An officer and a professor.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: Captain Professor: The Memoirs of Sir Michael Howard - Book review

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.

In Captain Professor, Howard blends his personal history with world events to provide a delightfully informal and disarming account. He begins with his privileged childhood before turning to his years in British boarding schools. His descriptions of the combat he experienced during the Italian campaign in the Second World War are seldom less than gripping. Scarcely less robust than the real thing, his accounts of academic warfare are, more often than not, mordantly entertaining.

But it is Howard's liberality of spirit and disdain during the Cold War for intellectual extremism of all kinds that emerges most sharply. As a half-Quaker and half-Jew who is also a homosexual--a topic he deals with in some detail--Howard says that from the outset he never felt as though he was traditional John Bull material. Rather, he took a far more inquiring and detached stance toward the issue of empire and the exercise of military power. Much of his life has been devoted to debunking pacifist sentiments in Britain and neoconservative nationalism in the United States. Today, Howard is aghast at the presidency of George W. Bush, which he believes has tried to claim a "hunter's license to use force anywhere in the world" and to dispense with the restraints of international law that the United States had formerly helped to create. He at once offers a timely reminder of the unpredictable nature of warfare and the importance of distinguishing between real and imaginary threats.

Like the historian Fritz Stern, who memorably chronicles imperial Germany in his recent memoir Five Germanys I Have Known, Howard, who was born in 1922, evokes the vanished world of his ancestors. On his father's side, Howard is descended from a long line of Quakers that was, as he puts it, "quite distinguished enough in its own quiet way without going scrabbling after strawberry leaves." His father provoked some comment in the family when, in 1914, he married Edith Julia Emma Edinger, who was not a Quaker. She was Jewish. To make matters even worse, the Edingers were also German. In 1914 it was not exactly a good thing to be, especially if one had been presented, as Howard's mother was, to the Kaiser on his yacht, the Hohenzollern. But whatever eyebrows may have been raised on the paternal side of the family, Howard's mother did have the very considerable...