Parenting & Family Quote by John Keegan

Keegan takes a claim that sounds like stoic consolation and turns it into a sly statement about perspective as privilege. The line begins with a familiar social myth - adversity “builds character” - but he narrows it to something more pointed: illness and disrupted schooling don’t just toughen you up, they estrange you. You come out with a slightly off-angle relationship to ordinary life, as if you’ve been forced to watch the world from the corridor rather than the classroom. That distance can hurt; it can also sharpen.

The subtext is almost an origin story for the kind of historian Keegan became. As a writer of war, he was famous for resisting the standard “great men and grand strategy” template and insisting on the physical, sensory reality of combat - what bodies feel, what soldiers see, how chaos actually operates. A childhood marked by illness suggests enforced observation over participation. If you can’t fully join the crowd, you learn how the crowd works. You notice systems, rituals, absurdities; you also notice what polite narratives edit out.

There’s a quiet rebuke here to the romantic idea of the naturally gifted author. Keegan frames writerliness less as innate brilliance than as an acquired vantage point: the world doesn’t give you the default settings, so you build your own. The irony is that “upset education” sounds like a deficit, yet he treats it as training in misalignment - a condition that can make you more perceptive, more skeptical of consensus, and more willing to describe what others prefer not to see.