 So should we believe everything that history tells us? I think it's important first of all to distinguish between academic history and what we might call public history, what people remember. So I was at an academic seminar once which was about Vichy France in the Second World War and it was about collaboration with the Germans. And by coincidence there were two elderly French women there who had lived through Vichy France and they were outraged at any sense that there would have been collaboration. Of course we know there was, so it's that distinction between what they remember, the kind of public narrative of the time, which is very much there wasn't any collaboration and what academics have found later. I think we have to distinguish between what people remember about the past and what historians as professionals seek to prove about the past. I can very much relate to that experience and I think that's the reaction one gets when one touches these taboos. A lot of the public understanding of history is very selective and because history is so often linked to identity and people's constructions of themselves as a nation etc. They tend to avoid thinking about some very difficult aspects and I think this is where the tension is the greatest and that is why one gets these very strong reactions. Another example that springs to mind is the Battle of Britain. It's something that everybody in Britain kind of thinks they know about. We were under threat of invasion and a very small group of fighter pilots mainly successfully defended mainland Britain and that's true. That did happen, but it is more complicated than that. There was a very important naval battle about the same time and Britain essentially took the decision to sink a large part of the French fleet. So it's a much more complicated story to say, well we saved ourselves by essentially scuttling our former allies' fleet. So we don't tend to remember that as much, but that's equally true. So I think what professional historians tend to do is to seek a balanced picture from different sources. And also to point out and deconstruct these taboos and point to where public history falls short of fully understanding what happens in the past. I think that's one of the most important functions of academic history as I see it is to provide a sense of perspective to current debate. There's often a tendency in contemporary debate to think this is a horrific new problem that's only just occurred. And one of the things historians often do is sit back and go, well, you know, we've heard this before, this has happened before, this isn't maybe not something to worry about. So as you say, is this calling into question either contemporary debates or accepted narratives of the past? But I think when it comes to popular understanding of the past, I think there is also another particular way of looking at the past which I think is particularly dangerous and sinister, if you like. And that's conspiracy theories. We are constantly alerted to the dangers of conspiracy theories because they're traditionally linked with various forms of prejudice. But conspiracy theories are always about history and they're about history in two ways. First, it is very difficult to envisage a conspiracy that doesn't try to see some contemporary social or political event as the most recent link in a longer chain of conspiracy. And also because conspiracy theories always view experts as part of the conspiracy. What for you were the key elements of a conspiracy theory? Well, a conspiracy theory, the sort of most basic definition, it's an explanation of usually a dramatic social and political event that assumes that the causes of those events are the machinations of a small group of people who are conspiring in secret to bring it about. And I guess that's because it's very comforting to find someone to blame. That's always a kind of comforting social phenomenon. But B, it's very simple. There's not a lot of complexity there. We don't need to worry, wrestle with the ins and outs of why this happened. We can just go, it was their fault. Well, there is a complexity because the argument that's constructed around the idea of a conspiracy is very complex. So there's always very complex web of interconnected kind of relationships. But the causality is very simple. And as you say, it's very comforting because it assumes that one can set all the world's wrongs right by simply removing the conspirators or even not even that, simply by exposing the conspiracy and getting people to believe or other to disbelieve that what the conspirators are telling them is enough for everything to fall back into place. And of course, that's not to say that there weren't, at certain points in the past, small groups of people who did band together in secret and attempt to achieve things. I suppose what marks out a conspiracy theory is the attempt to explain something incredibly complicated through a very simple mechanism. And also to explain everything in terms of that simple mechanism. Conspiracy theorists see conspiracy as the motive force in history. So it's the thing that drives all of history rather than a collection of disparate conspiracies that often get in each other's way. You often hear people say, you know, when attempting to find out the causes of something, was it a conspiracy or was it a cock-up? I think you'd find more historians would probably tend towards the cock-up theories because we tend to see just how complex daily life is. I mean, it's hard enough to work out why things happen now. Imagine doing that, looking back, but you can't talk to the people, you can only piece things together. And I guess what's interesting is, again, what marks out academic history is its attempt to use as wide a range of sources as possible. So you won't just look at, I mean, if you were to look at just the papers of the German general staff, you might very well conclude that Germany caused the First World War. But then you read the same thing from other capitals, from Vienna, even from London. So yeah, it's that kind of what marks out professional history from public history, if you like, or certainly from conspiracy theories, is an attempt to find a range of different ways to kind of correlate the evidence. But it's also, I think, the fact that it is possible for historians to look at the same sources of evidence and come up with different interpretations. And a very well-known example is the debates about perpetrators in the Holocaust, the Goldhagen and Christopher Browning debates, where they looked at the same set of evidence. Yet their interpretations are very different about whether it was more kind of situational factors rather than some kind of eliminationist anti-Semitism amongst the German population. And the fascinating thing there is that there's no way of deciding who is right, except them engaging in a debate. So unlike in conventional science, where one can assume that if you apply a certain method or two different people apply a certain method, they will necessarily arrive at the same result in humanities, in particular in history. That's not necessarily the case. That's one of the things that often comes as something of a nasty surprise to students at degree level. They were horrified to discover that historians disagree with each other. And you keep telling us, on the one hand this, on the one hand that, why can't you tell us what really happened? It's because we don't know what really happened. We have differing views on what really happened. And I guess another complexity is that the type of history which gets written and the questions that get asked for the past, of the past, changed depending on your point of view. Depending on the questions we might ask of history now were very different to the ones being asked 50 years ago. And also the certain ways in which we understand the world around us, sort of ebb and flow. So the concerns about social order, for instance, reinvented because the certain arguments that were apparent 30 years ago come back and are kind of rehashed and revamped. So I suppose in answer to our original question of should we believe everything history tells us, short answer would be no. Certainly it depends whose history you want to issue. But equally, I suppose what we would say is that people need to form their own opinion about history. They need to read widely. They need to make sure that their reading sources written by professional historians. But then beyond that, people will encounter differing viewpoints and it's in many ways the, I wouldn't say the duty, but it's something that a responsible citizen can do is to read their own history, the history of their nation, the history of Europe and decide for themselves what they think they should believe or not.