Niall Ferguson Critique

From the Spectator, 22nd February 2011:

Naturally, envy plays its part. Basking in the bright lights of New York was never going to endear him to Britain’s mustier academes. But envy is only a constituent of contempt. Ferguson's bumptious style is resented. He carries himself with the brash deportment of a nabob – a self-regarding parvenu who has absolute certainty in the merit of each and every one of his opinions.

And he has lot of opinions. His reputation as a financial historian is confirmed. And with good reason: The Cash Nexus is an involved masterpiece of gritty number-crunching. But his discursive meditations on the history of Western culture and empire are intellectually diaphanous. Specialists decry his shallow research, his tabloidese and his insistence on structuring arguments according to the dictates of a six-part television series.