Though Gilbert was to write many books, it was the Holocaust that attracted his special attention. His book The Holocaust: A Jewish Tragedy stands, in my opinion, above any other produced by a British scholar. It was when I inquired why it was not included in a dense, 19-page bibliography of Oxford's special-subject history course on Nazi Germany, that the underestimation by historians at his own university became clear. There was no substance in the work, nothing for students to discuss, I was told. After I mentioned the startling omission in the Jewish Chronicle, the book was eventually included.   

How is his underrating to be explained?  Gilbert has devoted his career to works of monumental proportions. Academics are too busy and too pressured to read. They prefer studies with introductions and conclusions which allow them to skip the rest. To score maximum points in the game of academic research assessments, works must present a thesis, quote amply from the writings of other historians, and express agreement or disagreement.  

Gilbert's methodology of chronological narrative using a multiplicity of sources, derived from Winston Churchill himself, does implicitly put forward interpretations and is subject to bias. But it does not involve direct confrontations with rival historians. When he wrote Auschwitz and the Allies, Gilbert did not set out to discredit the doyen of Israeli Holocaust historians, Yehuda Bauer. But Gilbert's account of the events of June 1944 differs considerably from Bauer's. Gilbert's writings on the Holocaust differ from many written by conventional historians in two other respects. He has apparently not relied on German sources of research funding. And he has shown endless kindness to survivors of the Nazi death camps, regard for their testimony, and willingness to advise and contribute to their memoirs. 

A great Jewish historian, he is quite separately a great English historian, a great cartographer and a fascinating lecturer. Apart from the huge achievement of the multi-volume Churchill biography and collection of documents, he has written major works on the First and Second World Wars as well as a three-volume History of the Twentieth Century. He has been entrusted with the most sensitive of secrets about the Iraq War. While the Queen is able to give advice to her ministers on the basis of her 60 years of experience, Gilbert has been summoned to give to successive prime ministers from Harold Wilson onwards the distillation of the wisdom of the past century. After all, the jealousy of the professoriat may not matter.