Category Archives: historians

Obituary – Penry Williams

Sincere apologies all, but the pressures of examinations and the end of term meant that I missed the passing of the great Penry Williams in May. Many of you will have come across his text  The Later Tudors as further reading … Continue reading

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AJP Taylor – the first TV historian.

It has been particularly pleasing to me to see that the BBC have made available some of their lectures from the 1970s by the legendary radical historian AJP Taylor. I warmly remember my history teacher showing us his half hour programme … Continue reading

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Obituary – Eric Hobsbawm

“It is the business of historians to remember what others forget” – I might steal that. This week of course saw the passing of the great Eric Hobsbawm, and you might be wondering what all the fuss was about. Well, … Continue reading

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Obituary – Sir John Keegan

As students move into and beyond A Level history they should be aware of how the discipline becomes more specialised. Military history has never really been my thing but I have always had great admiration for two British historians of … Continue reading

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Repost – when historians fall out…

Again I am not going to repost all the articles that were lost. However, the racism row between Niall Ferguson and Pankaj Mishra, is chronicled well in this Observer article provides a good summary. Two questions do seem apposite here; 1. Why do … Continue reading

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“2011 – it reminds me of 1848” – Eric Hobsbawm

You will probably remember from an earlier post that Eric Hobsbawn is a British Marxist historian, most famous for his trilogy of books on the nineteenth century – The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital and The Age of … Continue reading

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The Origins of The Second World War – different approaches to the same topic

The Origins of The Second World War is of course one of the great historical debates of modern times. To be honest it is not really a topic that sets me on fire. I have however included this link from the Wall … Continue reading

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Historians and the riots.

All of us will of course have been aware of the awful rioting in early August, and many of us will have heard (about) David Starkey’s comments on Newsnight. If not, or if you want to hear the discussion Verbatim then this BBC … Continue reading

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Ian Kershaw on writing history about Hitler

In this interview in in the saturday Guardian, there’s a fascinating insight into what drives historians in their choices of research, in the process of writing history books, and in the way that different schools of historians views are often … Continue reading

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Be careful with the historians that you read…

It is hard to know how to react to this news article (orginally posted on the old site). On first consideration any historian who posts secret Amazon reviews of his rivals’ books as having “no insights to make it worth … Continue reading

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