Has the success of history programmes on television changed the way history is written?
Some of the most widely selling history books are crossover books, such as Simon Schama’s recent book The American Future , or his earlier work on the history of Britain. There’s quite an important influence. I think myself that the more traditional public demand for history writing that follows the conventions of historical discourse as we know them, has not been by any means exhausted, and I don’t take the pessimist’s view that because of television on the one hand and the internet on the other, that the days of traditional history writing are numbered. That’s not borne out by what happens to history books in the bookshops. TMO: There is often, it seems, a gulf between academic history and popular memory. In countries like Ireland and Italy, for example, there seems to still be tremendous problems agreeing on the facts of the recent past. More dangerously, over sixty years after the discovery of Auschwitz there are still people who deny the Holocaust. Does this point to some kind of
