The Pleasures and Pains of Contemporary History
Paul Hennessy talks of his two unsound heroes in history in the inaugural lecture of the Longman-History Today awards
Historians are not supposed to have heroes. To do so is often detected as evidence that detatchment and cool reason have fled. But two men who matter to me have delivered verdicts on my adopted craft that genuinely give me pause.
The first is the finest constitutional analyst my old profession – journalism – has ever produced, Walter Bagehot. In his 1856 essay on Gibbon, Bagehot declared that history:
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