Academics have a varied commitment to methods. Evans draws attention to Roberts's weak footnotes. But there are prominent works that deliberately break with footnoting, not least one by Evans's colleague, Christopher Bayly, in The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914. Another Cambridge professor, John Hatcher, in The Black Death: An Intimate History, chose, in proceeding from the known to the unknown, to invent situations, characters and dialogue (pp. xii-xiii, 9). Similarly, Chris Wickham, Chichele Professor of Medieval History at Oxford, offered an English case study that was "frankly speculative, indeed partially invented" in Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800, pp. 386, 428-33. Rather like historical geographers modelling settlement patterns, Wickham constructs an ideal picture of reality, seeking to crystallise the characteristics of many places. He does not go counter to the facts. Just so, but one wonders whether Roberts would be allowed this by an academic reviewer. At times, indeed, there is a sense that standards are being applied in a different fashion, although that is also the pattern within the academy: "I write a synoptic work of brilliance. You write mere textbooks."

To turn to The Storm of War is to be reminded that Roberts is a first-rate writer and one who has an ability to link his account of the grand strategic level to the details of individual cases. There is proper attention to what Roberts terms "the everlasting shame of mankind", the Holocaust. Much of the book is devoted to fighting, which is a reasonable choice given the subject. The balance of coverage is lopsided, but among the non-British topics ably covered are the Eastern Front and Midway. There is also an interesting discussion of Hitler's personal responsibility for Germany's defeat, one that is worthy of debate.

Throughout, Roberts writes with an impassioned commitment that does him credit as an historian: "Even two-thirds of a century later, it is still impossible not to feel fury against Hitler and the Nazis for forcing baby Rita Gains to grow up without her father." In his Oxford Companion to World War Two, M. R. D. Foot, one of the critical reviewers of Roberts's book, compared the Anglo-American bombing offensive on Germany with the Holocaust in a passage that totally failed to capture the point of intentionality:

"To days — day after day, regularly as clockwork — on which Himmler killed ten thousand Jews, nights followed, night after night, on which Harris killed a thousand Germans: both of them killing indirectly, as is the fashion with modern commanders. Sometimes Harris's body-count outreached Himmler's. What differences Saint Michael will see on the day of judgement between burning a baby to death in Dresden, and gassing a baby to death at Birkenau, is a question rather for the theologian than for the historian..." 

Historians abdicate their civic and moral responsibilities if they shelve such issues by handing them over to theologians. Roberts does not do so. I salute his commitment and worry about the moral emptiness of so much of the work produced by great scholars. The last, incidentally, is not a charge that can be made against Evans. Paradoxically, alongside their obvious differences, in approach and politics, there is much in common between these two powerful writers. So much for the simplicities of all too much historiography.