Blair the war leader provided historians with countless opportunities to get their names in the newspapers, let alone voice their opinions across the airwaves. The usual suspects were lined up (Eric Hobsbawm and Ben Pimlott in the Guardian, Andrew Roberts and John Keegan in the Telegraph, Niall Ferguson in The Times, and so on), but there was a refreshing readiness to call on pundits with diametrically opposite views from the paper in question. The Guardian, for example, had two major features - on historical parallels with the Iraq war, and on Blair’s legacy – both of which boasted a Premiership line-up from across the political spectrum. Unexpected stars emerged such as Richard Overy, a trenchant critic of the war, while the weeklies and reviews revived the great Fleet Street tradition of tapping the ivory-towered expert’s latent journalistic ambitions. Campus contributors to the London Review of Books continue to stoke the flames of controversy raging ever since Cambridge classicist Mary Beard dared suggest 9/11 was a backlash waiting to happen. No historian chose to speak up for Blair in the LRB, but the TLS provided an outlet for those academics, mostly American, advancing the case for war. Most galling for any historian...