What makes a good historian?
‘Your problem, Hugh, is that you ignore the documents.’ ‘Your problem, Taylor, is that you ignore the facts.’ As Oxford’s two finest historians locked horns in the full glare of the TV spotlights, their compare Robert Kee nervously tried to prevent a physical punch-up. While, however, Taylor and Trevor-Roper disagreed about the merits of the recently published The Origins of the Second World War (‘Why has Mr. Taylor written such a bad book?’, Trevor-Roper had wondered in his Encounter review), they implicitly agreed that the truth matters above all, that indeed truth is the only real priority for the good historian. One can go further and argue that Taylor and Trevor-Roper together identified the two methods of establishing truth. A.J.R…
