Geoffrey Hawthorn writes:

Burrow and Anthony Grafton are as capacious as can be. Their question is not so much ‘how did it come to this?’ – in Grafton’s case, to a more critical historicism in the 17th and 18th centuries; in Burrow’s, to professional history-writing in the 20th – as ‘what pasts have this or that set of people found interesting and why, and how did they think and write about these?’ Since each is writing about historians who will not all be familiar even to specialists, each also takes care to convey the experience of reading them; and since each is himself an acute reader and an exceptionally good writer, the experience, even when filtered through translation, is vivid. Burrow writes for a general audience; Grafton, writing up his Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge in 2005, more for scholars. But each has a grasp of the whole, an eye for detail, and a sense of irony and wit that make them a pleasure to read.

(LRB 20 November 2008)

Allen Lane | hardback 553 pp. |ISBN: 9780713993370