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Zara Steiner obituary

Zara Steiner obituary. Brilliant historian of international relations in Europe between the two world wars

Zara Steiner, who has died aged 91, was the world’s leading historian of international relations in Europe between the wars. Her two massive and magisterial volumes in the Oxford History of Modern Europe, The Lights That Failed (2005) and The Triumph of the Dark (2011), remain the standard works on the doomed quest of European states for a stable new international order in the 1920s, and the gathering clouds of the 30s, leading to the outbreak of the second world war towards the end of the decade.

The two books are as impressive in their breadth as they are in their depth, covering economic developments and relations, arms production, diplomatic negotiations, politics and war, with equal authority. Over more than 2,000 pages, based on a secure command of the scholarly literature and documentation in several languages, the two volumes convey complex sequences of events with limpid clarity. Brilliantly written, full of pungent judgments, arresting phrases and sarcastic asides, they are also a joy to read.

No student of the period can afford to ignore them and it is something of an indictment of the insularity of so many British historians today that so much recent work on “appeasement”, and the origins of the second world war, much to its detriment, unfortunately does. Steiner’s criticism of Chamberlain, Eden and Halifax, hopelessly out of their depth in the brutal world of the dictators, is unanswerable. In researching European international history between the wars, she remarked, she had encountered “few heroes, two evil Titans and an assortment of villains and knaves. I have not enjoyed their company.”

Born in New York, the daughter of Joseph Shakow, who ran a shop that sold outdoor clothing and supplies to polar explorers, and his wife, Frances (nee Price), Zara showed early academic promise and studied history at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1948. She then took a history degree at Oxford University in two years instead of the usual three, benefiting from being tutored by luminaries such as AJP Taylor and Isaiah Berlin.

But when she asked Taylor if he would take her on as a doctoral student, he told her that the PhD was a German invention that the Americans had bastardised and was not worth pursuing. So in 1950 she relocated to Harvard, where she completed a doctorate, graduating in 1957.

In 1955 she married a fellow Harvard graduate, the comparative literature scholar George Steiner, whom she had met in London, where she was conducting research for her doctoral dissertation and he was working for the Economist. They were introduced by their respective Harvard professors, who knew them both, obviously discussed them a great deal, and bet each other that the two would get married if they ever met.

On receiving postcards from the professors urging each of them to “be a sport”, George and Zara met for tea and agreed at the start that they would send them their own postcard saying “you lose the bet”. At the end of the afternoon, however, they agreed not to send it after all. Their marriage lasted for more than 60 years, with Zara, among other things an excellent cook and dinner-party hostess, her skills complemented by George’s taste in wine, providing a base of stability for her mercurial husband.

Neither marriage to a man noted for his restlessness, nor the birth of two children, respectively in 1958 and 1960, took her away from her writing and research. Her first major book, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1898-1914, published in 1969, laid bare the complex interactions between ministers, officials and ingrained diplomatic practice and tradition that helped shape Britain’s part in the origins of the first world war. It was followed in 1977 by the wider ranging Britain and the Origins of the First World War, commissioned for a series of short books on “the making of the 20th century” published by Macmillan.

Already in these volumes Zara was broadening out the concept of diplomatic history to reflect developments in international relations theory and include the impact of public opinion, economic interest, the press, and, above all, the input of civil servants. She journeyed up and down the land, examining the private papers of Foreign Office mandarins, buried in dusty files no other scholar had seen, looking for “the men behind the minutes”, as she called them.

On occasion her discoveries could spring surprises: at Sissinghurst, going through the private papers of the diplomat Harold Nicolson, she came across the love letters of his wife, Vita Sackville-West, to Violet Trefusis, and felt obliged to tell her host, Nigel Nicolson, of their very intimate contents, promising him she would not make use of them. Nicolson said nothing, but later made good use of them for his revealing book about his parents, Portrait of a Marriage.

The success of her first two books prompted Alan Bullock to ask her to write the Oxford History of Modern Europe volume on international relations following on from Taylor’s classic work The Struggle for Mastery in Europe. It was a testimony to Zara’s scholarship that the project eventually expanded into two volumes, and took nearly 30 years to research and write – though in the early years she also had to carry out the demanding task of editing The Times Survey of Foreign Ministries of the World, a major scholarly undertaking, involving scores of historians and published in 1982.

The thoroughness of her research for the Oxford volumes was staggering. On one occasion when the Yale historian Paul Kennedy visited her, he found her “writing-room bursting, overflowing with papers, articles, tagged books, copies of ‘an important new dissertation’ on France and the Bulgarians, etc”. She seemed to have read almost everything that had been written on the numerous topics her books covered.

After spending time in Princeton and then Innsbruck, Austria, following George from one job to another, she eventually settled with the family in Cambridge, and in 1968 was elected a fellow of New Hall (a women-only institution, later renamed Murray Edwards College), where she remained, tutoring undergraduates while continuing with her research. She took a leading role in the college’s management, serving as acting president in 1995-96. She offered encouragement to her female students, not only in their academic endeavours but also more generally; many of them remember her with great affection.

From the very beginning of her career, Zara was a woman in a man’s world. When she arrived in Oxford in 1948, one of her (male) tutors initially refused to take her on. “I don’t tutor women,” he said. “Just call me sir,” was her reply; and so he did, from then on. As a professional historian, she became part of the male-dominated realm of diplomatic and international relations history.

Her volumes in the Oxford History of Modern Europe are the only ones in that series to have been written by a woman; and at a conference she organised in Cambridge in 1989 with officials and diplomats from 20 countries, when she led a discussion on the career difficulties faced by female diplomats, one official told her bluntly: “In my country, we have no such problems. We just do not let women into the foreign service.” A retired British diplomat whom she interviewed greeted her with the comment: “An American, a woman and a Jew writing about the Foreign Office? It should not be allowed.”

In Cambridge, unlike in Oxford, the colleges are entirely separate from the university and its faculties. Although Zara was one of Cambridge’s most distinguished historians, she never gained an official position in the history faculty, just as, for very different reasons, her husband George never secured an appointment in the English faculty. She remained for the rest of her career just a fellow, then emeritus fellow, of New Hall, and so never acquired the professorial title she so richly merited. Already by the 80s, diplomatic history was going out of fashion, and she was an outsider to the university in more ways than one.

It was not until 2007 that she was elected a fellow of the British Academy. But around the world, she was recognised as a great historian, author of a string of important and durable works of scholarship and, not least, a role model for younger female academics.

George predeceased her by 10 days. She is survived by their children, David and Deborah, and two granddaughters.

• Zara Alice Steiner, historian, born 6 November 1928; died 13 February 2020