 Many people accept storytelling as a part of life but they never really reflect on it. And I think certainly in today's age of mass media and social media where we are constantly being fed different stories I think it's extremely important that we understand how stories are constructed and how we might be able to recognise the stories which are actually more persuasive or should be more persuasive than others. My first book was about the historians of the French Revolution and I've written a number of books along the way but my most recent book and the one I still think is a very important step forward is about the after lives of Walter Scott and it's about the ways in which once a story has been produced what happens to it. Traditionally people looked at stories in themselves how they were made and I shifted the emphasis to looking at the way stories are used and I particularly looked at what we call the reception of this particular novelist a very famous novelist and looked at the ways in which people reproduced his stories acted out his stories, referred to his stories in street names in theatre productions and film productions and so I began to trace the ways in which a story survives in society over many generations. I like to think I've made an important contribution to the development of what we call cultural memory studies. Cultural memory studies is this study of the ways in which societies remember through all sorts of media. This is a very recent field which is an interdisciplinary field and I have tried to develop the study of the literary and media dimensions of cultural memory and we through cultural memory studies are developing concepts with which to analyse these processes of contestation and negotiation around the collective past and we're also developing a larger sense of the history of the practice of commemoration and of the production of cultural memory. What does Arhus mean for me to begin with the great honour of being here today and to receive this honorary doctorate but it follows on a history of very successful and intense collaboration with various colleagues in Denmark and particularly in Arhus and given my own background in cultural memory studies I've been delighted to see the development of this focus area on the uses of the past which will allow me to continue my collaboration with historians and cultural scholars here in Arhus on the issues of representation, narrativity and cultural memory.