John Lukacs brings forth a fresh and triumphant essay in historical revisionism with The Last European War.

The Last European War: September 1939—December 1941 By John Lukacs Doubleday, 562 pp., $15

Despite the fact that the so-called “revisionist historians”—creatures like Gabriel Kolko, William Appleman Williams, Gar Alperovitz, Diane Shaver Clemens: smug rovers through the parlors of the professional conventions and the pages of such publications as The New York Review of Books—are mainly offensive people and have come of late to look like comic ones as well, there is nothing intrinsically idiotic about so-called “revisionist history” itself. “All history,” suggests Mr. John Lukacs, masterly philosophical historian, “is revisionism of a kind. The revision of history is not—or, rather, ought not to be—the monopoly of opportunists whose descriptions of the past serve but their ephemeral interests of the present—their present. . . . All history—indeed, all thinking—consists of the rethinking of the past.”

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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The Last European War: September 1939—December 1941 By John Lukacs Doubleday, 562 pp., $15

Despite the fact that the so-called “revisionist historians”—creatures like Gabriel Kolko, William Appleman Williams, Gar Alperovitz, Diane Shaver Clemens: smug rovers through the parlors of the professional conventions and the pages of such publications as The New York Review of Books—are mainly offensive people and have come of late to look like comic ones as well, there is nothing intrinsically idiotic about so-called “revisionist history” itself. “All history,” suggests Mr. John Lukacs, masterly philosophical historian, “is revisionism of a kind. The revision of history is not—or, rather, ought not to be—the monopoly of opportunists whose descriptions of the past serve but their ephemeral interests of the present—their present. . . . All history—indeed, all thinking—consists of the rethinking of the past.”