Published Historical Works
Packe's first book was First Airborne (1948), reprinted in 1988 as Winged Stallion: Fighting and Training with the First Airborne (ISBN 0713720379). In 1954 he published the work for which he is best known, The Life of John Stuart Mill. The book was generally well received. It was called by Friedrich Hayek "the definitive biography of Mill for which we have so long been waiting." Other reviewers were more cautious. Lionel Robbins of the London School of Economics criticised the Life for neglecting Mill's economic thought, for demoting prominent philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham to the status of comic relief, and for using "a method of presentation which makes it very difficult to distinguish fact from fiction." But Robbins conceded that the book "abounds in new information" and that "it is certainly safe to say that in future no one who wishes to write seriously about Mill can afford to neglect what he has done." Later biographers of Mill continued to cite Packe's work; in his 2004 biography of Mill, Nicholas Capaldi called Packe's biography "a gold mine of information," although "the stress is more on the life than on the thought."
Packe's next book, The Bombs of Orsini (1957) was a biography of Felice Orsini, an Italian revolutionary who tried to assassinate Napoleon III. In 1966 he and Maurice Dreyfuss published The Alderney Story, 1939–49, an account of Alderney's wartime occupation and liberation compiled while living witnesses were still available. Packe then began work on a biography of Edward III, but the book was incomplete when he died. This last book was completed by L.C.B. Seaman and published in 1983 as King Edward III (ISBN 0710090242).
Read more about this topic: Michael Packe
Famous quotes containing the words published, historical and/or works:
“To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.... A message from the gods should be delivered at once. It is damnably blasphemous to talk about the autumn season and so on. How dare the author or publisher demand a price for doing his duty, the highest and most honourable to which a man can be called?”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting. The man who can look at impassioned subjects of terror with a feeling of exultation may be certain he has an elevated taste.”
—Benjamin Haydon (1786–1846)