Michael Packe - Published Historical Works

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).