Short answers, pulled from the story.
Correlli Barnett (the 28th of June 1927 - the 10th of July 2022) was an English military and economic historian best known for arguing that Britain's industrial and strategic decline in the twentieth century stemmed from a moral revolution in its governing class during the nineteenth century. His major works include The Desert Generals, The Collapse of British Power, and The Audit of War.
The Pride and Fall sequence is a four-volume work comprising The Collapse of British Power, The Audit of War, The Lost Victory: British Dreams, British Realities, 1945-50, and The Verdict of Peace. The sequence traces the decline of British power in the twentieth century, attributing it to a transformation in the values of the British governing elite driven by evangelical and non-conformist Christianity from the early nineteenth century onward.
In The Desert Generals (1960), Barnett argued that Montgomery benefited from massive superiority in men and materiel at the Second Battle of El Alamein and that his predecessors, including Richard O'Connor and Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, had been unfairly sidelined. He called Montgomery an "emotional cripple" and described Auchinleck as "The Victor of Alamein" for halting Rommel at the First Battle of El Alamein.
Several ministers in Margaret Thatcher's government cited Barnett's work. Sir Keith Joseph, Education Secretary from 1981 to 1986, declared himself a Correlli Barnett supporter to Anthony Seldon. Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1983 to 1989, cited The Audit of War as an influence on his thinking about education. In 1995, Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine distributed copies of Barnett's The Lost Victory to every member of John Major's Cabinet.
Barnett opposed the 2003 Iraq War from its earliest planning stages, writing to The Daily Telegraph in August 2002 to argue that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed no threat to the region comparable to Nazi Germany's disruption of Europe. He predicted in advance that an invasion would end with the attackers bogged down in a politico-military mess, and later likened the Iraq War to the Suez Crisis of 1956.
From 1977 to 1995, Barnett served as Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge. He was also a fellow of Churchill College, as well as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Historical Society, and the Royal Society of Arts. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.