Esteemed Comrade Will has drawn attention to a most peculiar article in Wednesday’s Thunderer by expatriate British historian and darling of the stateside talkshows Niall Ferguson. In his Times piece Professor Ferguson attempts the near impossible: a defence of Henry Kissinger.

Well it’s certainly an audacious effort, but I must say that Ferguson makes a very poor job of it. In fact, Ferguson’s argument is so desperate that he is reduced to invoking Kissinger’s Jewishness to explain the almost universal condemnation of a man who in the eyes of millions is one of the most loathsome living carriers of the human genome.

My reaction to Will’s trenchant comment on Ferguson was to point out that the historian is merely filling column inches in order to stretch his considerable ego and replenish the coffers. Ferguson, you see, fills a market niche, and what he sells is history as a commodity.

The content of Ferguson’s non-academic work is attractive to a certain kind of conservative who likes what little he knows, and will not countenance spending valuable time reading anything else. It is writing by numbers. Ferguson is rather good at it, and he makes a tidy sum out of the exercise. And I’m sure it’s jolly good fun too!

Looking again at the Times piece, I see a handful of comments following Ferguson’s text. Here is one absolutely priceless example:

“I’m sure that the 200,000+ Bangladeshis that Nixon and Kissinger helped move quickly onward only blamed the Quakers,”

writes Robert Foster from Austin, Texas. Sander Freeman from Leesburg declares that Henry Kissinger has found his David Irving. That must be nice for him.

Bangladesh – the land that Kissinger memorably described thus:

“The place is and always will be a basket case.”

Quite unlike great men of state and cultural sophisticates such as Dr Kissinger, naturally.