Churchill and Hitler: secrets of leadership, by Andrew Roberts

All aboard the TV history bandwagon

Bush and Bin Laden, Matisse and Picasso, Blair and Brown... opposite pairs are all the rage. So are Winston Churchill and – on the other side of the Atlantic, at least – books about leadership. Put them all together and you get a television programme on Hitler and Churchill, with a book to match written by one of the younger generation of historians seeking to make their fame and fortune on the box.

Nothing wrong with that; the historian in this case is Andrew Roberts, who has already had some success with a work, and a television programme, comparing Wellington with Napoleon. That, at least, had the virtue of contrasting the approaches to war of two masters of the battlefield, with the added piquancy that Wellington shared the bed of some of Napoleon's mistresses.

In this case, the personal contrasts tends to rest more on differences than shared vices. Churchill liked his brandy and wine, Hitler was a teetotaller and a vegetarian. (What is it about teetotallers that makes them so fond of war?) Roberts comes up with some intriguing facets of their rival careers – that Hitler modelled his rhetorical style on a local beer-cellar comedian, for example.

That both Churchill and Hitler shared a belief in their own destinies, wrote their own speeches and gloried in the role of war leader goes without saying. So do their obvious contrasts: the democrat and the tyrant, the witty and the humourless, the inspirer and the charismatic. The question is whether comparing and contrasting does anything to shed light on the causes and course of the Second World War, or, as Roberts would also have it, the nature of leadership.

The short answer is: not much. There are instructive comparisons to be made between the two leaders: their grand strategies and relationships with generals, for example. And something could be made of their contrasting rhetorical styles: Churchill's imagery looked backwards, Hitler's forward to a new world. Did this reflect their own characters, or that of their nations?

But, though touched on, these are never developed. Television style instead demands a combination of the clever remark to camera and the flip relevance for our times. David Starkey pioneered the form, Niall Ferguson repeated it on the broader canvas of empire, and Roberts, a Cambridge man with a more earnest bent than Ferguson's Oxford taste for paradox, goes for the "leadership lessons" chopped up in gobbets, many quotations from recent books and few much more enlightening than a populist management textbook. As for modern relevance, any analogy between a small country facing invasion from a military force in control of a continent and a hyperpower beating up on a Third World country debilitated by sanctions eludes me.

That BBC2 – the gifted producer Laurence Rees, no less – should encourage this overhasty dash to board the TV history bandwagon is sad enough. But the price of the book is truly scandalous: £18.99 for 180 pages of text! You could buy both Roy Jenkins's acute appreciation of Churchill as a politician and Ian Kershaw's masterly two-volume biography of Hitler for not much more – and be infinitely better informed.