The past is there to be made use of, and everyone makes use of it in his own way. Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson invent alternative Englands where radical social experiments were nipped in the bud by the entrenched forces of reaction, while T.S. Eliot's successors imagine devout cavaliers preserving a unified sensibility in economic and spiritual matters. Apart from the therapy it offers against the perpetual unsatisfactoriness of the present, this construction of the past has the great merit of making sense and interest of the way things are at any given time. If it is a game of the intellectuals, a game which involves obvious falsification on a large scale, it is also one which limbers up self-consciousness, in players and spectators alike, and enlarges the scope of sympathy and inquiry.

LRB 5 February 1987 | PDF Download