Martin Gilbert

• 1. Introduction

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  Martin Gilbert was born on the 25th of October 1936, the son of a north London jeweller whose family name had once been Goldberg. Nine months after war broke out across Europe, the young Gilbert was evacuated from Britain on a ship crossing from Liverpool to Quebec. That transatlantic crossing planted something in him. The vivid memories of that journey would, in later years, pull him toward the history of the very conflict that had uprooted him.

  By the time Gilbert died on the 3rd of February 2015, he had written 88 books. He had spent years inside Hungarian diplomatic intrigues. He had argued before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. He had been knighted for his contributions to British history. And he had become the official biographer of Winston Churchill, inheriting a task so large that the finished project would run to 28 volumes and more than 30,000 pages.

  What drove a jeweller's son from north London to become one of the most prolific historians of the twentieth century? And how did a man so committed to gathering facts end up at the center of so many controversies?

• 2. Roots and Formation

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  All four of Gilbert's grandparents had been born in the Pale of Settlement, the restricted zone of the Russian Empire where Jewish settlement was permitted. That heritage was close, not abstract. Gilbert described himself from his school years as someone who was interested in "Jewish things," and acknowledged that he "once or twice got in trouble for my Zionistic activities" at Highgate School.

  At Highgate, Gilbert studied history under Alan Palmer, who specialized in the Balkans, and politics under T. N. Fox. The school would later honor him in a concrete way: the Sir Martin Gilbert Library at Highgate was opened on the 6th of May 2014 by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

  After school came two years of National Service in the Intelligence Corps, an experience that would take on unexpected resonance later. Gilbert then went to Magdalen College, Oxford, where one of his tutors was the historian A. J. P. Taylor. He graduated in 1960 with first-class honours in modern history. Postgraduate research at St Antony's College, Oxford followed, and it was during that period, in 1962, that his life's main work quietly announced itself.

• 3. The Churchill Project

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  In 1962, Randolph Churchill approached the young Gilbert to assist with a biography of Randolph's own father, Sir Winston Churchill. That same year, Gilbert was made a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, joining a circle that included C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.

  Gilbert spent several years dividing his time between his own Oxford research and Randolph's team based in Suffolk, which was working on the first two volumes. When Randolph died in 1968, Gilbert was commissioned to complete the remaining six main volumes on his own. He spent the next 20 years on the project.

  Each main volume came with two or three companion volumes of documents, initially called Companions. The full biography eventually reached 28 volumes and surpassed 30,000 pages, with three further document volumes still planned at the time of Gilbert's death. In 1971, Michael Foot, reviewing one volume in the New Statesman, wrote that "whoever made the decision to make Martin Gilbert Churchill's biographer deserves a vote of thanks from the nation. Nothing less would suffice."

  In 2008, Gilbert announced that the Hillsdale Press had taken over the task of publishing the remaining companion volumes. The first of these appeared in 2014, becoming the seventeenth instalment in a series the press titled "The Churchill Documents." Gilbert was incapacitated shortly after its publication, and subsequent volumes were completed by his former research assistant Larry Arnn, with Gilbert credited as co-author.

• 4. Holocaust and Jewish History

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  Gilbert described himself as an "archival historian" who built his work from primary sources. That approach shaped his engagement with the Holocaust, which became one of the defining subjects of his career alongside Churchill.

  He produced a single-volume history of the Holocaust, and in a BBC interview in 2005, Gilbert articulated his conviction about what research could do: he believed the "tireless gathering of facts will ultimately consign Holocaust deniers to history."

  His interest extended to living Jewish communities under pressure. By the 1980s, his focus had shifted toward Soviet Jews who had been denied the right to emigrate. In 1984 he published Jews of Hope: The Plight of Soviet Jewry Today, followed in 1986 by Shcharansky: Hero of Our Time. He also represented the Soviet Jewry Movement in settings that ranged from formal appearances before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to educational slideshows produced for the general public on behalf of the Soviet Jewry Information Centre.

  One of his final books, In Ishmael's House: A History of the Jews in Muslim Lands, drew on the work of Bat Ye'or, whose Eurabia theory Gilbert had publicly endorsed in 2005, stating that it was "100 percent accurate." Tom Segev, reviewing Gilbert's book The Story of Israel, acknowledged its "encyclopaedic clarity" while pointing to the absence of figures from Arab sources as a significant gap.

• 5. The Hungarian Episode

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  Gilbert's two years in the Intelligence Corps before Oxford were not the last time the shadow of intelligence work fell across his life. In the early 1960s, the State Protection Authority of Hungary made a serious attempt to recruit him as an agent.

  Gilbert initially responded warmly to the approach. He accepted a Hungarian government-funded trip to Budapest in September 1961, and during the visit expressed views about Britain that appeared designed to impress his hosts, along with what the Hungarian records show were some untruths about his own background. The Hungarians intercepted letters he sent home during the trip and eventually concluded that Gilbert was lying about being a Communist.

  When they invited him to a follow-up meeting in Paris, Gilbert did not appear. The intended handler later defected to the West, and the Hungarians abandoned their efforts. Gilbert himself never explained the episode publicly. Writing about it in 2015, the Hungarian historian Krisztian Ungvary concluded that Gilbert had likely understood what was happening, and raised the possibility that Gilbert may have been operating on behalf of British intelligence to help plant a double agent.

• 6. Chilcot and Controversy

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  In June 2009, Gilbert was appointed to the British government's inquiry into the Iraq War, chaired by Sir John Chilcot. His appointment drew immediate criticism in parliament from William Hague, Clare Short, and George Galloway, all of whom raised concerns about his neutrality. The basis of their objection was a 2004 piece in which Gilbert had written that George W. Bush and Tony Blair might in the future be regarded as highly as Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  In November 2009, an article in The Independent on Sunday by Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya, objected to Gilbert's presence on the committee partly because of his Jewish background and Zionist sympathies. Gilbert, in a later interview, characterized Miles's attack as being driven by antisemitism.

  The inquiry continued, but Gilbert did not live to see its findings made public. His death on the 3rd of February 2015 was announced the following day by Sir John Chilcot himself, who was at the time giving evidence before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee about delays in the publication of the inquiry's report. Chilcot told the committee that Gilbert had died the previous night following a long illness.

• 7. Honours and Legacy

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  In 1990, Gilbert was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 1995 he received a knighthood "for services to British history and international relations." That same year he retired as a Fellow of Merton College and became an Honorary Fellow. In 1999, the University of Oxford awarded him a Doctor of Letters degree "for the totality of his published work."

  Over the following years, honorary degrees accumulated from institutions including George Washington University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. In 2003, the University of Tubingen awarded him the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize. In 2012, he won the Dan David Prize for his contribution to the field of history and biography.

  Fellow historians and critics generally praised his precision and range. His book on the First World War was described as incorporating all major fronts, domestic, diplomatic, and military, and as a "stunning achievement of research and storytelling." Catholic sources described him as a "fair-minded, conscientious collector of facts." Gordon Brown, speaking at the opening of the Sir Martin Gilbert Library at Highgate in 2014, said Gilbert had advised Harold Wilson, Lady Thatcher, John Major, and Tony Blair, and that at every point Gilbert "wanted to believe that the best outcomes were possible."

  Gilbert had asked to be buried in Israel. A Memorial Tribute attended by Gordon Brown and Randolph Leonard Spencer-Churchill, the great-grandson of Winston Churchill, was held on the 24th of November 2015 at the Western Marble Arch Synagogue in London.