I have followed your discussion with interest, but feel I have to interject, on two counts:

I knew Kenneth GRiffith well. He came out to SA many times,and my family befriended him in Mafeking in 1967, where he was filming, and maintained a lifelong relationship with him. We got to understand some of the anomalies driving him.
Kenneth was a revisionist historian - it is true, he had a tendency to tilt at any windmill that stirred his romantic fantasies. IN South Africa's case, he latched onto the Boer cause and while he was certainly correct in theway he portrayed the British, he failed to mention the atrocities committed by BOTH sides against the real victims of the war, the blacks. We had so many fights with Kenneth about this - also about his peculiar attitude towards apartheid. He sometimes sounded like an apologist for it - and I suspect he really was. I heard him make some absolutely appalling, abysmally myopic statements about this, and I also heard him equate the British concentration camps with Hitler's concentration camps - a spurious, absurd, horribly ignorant comparison which ended up in one of our most memorable brawls. (I am Jewish.) But it ended, like all our brawls, with the realisation that one should not take his utterances too seriously. He loved to shock, he loved to claim the moral high ground, he needed the knowledge that he was rocking as many boats as possible.

NEVERTHELESS: he was a wonderfully warm, generous, compassionate, highly sensitive man whose emotional make-up led him on some strange intellectual journeys. He was a provocateur who relished outraging people, I think because he carried a lot of anger in him from early childhood issues.

My second point: I see your comments about "Breaker Morant". SInce you are discussing errant historians, you should know that the film - like the book on which it based, by Australian Kit Denton - is absolutely littered with errors, both about Morant's life and death, and about the circumstances of his trial. I could enumerate these for you, but it would take a very long time. Denton captured the romantic soul of the man, but really did very little homework indeed. I also found the film very moving, but it is horribly inaccurate. The real HArry Morant was a far more complex character, and his crime was considerably worse than the one the movie portrays. But the movie certainly got Kitchener right, and showed him up for the filthy hypocrite he was.

Sorry to enter this discussion uninvited. But I was really upset by some of your comments about Kenneth. He was, indeed, self-righteous. And yes, he did speak down to people. But he was neither evil nor malicious, and ultimately he died a very difficult, lonely death, after intense suffering. He really does not deserve some of the hideous things you people have said - particularly regarding his place of burial!!!! His aim with the Boer War, certainly, was to portray the suffering on both sides. See his film, "Men of the Widow", with interviews he conducted with surviving soldiers.

He was also a consummate actor, and remained one all his life. See "The ENglishman who went up a hill and came down a mountain", "Four weddings and a funeral", "I'm all right, JAck", and many many other fine films.