‘The Indefatigable Asa Briggs’ by Adam Sisman review

I knew Asa Briggs well; his life and work had a huge impact upon mine. We first met in 1963 when Asa appointed me to a lectureship at the new University of Sussex. Later, after I had left Sussex to work at the BBC, I would often encounter Asa who was then researching a multi-volume history of broadcasting. On his death in 2016, I wrote his obituary for The Times, a paper owned by his former student and admiring friend Rupert Murdoch.

I often wondered who could write a biography of this most active and productive of historians. Asa authored some 50 books, co-created Sussex and the Open University, and was a member (and often chairman) of countless worthy committees. Adam Sisman is probably best known for his biographies of A.J.P. Taylor and Taylor’s eminent rival Hugh Trevor-Roper. And, now, the truly ‘indefatigable’ Asa Briggs.

Born to a poor family in Keighley in West Yorkshire in 1921, Briggs obtained in 1941 a degree in History from Cambridge and – concurrently – another in Economics from the LSE (based in Cambridge during the war) before going on to work at Bletchley Park. After the war, he was elected a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, becoming a reader in social and economic history. Soon after his arrival in Oxford, Briggs found time to give extra-mural classes: an early indication, Sisman emphasises, of what proved a lifelong commitment to adult learning. Briggs presented a number of educational programmes for the BBC, gave lectures to British troops in Germany, and spent time in Paris in 1948 studying the revolutions that had occurred across Europe a century earlier (and why Chartism had failed to ignite something similar in Britain).

Following his decade at Oxford (and a year at Princeton where he found himself a junior colleague of Albert Einstein), Briggs became Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds. On the eve of this move, in autumn 1955 he married Susan Banwell. They would remain together throughout their long lives. Susan died in June 2025, shortly before the publication of Sisman’s biography, which is dedicated to her memory.

While at Leeds, Briggs was one of the historians recruited to check the final text of Winston Churchill’s long-awaited History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Apparently, the curmudgeonly old aristocrat was graciously receptive to the strictures of the Keighley scholarship boy – even when Briggs accused him of having been, of all things, too Marxist in his interpretation of the US Constitution. Churchill later sent a cheque which Asa and Susan were keen to retain as a memento, though practical considerations persuaded them to cash it.

In 1961 Briggs became co-founder (and later vice chancellor) of the University of Sussex. There, he helped develop and lead what he called a ‘new map of learning’. No more separate, old-fashioned ‘departments’ of history, literature, physics, or whatever. Rather, new ‘Schools of Study’ that would require cross-disciplinary thinking from lecturers and students alike. As Sisman shows, Sussex proved a highly successful and attractive university.

Always on the run – from one lecture to another, to this or that committee – Asa was notoriously hard to pin down if you wanted to discuss something with him. ‘I’d love to talk’, he’d say, his plump and bespectacled face smiling as he looked at his watch. ‘How about tomorrow morning, at 11 o’clock?’ It often transpired that what he had in mind was that you accompany him as he was driven to his next meeting. ‘Lord Briggs of Heathrow’, he came to be dubbed.

Briggs was long celebrated as an advocate of what came to be labelled ‘history from the bottom up’ and for his pioneering books about Victorian People (1954), Cities (1963), and Things (1988), and his detailed portrait of mid-Victorian times, The Age of Improvement (1959). Throughout his life, Sisman reminds us, Briggs retained a remarkable open-mindedness towards topics that were new to him. Did he ever ‘retire’? Not really. Unlike most of his fellow academics, we read, he could never hold back from his obsession with researching and writing yet another lecture, essay, or book. He was well into his seventies when, in 1996 as the new millennium loomed, he joined me in co-editing a book of essays based on a BBC radio series focusing on previous ‘fins de siècle’, while in 2001 he worked with Peter Burke to produce a pioneering book on the social history of the media, from Gutenberg to the internet.

In his eighties and even nineties, Briggs felt incapable of slowing down, agreeing to undertake one new project after another, several of which, as Sisman shows, he was no longer able to fulfil to the standards expected. These were depressing times, and he could not have been easy to live with. He managed to issue three new books, each in its different way a form of memoir. Then, as his death approached, his admirers were delighted – and surprised – by the publication of a lifetime of poems he had written and a social and cultural history of Victorian music.

This most energetic and entrepreneurial of intellectuals was, in his inimitable way, strangely old-fashioned. It is one thing to be interested in the past: the Briggs home in Lewes was full of historic old-fashioned statues and ceramics. But Asa never owned, or worked on a computer, hand-writing every word he published.

Sisman has clearly consumed a mountain of Briggsian documentation, from official archives to everything he could unearth from private letters and diaries, and interviews with surviving friends and colleagues. Virtually every project Asa undertook, every place he went, and every person he encountered is likely to appear in the book. At times, the nature of Sisman’s writing is not unlike that of Asa, as he focuses more on fact than analysis. There is a profound, persuasive authenticity to this excellent book – but I hope Sisman didn’t feel he had to handwrite it all.

• The Indefatigable Asa Briggs: A Biography 
  Adam Sisman
  William Collins, 480pp, £30
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Daniel Snowman is a social and cultural historian and Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.