A short life of the author
Thomas Frank Dermot Pakenham, 8th Earl of Longford (born 14 August 1933), is an Anglo-Irish historian and writer who has produced three of the finest narrative histories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — books that combine the research standards of academic history with the narrative drive of the best popular writing — and who has also, in a seemingly improbable second career, written some of the most beautiful books about trees ever published.
Background
Pakenham was born into one of the most remarkable literary families in Britain. His father was Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford, the politician and prison reformer. His mother was Elizabeth Longford, the distinguished biographer of Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington. His siblings include the writer Rachel Billington and the biographer Antonia Fraser. He was educated at Ampleforth College and Magdalen College, Oxford, and worked briefly in journalism before turning to historical writing.
The Year of Liberty (1969)
Pakenham’s first major work is a narrative history of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 — the most violent and destructive event in Irish history before the Famine. The rebellion, inspired by the French Revolution and organised by the United Irishmen (a coalition of Catholic and Protestant radicals), was crushed with extreme brutality by British forces. Pakenham’s account is based on extensive archival research in British, Irish, and French sources, and it narrates the rebellion with a novelist’s attention to character and incident.
The book was the first comprehensive modern account of the rebellion, and it established Pakenham’s method: exhaustive primary research combined with vivid, sometimes cinematic storytelling. It remains the standard work on the subject.
The Boer War (1979)
Pakenham’s most celebrated book is a massive, meticulously researched narrative history of the Second Boer War (1899–1902) — the conflict in which Britain, the world’s greatest imperial power, found itself humiliated by two small Boer republics in South Africa. The book covers the political origins of the war, the initial British disasters (Colenso, Magersfontein, Stormberg), the sieges of Ladysmith, Mafeking, and Kimberley, the guerrilla phase, and the British counter-insurgency campaign that included the notorious concentration camps in which thousands of Boer women and children died.
At nearly 700 pages, the book is a triumph of narrative history — vivid, dramatic, and morally engaged without being polemical. Pakenham’s sympathies are clearly with the Boers, but he treats the British commanders (particularly Roberts and Kitchener) with fairness and psychological insight. The book won the Cheltenham Prize and has remained in print since publication.
The Scramble for Africa (1991)
Pakenham’s third major work covers the European partition of Africa between 1876 and 1912 — the process by which the entire African continent (except Ethiopia and Liberia) was divided among European colonial powers in a few decades of frenzied imperial competition. The book follows the major figures — Leopold II of Belgium, Cecil Rhodes, Bismarck, Stanley, Livingstone — and the major events from the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 through the completion of the partition.
The scale of the book is extraordinary — it covers half a continent and thirty-five years — and Pakenham manages the complexity with remarkable clarity. He does not flinch from the brutality of colonisation, particularly Leopold’s catastrophic exploitation of the Congo, while acknowledging the varied motivations (commercial, strategic, humanitarian, missionary) that drove the scramble.
The Tree Books
In a delightful late-career turn, Pakenham became one of the world’s foremost writers about trees. Meetings with Remarkable Trees (1996) and Remarkable Trees of the World (2002) are large-format books combining Pakenham’s own photographs with essays about extraordinary individual trees — the oldest, the largest, the most historically significant, the most beautiful. The tree books, which draw on Pakenham’s arboricultural knowledge (he maintains extensive plantings on his estate at Tullynally Castle in County Westmeath, Ireland), are works of genuine passion and surprising literary quality.
Critical Standing
Pakenham is one of the finest narrative historians writing in English. His combination of deep archival research, dramatic storytelling, and moral seriousness places him in the tradition of Gibbon, Macaulay, and Barbara Tuchman. His three major histories are all standard works on their subjects and are unlikely to be superseded.
Collecting Pakenham
The Boer War (1979, Weidenfeld & Nicolson) in first edition with dust jacket brings $30–$75. The Scramble for Africa (1991, Random House) is widely available. The Year of Liberty (1969, Hodder & Stoughton) is scarcer and more valuable. The tree books in their large-format first editions are attractive collector’s items.