists' teacher.

E.H.Carr burst into the consciousness of every schoolboy in England studying History at 'A' level in 1961, when he published a series of lectures entitled 'What is History?' It was virtually a set book. No-one could contemplate an interview at a University without having read it, and possibly memorised it.

We found out later that he was not the only person to have written about the philosophy of history, and about historiography; and personally, I found that his much-praised 'Bolshevik Revolution' was (a) difficult to read and (b) overrated.

This book shows how far we were misled. The colossus was a man of straw: one of those brilliant scholars whose main aim in life was to be controversial, rather than illuminate. In the 1930s, he was an appeaser. In the 1950s he was effectively a propagandist for Communism. Nobody exposed him at the time; but nothing he wrote has lasting value. The author of this biography plays this down, as the title shows; but in my view he demonstrates the Vices without proving his case about the Integrity.

But it's a splendid read for anyone who ever read 'What is History?' and failed to understand what Carr was really driving at - that the Soviet Union was bound to win the Cold War. Carr died before the collapse of the USSR, which was just as well for him.

Stephen Cooper

Is the previous reviewer the same person as the author or simply his chance namesake?

I thought j haslam's review of his own book below was inspiring and has it has changed my life. I bow to his high-tech genius. please don't remove it.

The hardest thing about Haslam's study is deciding what to praise first. Haslam draws on his incomparable understanding of Soviet diplomatic history to produce a simply faultless, and certainly definitive, biography. The analysis is endlessly provocative, the conclusions definitive. I bow before his genius.