London News. (Bryant paid tribute to Chesterton in his introduction to Chesterton's posthumously-published essay collection The Glass Walking-Stick.) He continued writing this column until his death, which occurred almost half a century after Chesterton's. Overall, Bryant produced about 2.7 million words for that magazine. Historical reputation Andrew Roberts claims that Bryant's work on Samuel Pepys gave insufficient credit to the scholarly work of Joseph Robson Tanner (1860–1931). J. H. Plumb gives this account of how G. M. Trevelyan passed Tanner's notes to Bryant: Roberts also claimed that Bryant remained in indirect contact with the Nazis in early 1940, after the outbreak of World War II, and that these ties had been requested by the Foreign Secretary. Although professional historians were frequently negative about his best-sellers, Bryant's histories were explicitly praised by prime ministers Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Churchill, Attlee, Macmillan, Wilson, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher. J. H. Plumb, one of Bryant's detractors, wrote: Plumb's verdict is that Bryant killed off 'patrician history': Plumb cites Trevelyan's possible heirs as Wedgwood and A. L. Rowse. Another detractor is the British historian Andrew Roberts, who has said Roberts's polemical essay, prompted by the opening of archive material on Bryant, has been followed (and rebutted) by Julia Stapleton's full academic study. Bryant's first biographer was Pamela Street, a neighbour of his in Salisbury, who on occasion had collaborated with Bryant in his historical works, and who was a daughter of farmer-author A. G. Street. Her book appeared during Bryant's lifetime. Bryant was aware of the liabilities of writing fast-moving, grand, rather literary narratives. With more self-awareness than some scholars may give him, Bryant answered his critics to some extent when he wrote in 1962, In these days of specialized and cumulative scholarship, for one man to try to survey a nation's history in all its aspects is an act of great presumption. It involves problems of arrangement and writing so baffling that it is seldom attempted, and with reason, since, through compression and generalization on the one hand and the selection of misleading detail on the other, it can so easily lead to over-simplification and misrepresentation. I am very conscious of the imperfections of a work that seeks to cover a field of knowledge so much wider and deeper than any single mind can master. Yet, if my work has any virtue, it is that it attempts, however imperfectly, just this. For if