Your case on the thread when Wheatcroft was first brought up challenged Keith A's stance related to three points put by modern day historians specialising in the period of the First World War. You challenged the statement that they were of the opinion that, in comparison to the other combatant powers involved, the British Army was generally well led. To back up your case you mentioned two works, A.J.P. Taylor's book "The First World War: an Illustrated History" and Alan Clark's "Donkey's", Keith A, myself and others pointed out that both those works had been critically reviewed by historians at the time and both had been found wanting. (Clark himself admitted that the quote from which the title of his book was taken had been made up by himself - so that would account for the "largely fraudulent", i.e. based on a falsehood.) It was also pointed out to you that any historian writing about that period in the 1960s (Taylor & Clark) did not have access to vast amounts of material available to historians writing about the subject in the last thirty years. As you based your "case" on works that were regarded as being unrefined, uneducated, illiterate (all synonyms for the word "vulgar" used in it's intended sense) and largely fraudulent that was yet another WWI thread in which your "mobbing" of Keith A did not quite pan out as you had hoped.

But I didn't mention those works AT ALL except in the context of Keith's misquote. I certainly did not try to use them to back up any case. Know why not? Because I haven't read them! I have no argument with Wheatcroft's analysis because I don't know the books. I don't know anything about Wheatcroft either. I didn't challenge the statements of any of these chaps, contrary to what you have said. You must be mixing me up with someone else, mate. The quote from you in this post appears to be an attempt to deflect from from the problem with Keith. If you are of the OPINION that the books were fraudulent, vulgar, whatever, I believe you. But this has nothing to do with my opinion or your opinion or Keith's opinion. It's really, really simple. I'll distil it into a single sentence for you. On Dec 16 2014 in the thread "I'm not a historian but..." Keith stated that The Guardian had called Taylor's book " fraudulent," whereas no such comment had appeared in the paper. Now I don't really see why you can't set aside all the bluster and flannel that you and Keith have surrounded this very simple matter with. When you say that someone called a book "fraudulent" when that someone did no such thing you are misquoting, misrepresenting. Accidentally, maybe: it happens. But when I picked Keith up he went all defensive and has consistently refused to admit that he ascribed a comment to a person who did not make that comment. You have the option of going back to the thread to check what I'm saying. You have the option of ignoring this. But what you seem to have done is to have relied on a sort of half-memory without checking back, then indulging in a sort of mythology of what happened in the thread. Everything I've said here is true, checkable and neutrally-put. If you and Keith wish to stand by the fiction you've both created around this, fine. We can make our own conclusions about your lack of integrity and honesty from that.