Join us online or in person for a seminar with Associate Professor Michael Finch
Creating the ‘Sage of Medmenham’: Basil & Kathleen Liddell Hart and the States House Boys
For Basil Liddell Hart – military theorist, historian, journalist – reputation was a preoccupation, and his own was paramount. By the time of his death in 1970 he had secured for himself the status of the ‘Clausewitz of the Twentieth Century’. In the decades since then, his reputation has been the object of criticism. Yet his ideas continue to occupy a central position in strategic and military debates on a variety of subjects, encompassing manoeuvre warfare, grand strategy, and the roots of strategic culture.
Liddell Hart’s most strident critic, John Mearsheimer, cast him as a mendacious campaigner, who twisted – and even fabricated evidence – in an effort to portray himself as a military and strategic soothsayer. Moreover, he painted Liddell Hart’s ‘disciples’ – the young scholars that the older man befriended and advised in the 1950s and 60s – as accomplices in the deception. The charge brought strong rebuttal from some of those at the centre of the controversy. Yet despite the backlash, there was something in the spirit of Mearsheimer’s critique, if not the detail. There was a legend of Liddell Hart, which was conjured during his lifetime and curated after his death, both by the man himself and by those around him.
This talk will focus on the roots of that legend in Liddell Hart’s post-Second World War life. It will consider the significance of space and place in the creation of Liddell Hart as the ‘Sage of Medmenham’ (the village in which he lived), as well as his relationships, especially with his second wife, Kathleen, and the ‘States House Boys’ who came to visit them at home. In so doing, it will seek to unravel the confluence of the personal and the intellectual, in pursuit of a more intimate history of influence.
20 August 2025, 11am AEST
Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC1.108
Zoom: Click here
Michael Finch is Associate Professor of the History of War and Strategy and Head of Teaching and Learning at the Deakin University Centre for Future Defence and National Security. Prior to this he was a Senior Lecturer at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, Lecturer in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London, and the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of War at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Making Makers: The Past, the Present, and the Study of War (OUP, 2024) and A Progressive Occupation? The Gallieni-Lyautey Method and Colonial Pacification in Tonkin and Madagascar (OUP, 2013), and co-editor of the forthcoming volume Framing the First World War: How Divergent Views Shaped a Global Conflict (Kansas UP, 2025)
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