Our Past, Present and Future

In a fascinating if rather depressing essay, broadcast as part of BBC Radio 4’s A Point of View, the historian and novelist Stella Tillyard confronted what she considers to be a crisis in history. For her, as for many of us, history has been a guide premised on the belief that, if we understand the past, we ‘have the knowledge to confront the future’. Since the first stirrings of the Enlightenment, when religion began its ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’, history has taken on the mantle of a secular faith, a ‘justifying and ordering force’, according to Tillyard, which connects us to the past, explains the present and offers windows on the future.