Asa Briggs Embodied Everything Wrong With the Modern Age

A review of Adam Sisman, The Indefatigable Asa Briggs (William Collins, 2025).

This book is a great unintentional revelation. It achieves greatness by accident. But only if we read it in the wrong way. It is a biography of Asa Briggs (1921-2016), the historian: and it is a book by Adam Sisman, the biographer. Relevance for the Daily Sceptic? It exposes the entirety of the late 20th century exquisitely. What was 1945-1999? It was the Age of the Time-Server. To be continued, alas, this century. And here it is in the form of a biography. With Briggs as its representative figure: an unexpected apex.

Adam Sisman received polite appreciation, and sometimes prosperous acclaim, for his previous biographies of A.J.P. Taylor and H.R. Trevor-Roper. Obviously everyone had Sisman marked down to write another biography of a great historian. After Norman Stone’s death, I mentioned in an obscure place the possibility that it could be Stone. I never imagined that it would be Asa Briggs. In the pages of The Indefatigable Asa Briggs Sisman says that Taylor was on the “maverick Left” and Trevor-Roper on the “maverick Right”. Well, Briggs may have been indefatigable but he was never maverick. He was on, or in, the unmaverick centre. He was an almost spectacular example of a safe pair of hands. He was, in passing, also fond of travel, luxury and seems to have been a colossal bore, not as a man, but as an entity: though, of course, an entertaining, networking, gladhanding, gossiping man of the world. That is to say, he was probably charming in the flesh, but now the word-made-flesh is again made word, as it were – i.e., only the words remain – we can see that what we have is a lot of biographical frippery standing in for a worthy life.

I wrote the above paragraph before reading the book properly. What I did at first was dip into the book, and marvel. First of all, I marvelled at the possibility that Adam Sisman might not be a very good writer. On p. 400:

On the Eurostar to Paris he had been unable to urinate. (On the platform at Waterloo, Susan had urged him not to go.)

When I reached “go” I inevitably took “go” to = urinate, and not = “travel to France”. (Perhaps encouraged by the portentous word “Waterloo.”) What kind of wife forbids her husband from urinating during an entire train journey? The whole book is a bit like this: serviceable prose occasionally running into overload, mostly because Sisman feels obliged to be pious. He met Trevor-Roper when writing about Taylor; he met Briggs when writing about Trevor-Roper. Trevor-Roper supposed Sisman might be his own biographer. Briggs, naturally enough, thought the same thing.

Second, I marvelled at the possibility that Asa Briggs might not be a very good subject. Trevor-Roper was the greatest writer of historical essays in our time, and quite possibly the greatest writer of the time without qualification: above all other historians, philosophers, novelists, journalists etc. And one could say that Taylor was, though a different species to Trevor-Roper – to my mind, less endowed with the higher powers – he existed where high competence encounters brilliant provocation: and of course he had a bristling prose style. I read a lot of Taylor in my 20s; but only discovered the maturer manner of Trevor-Roper in my 40s. But I never discovered Asa Briggs. I have, I should think, nine of Trevor-Roper’s books on my shelves, and six of Taylor’s. I have none of Briggs’s books. I remember only reading Briggs’s chapter on Middlesbrough in Victorian Cities – but only because I was born in Middlesbrough and was astounded that anyone would condescend to write anything serious about it. It was a competent chapter: Briggs flattered Middlesbrough as Gladstone had done in the 19th century by calling it an “infant Hercules”.

Anyhow, after all this preamble, I finally read Sisman’s book through. It took six hours. And the book is woeful, terrible, aweful = awful in the English sense but also awesome in the American sense: it is sometimes intrinsically interesting, by which I mean interesting in ways that Sisman intends because he finds Briggs in an interesting situation. But the rest of the time it is instrumentally interesting: as a strange, wild, disordered, dull testimony to extremely successful and never disillusioned though certainly dismayed time-serving in the late 20th-century. Briggs was the son of a grocer from Yorkshire. He ended up one of the Great and the Good. But the fact he was one of the Great and Good is really a colossal indictment of the late 20th century.

Consider the following. He went to Cambridge, Sidney Sussex, and also went to the London School of Economics, receiving a First in both places. He was immediately offered great opportunities, and seems never to have lacked them. He was offered something at Peterhouse, but took something at Oxford, at Worcester College, and then took his wife to the University of Leeds. After this there were yet more varied offers, and the one he took was the new University of Sussex: and so Briggs became the face of the new campus university, first Dean and then Vice-Chancellor, inventing departments and schools, and inviting acquaintances and friends and others to teach there. Even after this, though he swore loyalty to Sussex, he was offered Head of this or Head of that, and eventually went on to be Provost of Worcester College. Eventually he was made Fellow of the British Academy and elevated to the Lords.

And then consider this. Even though he was obviously an academic administrator he kept taking on contracts to write books. And he did write some of them. This aspect of the book is bewildering: we turn yet another page and find Sisman, without any irony, telling us that at some point in the 1970s Briggs had agreed to do x, for y, and was paid z. And again and again: yet another x, some other y, and a lot more z. For yes, money was always involved. Sisman should have simplified everything by simply telling us how many contracts Briggs signed, and what percentage of them were completed, what percentage had to be adjusted so Briggs’s contribution would be taken over by a co-author, and what percentage, probably a significant one, was simply written off. By the end of the book I was irritated. This was a bit of a reversal, because through the middle of the book I had felt some sympathy for Briggs – interestingly, in relation to Ruport Murdoch. Briggs was considerate to Murdoch, whom he knew at Oxford in the 1950s, and looked after him when Murdoch’s father died. Murdoch wrote, “I will never forget.” He never did. See p. 134. In addition, Briggs had married a woman slightly out of his league: he clearly craved a Cleopatra, and so he did his best with a wife who “disdained the merit of conjugal fidelity” (as Gibbon put it in Decline and Fall) by receiving payment for jobs here and there, taking her abroad on cruises and whatnot, and also getting her invited to meet the Queen, Roy Jenkins and other dignitaries. But this is what eventually irritated me, on p. 397:

The book [A Social History of the Media, which Briggs co-authored with Peter Burke], now subtitled From Gutenberg to the Internet, concluded with a chapter entitled ‘Into Cyberspace?’ Asa’s vision of the digital future was wholly positive, though he never learned to use a laptop or mastered email.

Good God. The irritating part is the fact that this time-serving historian was “wholly positive” about the wires and screens and whiz-whazzery, even though he knew nothing about ‘em.

Briggs was successful as an undergraduate, with his two Firsts. He impressed Butterfield. He impressed Laski. He worked at Bletchley Park. He was invited everywhere: America, Australia, China. Trevor-Roper joked that the difference between our Lord and Lord Briggs was that “our Lord is always with us”. He had short sight. He went blind. He was kind. One interesting detail: he couldn’t frown or raise his eyebrows. Which was quite possibly, though Sisman does not say so, his most important characteristic: it made him a safe pair of hands. Since he was incapable of expressing horror or disagreement or irony, he was a perfect unironical systems man. Or, as A.J.P. Taylor put it, “a house historian”. What could be better, if we needed someone to meet the Queen, to have Asa, since he would never give her a funny look? Who could be better to have as Head, or Chair, or Historian of our Company? But, but, but. Here is the problem. Briggs, despite all the accolades, and despite, for God’s sake, Miles Taylor’s embarrassing book of 2015 entitled The Age of Asa – playing in typical fragrant academic manner on the title of The Age of Improvement (one of Briggs’s two or three properly competent books) – was nothing better than a plodder. I shall quote A.J.P. Taylor below. But here is Adam Sisman himself, as unironical as Briggs, on one of Briggs’s last books:

It read like the work of a conscientious but unimaginative research student.

I wrote in the margin, “Well – that is what he was.”

What is amusing about this particular, very late book by Briggs, is that its subject was our Editor-in-Chief’s father, Michael Young, and that even Toby Young is mentioned on p. 394 (I had no idea until I reached this point of the book), since the eventual manuscript – and, I have to say, I was impressed that there turned out to be one– was shown to him by Michael, whereupon Toby said it was “very weak” and suggested a new conclusion be added. But this is all at the end. The story, before we reach that point, is vexatious to read. Bear in mind that by this point in the book one has already read, again and again, about Briggs signing a contract for this or that, and the this or that coming out five years later, or 10, or 20, or not at all, usually not at all. So then we have a man called Howard Newby, who obviously did not know Asa Briggs all that well, suggesting to Michael Young that Asa Briggs should write his biography and suggesting to Asa Briggs that he should write a biography of Michael Young. Again, if Adam Sisman had any sort of higher ironic sense he would have told the story less earnestly. Here it is, so you can enjoy the agony of it:

• In 1991 Newby suggests Briggs writes a biography of Young.
• Briggs says he can start in 1992.
• In 1993 Young writes to ask if there is anything he can do to help.
• Briggs says he will complete a draft by 1994.
• In 1995 Young asks if Briggs has another date in mind for completion.
• Briggs becomes irritated with Young’s character in 1996. (We are not told whether Young became irritated with Briggs’s character.) He considers waiting until Young is dead to publish so he can say what he really thinks.
• In 1996 Young requests a meeting.
• Briggs says he understands Young’s concern but has been working or, at least, travelling with his notes. And he adds that he would “strongly object” to repaying any sums he had received.
• In 1997 Briggs says he is working only on the book, and is two-thirds of the way through it.
• In 1998 Young asks, “Ought we to call it a day?” Briggs replies: “I have an enormous investment in this project and I don’t think you quite realise how much time I am putting into it.”
• In 2000 a typescript is ready. Young thinks the book is weak, shows it to Toby etc., and Briggs writes a new afterword.
• In 2001 Michael Young: Social Entrepeneur is published. Even Sisman says it is “bland”.

Trevor-Roper was brilliant. Taylor was very good. And Briggs: Briggs was nothing better than a time-server, and evidently a bit of a grifter, though evidently an accidental or innocent one. He worked hard: on what? He chaired meetings. He signed contracts. He drank champagne. He ignored his children. He lamented that not enough working class people availed themselves of the opportunity of the Open University. In short, he was an overgrown schoolboy, who hardly developed after posing for his Matriculation photograph at Sidney Sussex in 1938. And the truth is even worse than this. He was simply the tip of the iceberg: for perhaps it was The Age of Asa, not in any glorious sense, but because what England wanted was slightly pompous, entitled, willing-to-work, willing-to-enjoy-expenses, fearful and compliant systems-men-and-women. Listen to the verdict of his best man, Harrison Pitt, who was also a Fellow of Worcester College, when assessing whether Briggs could be a good Provost for the college. And bear in mind he was a close friend of Briggs. This is from p. 300:

He is not devious: indeed he is not really a very subtle character. But he does have a certain elusiveness – he isn’t really a very bold man. He bubbles with ideas (not all of them very well thought out). … If things tend to get a bit tricky, then you would have to be very firm with him. … He is a good man of business, competent in committee. … He doesn’t much like controversy. … In a row he would reach for the soothing oil at an irritatingly early stage. He tends a bit to the “Well, that’s all settled then”, when it’s clear that nothing is settled at all. … He is a very nice person.

So he was nice. And I am sure he was. He even looks as if he was. The sort of short man who stands slightly too close to one’s shoulder, gazing short-sightedly, but with an agreeable smile, and always willing to let you be the one to talk first. A wing man. A systems man. After which, if provoked, he will talk a book. But always good-natured. Chapter 15 of Sisman’s book is entitled, ‘Too Good-Natured to Say No.’

Such men as Briggs are necessary to the workings of the world. They make the world go round. They travel round the world as it goes around. They say, ‘Yes.’ They say, ‘How much?’ They have get-up-and-go. But they don’t know where to go. They have no critical sense. They are receptacles. As a historian, Briggs was a receptacle, a repository. He had an undergraduate ability to knock out an essay, and a graduated ability to shake out a book: but, even though he never used word processors, he wrote with all the vices of the word processor, not in a flow, but, obviously, by excising, by cutting and pasting, by stopping and starting, and then by simply agglomerating all the pages he had so far written: 1,500 words a day, clickety-clack, 1,500 words a day, ink-on-the-page. Oh, and listen to this. He complains late in life, at the beginning of the very last chapter, while in bed, grumbling to his journal: “I get no encouragement from Susan lying beside me, who has no idea of how difficult it is to write.” This is written by a man aged 79: who has spent his entire life posing as a writer. A man who wrote I don’t know how many books, because Adam Sisman never lists them, but only mentions their titles as he goes along. If it was so difficult to write for Briggs, why did he bother? He was good at plenty of other things.

I want to drag Briggs up from the grave, shake him, ruffle his hair, push his owlish glasses up his nose, and tell him that if he had wanted to be a writer, he should have worked on writing instead of working on everything else. The oddest of all things is that Asa Briggs managed to put himself across as a writer or historian, when he was nothing of the sort. He was a man of the 1950s and 1960s: a week-is-a-long-time-in-politics sort of person, a white-heat-of-technology sort of person, a you’ve-never-had-it-so-good sort of person. I doubt if anyone will ever read any of his books again.

David Cannadine called him “the Macaulay of the Welfare State”. It sounds like praise. But, if one reads it aright, it is a brutal put-down.

Nonetheless Sisman’s book, awkward and clumsy though it is, is a remarkable book. It is the perfect description of everything that was wrong about the mid- to late-20th century. Asa Briggs embodied the age. He was an unimaginative research student. All over the world, now, there are countless uninspired Asa Briggses, who cannot write, and yet who perpetuate themselves, writing, writing, writing, and working the net (i.e., networking, in case I am too obscure) but not working the trident, for they are not ironical enough, or nasty enough, to work the trident. Good men, nice men, kind men: but weak men, bland men (bland women too): men who’ll not only sell their grandmother, but their mother, and maybe even their wife, for a contract, or a house, or a position: or for a holiday for the same wife. And these men, though good, are not good enough, because they cannot stand up to the bad men, the men who work the trident.

I wrote all the above without going through the entire book a second time to check my marginal annotations: but I have since done this, in order to substantiate what I have said. In order to give chapter and verse. So let’s scavenge. The book is certainly interesting in drawing a number of names together that rarely come together. Every man is an island, no doubt, but also a set of bridges, and it is interesting to see who abutted against whom. Briggs was remarkable for knowing Richard Adams of Watership Down, Roger Bannister of the Four-Minute-Mile, and Roy Jenkins, also Denis Healey and James Callaghan, and also Harold Macmillan and Clement Attlee. He befriended Richard Attenborough. He met Charlie Watts. He knew Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, as well as Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine. He had a full set of Oxford and Cambridge names: Butterfield, Postan, Brogan, Oakeshott etc. on the one hand, and Beloff, Bowra, Taylor, Weldon, Ryle etc on the other. Later on, there were Winch, Supple, Lively and the rest at Sussex. He was originally influenced by Matthew Arnold, was indebted to Reinhold Niebuhr, and admired Oswald Spengler – but Sisman does not tell us much about these, since Sisman is not really interested in ideas. Probably neither was Briggs. (Macaulay of the Welfare State indeed.) In fact, Sisman does not really know what to do with Briggs: with Trevor-Roper there was a paper trail of malice and forthrightness and spirit, and some of this rubbed off on the biographer, but with Briggs there is only achievement, and a lack of achievement. One would like to have had listed all the positions Briggs was offered, and even all the positions he took: he was involved in the WEA, and the Open University, indeed, its third chancellor. He went to Glyndebourne and Ascot. He was invited by Richard Crossman to be on a government committee on nursing. He judged the Booker prize. He was on the Wolfson History Prize board. He was a governor of Henley College. He was an associate of the Club of Rome. He had something or other to do with the Civic Trust, the Brighton Pavilion, and he turned down, at least, the offer of being made chairman of the Independent Television Authority. There was speculation he would be made chairman or director-general of the BBC. He could have gone to All Souls. He was sounded out to become the first president of the European University Institute in Florence. Isn’t this all tiring? Iris Murdoch fell in love with him – of course. He was asked if he would like to be Gladstone Professor of Government in Oxford. He was offered £30,000 to write a social history of England, which he did, though he had nothing distinctive to say about it. How about this for temporising? He was critical of G.M. Trevelyan’s English Social History, said it was out of date, then wrote an introduction to it, and then wrote his own replacement for it, which, Sisman says, lacked Trevelyan’s “fixed point of view and elegance”. He wrote a history of the Leverhulme Trust. He wrote a history of a Bordeaux wine. Even in the 1960s – long before any of this – he told someone he thought he had left no time for his writing. He was President of the Victorian Society, President of the British Association for Local History, President of the Association of Research Associations. He acted as consultant to Reader’s Digest for some dull book or other. He signed a contract to write a history of Longman the publisher, extracted a lot of money, but publication was abandoned, though he did publish a book out of the wreckage, 30 years after the original contract. He signed a contract to write a comparative history of welfare states. It was never written. He acted as consultant to Reuters, with the vague intention of writing a history of it, which he never did. He wrote, at tedious length, a history of the BBC. There were contracts to write histories of Lewis, Sainsburys, Marks and Spencer, and I forget which were completed, which not. Towards the end of his life he considered writing a history of the radio. He was asked to write the fourth volume of the history of the Royal College of Physicians of London, a book that was so tortured that his volume came out 30 years after the previous one. He was due to collaborate to write a three-volume history of Europe, but his collaborator was angered by his delays, so he eventually took on a co-author to help him complete his part. He wrote a few books which were only 10,000 or so words long. That he could manage. He was contracted to write a history of Bethlem Royal Hospital. But 1973 soon became 1986 and the contract was cancelled. He delivered feeble Ford lectures at Oxford, and everyone sighed over the manuscript, knowing nothing could be done with it. Ain’t it astounding that he never suffered disgrace over this repeated habit of signing, wining, dining and then signing something else. Somehow he got away with it.

And this is why his writing was no good. A.J.P. Taylor said, of one book, that Briggs was “a veritable Lysenko of verbiage, making three sentences grow where one would do” (p. 183). Taylor said of another book that it was “a sound utility product, plodding steadily forward” (p. 205). Malcolm Muggeridge wrote of another book: “Professor Briggs is no Gibbon, not even a Trevor-Roper” (p. 253). And, finally, Peter Jay wrote of yet another book (p. 326):

If the Venerable Bede is the truly the father of English history, then the Venerable Briggs is his true son: prolific, indefatigable, meticulous, uncritical, unilluminating, shy of issues and immensely boring.

Look! “Indefatigable.” The very word that Sisman uses in his title, The Indefatigable Asa Briggs. Was Sisman being ironical after all? Does he know that his book is a very subtle satire in disguise? Does he know that he had a dud for a subject? One hopes so.

But it is worth having such a book. I don’t know of any book that exposes an entire age as well as this one.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.