 Michelet exemplified something the astringent Wilson wished he possessed in greater measure than was actually the case, a generous expansiveness, the vast almost lyrical poetic faculty, vast imaginative faculty, the intuitive earthiness, the constant connection with actually lived lives, whether of an individual or of a mass of people. Without all those things, history becomes a mere series of analytical propositions, at which point, which is I think the lesson for today, when it becomes a series of analytical propositions, it loses the common reader. Instead of being part of our cultural mainstream, trickles in ever diminishing form into the self-evaporating pond of the pure academy. So Wilson painted, but it was Michelet who in effect handed him the brushes. And Michelet corresponded to what Wilson thought, and I certainly, when I read him, imagined the historian was and did, above all, writer as lightning conductor, transmitter of the past in that housing sense, rather than as a comparative political scientist. In other words, paying as much attention to the effect of history on those who read it, see it, hear it, and as simply someone who actually makes available the documents of the dead, to sway us to enlarge our time horizon, to deepen our understanding of what the human animal is, how we behave, how we conduct ourselves. If we're going to do this, Michelet thought, Wilson thought, I still think, history needs to look and sound less like newspaper editorials and more like poetry or even a novel. The condition of history's persuasiveness is the union of the intellect with the literary imagination. Thus, for Michelet who assumed that what he was going to write must matter to the political and moral world of the French, must help them recognize usurpation, particularly bonapartist usurpation, and its second iteration under Napoleon III, the purchase that history could have on the public, how it could shape our own ways of living with each other in a political community, depended crucially on the form of his writing itself, on the persuasiveness of the imaginative reconstruction of lost worlds, and finally on that tricky negotiation between the alien and the familiar, the alien as the irrecoverable strangeness of the past on the one hand, and its shocking closeness, the sense in which everybody who's gone before in some way are lost to us and in some way feel the same grief, the same desire, the same rage, the same joy that we do. When Wilson wrote of the pains that Michelet took to make this trick using the word trick at the highest level of creative and moral quality, moved me a lot and sent me to Michelet. As the revolution in France gathers momentum, Michelet makes the decision to write shorter and shorter paragraphs which eventually turn into one sentence paragraphs and shorter sentences inside those paragraphs, and remember the tradition in the 19th century and indeed as they imagine was the case with Herodotus and Thucydides was a verbal performance that actually children would sit around, listen to history being read to them and it would not be dull. So that the here for example I've got lots of, well I'll give you two very quite short sense of the way Michelet works. How many of you are as okay with French, with French as you are with English? Okay I'll translate it there, not all of you, okay. But you need to listen to the kind of staccato music a little bit, okay. So here's Michelet and I'll read it and I'll translate it into English, should really be translated into Dutch but I haven't had enough coffee for that. Here is that weird moment between the end of the national assembly still living in but guarded, it's before the fall of the Bastille, before the big uprising in Paris and it's sitting in Versailles and it doesn't quite know whether it's safe, you know, the National Assembly which has been the estates general. Here's how Michelet, you have to listen to it almost like chamber music except with a very bad musical instrument my voice. La situation était étrange visablement provisoire. The assembly n'avait pas obéi, it hasn't obeyed, mais le roi n'avait rien révoqué. Le roi avait appelé Néker, the French minister, mais il tenait l'assemblée qu'en prisonnière au milieu des troupes. Mais il avait exclu le public des séances, Michelet's image is coming in. La grande porte restait fermée. L'assemblée entrait par l'arpétite et discutait un week-low. The situation was odd, visibly provisional. The assembly had not been obedient, but the king had not revoked anything, had not retreated. The king had recalled Néker, the minister he swore had started the revolution, but he held the assembly as a prisoner in the middle of his troops. He had avoided, but he had excluded the public, the general public in Versailles from the sessions of the National Assembly, and here this wonderful image that Michelet has, classic Michelet, the great gate to the assembly stayed shut. The assembly had to get into its debating wall by the little door, so that its debates were behind closed doors. Week-low has his sense, of course, of absolutely sealed shut. Here's another little, again, short, lovely piece from just before, again, even further on, when Paris is about to explode, before it's about to explode. Du vingt-trois juillet, de la Manastruois, à l'explosion du peuple, il y eut une halte étrange, une alt étrange, une alt étrange. C'était dit, observateur, c'était un ton orageur, sombre, comme un songe agité, é pénible, plein d'illusions, de troubles, fausses alarmes, fausses nouvelles, faables, inventions de toutes sortes. On savait, on savait pas. On va tout expliquer, tout deviner. From the 23rd of June to the 12th of July, from the threats made by the king to the explosion of the people, there was a weird hiatus, a weird haute. It was like, one observer said, the lull before the storm, it was dark and sombre, like an agitated dream, heavy, full of trouble, fausses alarmes, fausses news, rumors, inventions of all sorts. One knew something, and it's almost impossible to translate this last lovely kind of cadence. On savait, on savait pas. One knew something, oh, you don't know it. One wanted everything explained, one had to guess everything, to devine. The same care with which the web, and this is on with the lecture now, not Michelet, with the web of memory as spun, the illusion of being there, of the overflow between past and present through an intense, acute attention to literary form, to rhythm, rhythm and rhythm, no graduate student should be allowed to get anywhere near a PhD unless he understands the rhythm of historical writing. Now this was the kind of history I wanted to be. The only kind I thought stood a chance of mattering. And I got a long section here, I'm not going to read it, but I just want to say that I grew up very kindly and accurately referred to how important my father as a kind of reader out loud. We not only read all the parts of Shakespeare together over many, many years, but he was used to read Dickens to us out loud, which was, but my father had this sense in which Jewish history and British history had come together during the war and in the person of Churchill. And all I would say is that Churchill really does sort of belong. Whatever you think of Churchill as an historian, Churchill famously said, not altogether comically, that I know that history will be kind to me because I shall write it myself. He did. But of course actually when, there was a very specific moment that Churchill as the writing historian, that's why I'm alive actually, mattered. And it's the third week of May 1940 and there's a revolt brewing in the war cabinet. Churchill has only pretty recently become Prime Minister. And there's a rebellion of the old Chamberlainites, particularly led by the very brilliant Lord Halifax's foreign secretary to do a deal through Mussolini by which the British Empire would be preserved by the Axis powers on condition that Britain made peace with Germany and permitted the total domination of the continent. And Halifax thought it's not such a bad deal because no one, the troops were stranded at Dunkirk. It looks as though they'd all be a quarter of a million of them would be annihilated. Britain stood no chance of surviving the war against this monstrous war apparatus of Hitler. Why not take the deal? Churchill of course was absolutely never going to do this. And he, the two of them, Halifax and Churchill went and had their own kind of historical reveries. Halifax fatally for his own, and luckily for all the rest of us. Halifax went off and walked over his estate in Yorkshire. And he rode rather than walk, he rode over his estate in Yorkshire. And he said, I could not imagine the jackboot striding and violating the landscape I loved. In other words, he didn't have any problem with the jackboot in Holland or anywhere else, but he did have a problem with it in Yorkshire. Churchill of course went back to Chartwell, and he thought about his own writing of the English-speaking peoples. He thought in not entirely sentimental terms about Magna Carta, about the Protestant Reformation, the Civil War, the tradition, call it Wiggish or not, the tradition by which liberty had been, had been protected against absolutism and autocracy. And he did a brilliant thing. He summoned not just the inner core of the war cabinet, which Halifax influenced. John Lukatch, by the way, it's called Five Days in May. It's an absolutely brilliant, short, thrilling book. Very much of the Michelin kind records this. And we have Hugh Dalton's record of this, because the cabinet minutes didn't entirely record it. He brings the entire war cabinet and he makes a speech rather like the famous speeches he'd made to Britain, but this is just the cabinet. He's said to have said that he would rather lie upon the ground choking in his own blood than do the kind of, make the kind of fatal compromise that was being suggested by the likes of Halifax. And that point, Hugh Dalton tells us, the whole war cabinet really funded their fists in determined approval on, I mean, that is the point where, historian does change history. It's both the writer of history and the an actor of history. And the next day he sends Halifax off to be ambassador in Washington. And, you know, it's a huge throw of the dice. It's an immense throw of the dice, but it meant that, you know, my own Jewish community were not going to end up in smoke. Then the one figure who some of you may know, some of you may not, again, a rather long quotation, but I hope you'll enjoy it, was an extraordinary figure who was really a kind of outrider in this group, because he certainly wasn't particularly left wing. I'm not sure he was any kind of wing. But it was a poetically charged methodological anarchism. A professor called Richard Cobb at Oxford who certainly, if not the greatest, was the most unorthodox historian I ever had the good luck to encounter. I was a young historian at his seminars because there were no seminars on French history at Cambridge University. I used to drive through the sprout fields of Bedfordshire to sit at Cobb's peculiar, in his peculiar presence. Cobb had gone through the penal servitude of the French Dr. Adita, and with a very stony Marxist, Georges Lefebvre, at the end of it, he produced a book called Les Armées Revolutionaires, The Revolutionary Armies, which were not, in fact, soldiers. They were the armies of the Sankulat who were enforcing prices and political orthodoxy out in France. Once Cobb got out from under that ox yoke of ferocious ideology and relentless documentary extraction, he was often running, and the figures towards whom he was sprinting were all dancing on the wild ashore as a French writing. Raymond Cano, above all others, but the demonic Céline too, Michel was a kind of monster to Cobb, but he understood that he was almost as strange as Cobb was himself. Anybody who spat scorned in the eye of lapidary history. So Cobb wrote about the underclass as E.P. Thompson did, but not as heroes, but as petty crooks, scapegraces, people are talking opportunistic ride on a revolutionary rollercoaster to get even with their enemies. He wrote about monsters of cruelty, geniuses of evasion, pregnant girls throwing themselves into the sand, leaving their infants in a basket with a note asking for baptism. The dysfunctional, the unclassifiable, the soiled, the stained, the hopeless. And Cobb did this with a freedom of literary expression that was just breathtaking. Everything he did, he was Monsieur Les Archives, but it was translated into a kind of poetic intensity that burned itself into the imagination. It made Cobb totally impervious, in fact wildly hostile to any grand discussions, probably of this kind of historical thought or to any theoretical framework for shaping the past. But it made him a kind of brilliant ventriloquist for the dead, a resurrectionist. So forgive me for this slightly long reading, but this occurs, and this is the last of my exemplary readings. It occurs at the end of a book, which is a tough book to read. I wouldn't force it on you, called The Police and the People, which is really about the attempt to provide food during the worst years of the revolution for the mass of people, but at the cost of political surrender to whoever was in power, particularly the revolutionary government of the Jacobin. And at the end of it all, I don't know when Richard wrote this late at night, I suspect, in one of his increasingly more infrequent sober moments. And it just is the kind of writing, we all do it, where we don't need to look at our books or our footnotes or anything, we've internalised everything we've been reading, both in the archive and in secondary sources. And you just let Michelin did this all the time, you let the past out. So here is how he ends his book on The Police, the Food and the Revolution. It's the very last page. It's about hunger. I'll take it slowly, because it is in itself an extraordinary piece of writing, in my view. Hunger employs its own outriders. Those who have already experienced it can see it announced, not only in the sky, but in the fields, scrutinised each year with increasing anxiety, week by week, during hot summer months, by 30 million anxious eyes. Questions whether they'll be a good harvester, of course. In the figures for grain prices on the markets, these are the clues. These are all the clues. There's always an element of detection in good hysterical writing. We are crime writers of the past often. Go on with Richard now. So you're looking for the clues about how bad things are going to get. In the amount of movement on the rivers and roads, in the traffic of the barrière, the little area on the periphery of Paris before you pay your customs duty to get in, in the conversation of visiting countrymen, in the letters of country relatives, or in the discrete decrees of government and the unspectacular efforts of municipalities to extend the limits of their cemeteries. In the number of times two men carrying a covered object emerge from a hospital by night in unusually massive orders of quick climb. In the dispatch of a commissioner to Janowa, Geneva, Hamburg, Bown, Tunis, Copenhagen, buying expeditions of grain. In the prayers of the pious, in the secret sermons of barn priests, in the cards of desers de Bonaventure, fortune tellers, for whom famine was a better customer than marriage, violent death, war, or success in money, or in love. In the anxious faces of women, or the pallor of those who have already eaten dead war horses. In a sword worn by an imprudent mare, in the shadow thrown at a certain hour of day, seen from a certain angle of a certain statue in a certain town. It, hunger, is something that comes with stealth, without fanfare, yet preceded by a thousand imperceptible signs that the 18th century marginal man could pick out. Just as those who were in the know, the mare, the borough engineer, and the members of the rat killer department, knew that Gaston, with his broad brown and black back, the size of a largeish mastiff, was just one of a race of invaders, a new race of giant rats already in possession of the city, waiting only for the single signal to come up from the sewers and take over. That's the way historians are supposed to write. It's not easy. If young, our young graduate students are not aiming to write like that, they need to find a different job, in my view. Cobb clearly did not give a hoot for any pretense at narrative self-effacement. In this, he was a figure of the 19th century, almost. He thought the objective voice, either apathetic, the sense in which you bring history to life from nowhere, that there's a kind of point of view that is nowhere, that is disembodied, you are just a kind of transparent recorder of documents, the re-presenter of documents. He didn't believe, he thought that was either self-delusion or professional fraud. There was a still small voice that banked to differ from this basis in which the historical profession was built, particularly the phenomenological philosopher R.G. Collingwood. Again, I was going to talk a lot about Collingwood, I'm not going to do this, but Collingwood made in his remarkable book, I think, The Idea of History, which again had a big influence on me. Collingwood, who was not a moral relativist, who did not take the view that there is no fundamental historical truth, it was just that we had always to take account of how we reached it and how we reconstructed it, and we should be unembarrassed about what the work of reconstruction was. Essentially, Collingwood made a crucial distinction between the empirical side of our brain, which goes hunting and gathering with honesty and expansiveness for the evidence, and then the imaginative literary side of our brain, which builds it into something different. He described it as, yeah, he says something beautiful. He's very adamant about the historical imagination, and he quotes Macaulay. Macaulay, in a fine Macaulay truism, said, this is Macaulay now. A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque, and Collingwood said, well, that's fine, but he said Macaulay's comment is to underestimate the part played by the historical imagination, which is properly not ornamental but structural. The historian's picture of his subject, whether that subject be a sequence of events or a past state of things, this is all Collingwood, thus appears as a web of imaginative construction stretched between certain fixed points provided by the statements of authorities. It's almost like a beautiful gossip attempt, and you have to stretch the web of your imagination between fixed points of verifiable rock-solid evidence, but the web is the web, the roof is the roof. If those points are frequent and the threads spun from one to the next are constructed with due care, and never merely by arbitrary fancy, the whole picture is constantly verified by appeal to data, to evidence, and runs, this is all Collingwood, runs very little risk of losing touch with the reality it represents. So that is, for me, the job description of the working historian. And now, the end of my lecture, the dismal part of what Nietzsche called the gay science. What in hell has happened? What has happened to those legions of writers, to the unapologetic public historians of the servants of Cleo? Well, you can find the qualities of the job description, but for the most part in the pages of historical fiction, which in terms of the audience reading history are in the pages of Hilary Mantel, or Peter Carey, or Rose Tremaine, or Colom Toibin, just the English, David Mitchell, you can even find this care to think about the relationship between evidence and imagination in some films in 12 Years a Slave, even, I think, in Spielberg's wonderful film, so it seemed to me, Lincoln, just concentrating on that one moment, the Emancipation Edict, but those are all, of course, in the last resort, fictions, that Hilary Mantel has claimed some sort of non-literal truth unavailable to historians. I don't agree with Hilary Mantel, either it's the truth or it's not the truth. The issue is where the truth historians who embody all the qualities I've been characterizing are to be found. They are there. One thinks of Christopher Clarke's wonderful book on the beginnings of the First World War, The Sleepwalkers. There are plenty of them there, but they are not, as Rob in his Nietzschean mode said, altogether massively populating the groves of academe. They're the obligation to uphold the paradigm of anti-writing, of counter-writing, of inhabiting a purely academic language world that's made entirely for scholars prevails, to the point that if our young graduate students wanted to write, like Mattingly, for example, or Cobb, they would have no clue about where to start, and often in the way in which Nietzsche had a very short career as a professor, everything works against a graduate student liberating her or himself from the kind of writing which will get you a job. Pierre Biodot was right. Academia is overwhelmed by the need for collective self-reproduction. Professors recoup graduate students who then become his or her team, are trained as much as possible to resemble their mentor with occasional allowances for argument and variation, sometimes the edible gesture of wounding the Dr. Vata so as to make a splash with a thin squirt of academic blood, tolerated prophesied under strictly controlled conditions. The other rituals of the reproductive process, the academic paper with its mandatory positioning against whatever is defined as the reigning orthodoxy, the differentiation, right, somewhat akin to Antler display among aspiring stags, the conference paper at which daring is advertised to the gathered profession, the nicely calculated job talk, fresh but not combative, you all know it, and it goes on and on. The crown PhD becomes junior faculty member, goes through the motions, dons the mask of respectability, becomes in turn the arbitrator and operator of the same routine. Thus another terrible word really mentioned, the integrity of the field. Let us now henceforth call it the fences of the containing paddock are duly protected and shored up. In the meantime, within the academy, not many people care about the challenge of strong, vivid, imaginative, forceful writing. The occasional gesture is made when an otherwise dutiful writer opens their account with a story, but usually it's abandoned for the pie chart, the bar graph, the positioning of your particular point. It doesn't arise organically from the body of the narration. And there are plenty of examples to the contrary, I have to say, but they're not enough and they're only by established professors. David Kiniston's great epic of British life in the 1950s and another great example of how it should be done. But mostly it's all content and no form and the academic, the academy circles the wagons. The public, however, will view go begging and the public does beg. Every time I do a signing at a literary festival or on book tours, parents come along with their children and ask why there isn't more for their children to get stuck into, or very kindly, and I'm sorry, sounds horribly self-serving. I get thanked much more than I deserve for doing this kind of thing at television. There are lots of opportunities now in Britain particularly for young, for school children to engage and for historians to engage with this avid, extra-academic audience. It's a terrific history festival at Draught Valley in England, if you have one here. But I'd love to hear that in the Netherlands, perhaps some of you will be kind enough to tell me when I'm finishing, which is very soon, I promise, that history in the Netherlands has not become a sinkhole, that's not become something from which people flee, that it's not something which, if you take it seriously, it's likely to reduce your credentials for employment. This is actually a remark made by the present Minister of Education in the United Kingdom that you have to be stupid to actually study the arts or the liberal disciplines, including history, if you want to get a job. So instead of actually getting in the kind of history that I've been reading to you and trying to characterise, kids, of course, who are wired for epic and chronology, where do they get it? They get it from the person whom Wilson despised, from Lord of the Rings, from Harry Potter, from Game of Thrones, in a fantasy realm of myth, rather than in the equally thrilling realm of truth. And the failure of the profession to think that any of this is their business, let history be down to nabby, let it be a stroll down memory lane, comes, I believe, at a cost to our shared civic life. Wherever you look at the fate of nations in the globalising world, the return of a kind of tribal nationalism in the epoch of corporate bureaucracies, in the rise of fundamentalist intolerance, the collapse, the surrender, really, of the Enlightenment project of pluralist toleration, in the blowback of post-colonialism in the heart of the European urban world, in the return of anti-Semitism, something giving me, particular grief, notwithstanding Holocaust education, in the fate of the planet itself, where there are great historical environmental books with beautiful writing in the hands of people like Stephen Pine, for example. In issues of epidemiology, the tragic dynamics of revolution, the social distribution of the rewards and penalties of the capitalist market, all these things, understanding is conditioned by informed action, a proper consideration of the dominant matter shaping our own world and that of our children, is impoverished by what David Armitage in his recent History Manifesto has called short-terminism. I go further than that and say that the free world, and I don't sneer at the characterization of the free world, is actually impaired and weakened by its indifference to history, seeing it as harmless costume escapism, or else, on the one hand, Downton Abbey, on the other hand, the impenetrable, endless PhD dissertation. We are weakened because we face the adversaries of our freedom, are those for whom history is manipulated in the interests of imposed subservience. Theocracies of the kind enthroned in Iran, in which law is made by revelation, are definitively ahistorical. They brook no dispute against the Word of God. Tyrannies or despotisms of the kind prevailing in Russia manipulate history to narrow the definitions of allegiance, pledge allegiance to our version of the national past, or be deemed a traitor to it. That, Thucydides, is screaming in his tomb when he contemplates what becomes of history and those circumstances. There are curriculum committees in the United States that have been caught deleting subjects, deemed critical of what they define as patriotic American authenticity, substituting instead feel-good histories with the wrinkles smoothed out and the warts removed, and it was against that that the honor of European history was first flown from the master. Thucydides is masterpiece. The whole honor of history, our moral self-respect, is to be a gadfly and irritant to the complacent, a criminal nuisance to the official version. It's what Mishle was, it's what Richard Cobb was. To do something about this, we can't just write extended newspaper columns or editorials or even, much as I've loved doing so and have inflicted this on you, we can't even just give lectures for the Nexus Institute, we can support the flourishing of the Nexus Institute. We need to go on the offensive against oblivion and our proper weapon of attack is that brilliantly told story, the web of construction over the fixed posts of evidence. We need to tell stories out of which emerge organically all the questions that need to be asked about whichever particular predicament we are grappling with. And lots of academics, I'm sure, here have probably taken terrible offense. We need to leave the campus, everybody. We need to march out of the gates of the monastery and into the world with our inconvenient stories. So, here, in the Nexus Institute, I'm proposing something, a radical rethinking, so radical it verges a bit on the Maoist of what should qualify a student for a PhD in history. Yes, the dissertation based on primary research should be the jewel, the essential treasure. But along with it, no one should receive a doctoral degree unless they spend a semester, a third or a half of a year teaching in a high school. I'll do it myself. I'll start. Absolutely fine. I go into schools a lot in America, but I'm happy to do that. And even in other captive communities, prisons, young offenders, for example, not every day of the week, let's not get carried away. And there was another job description without which you should not be able to get a PhD. The ability with software designers to create a website that can bring these stories to a mobile device, a tablet, to anyone, anywhere, working at a Thai factory in a farm in Africa, anyone with different set of beliefs, a different kind of job. We've never had such powerful means of honoring the Thucydidian vocation of being an irritant and yet assumed that it's someone else's job. It's not someone else's job. It's the scholar's job. It's working historian's job. Taking history out of the academy to the people, however, doesn't have to be a purely digital exercise. Amazingly, last week I was at the Weizmann Institute, kindly asked me there, of science in Israel. And the head of the Weizmann Institute, Daniel Zeichmann, told me that was the amazing thing. That's an extraordinary venture that's been going on for five years in which all of his senior colleagues, these are Nobel Prize-winning scientists, have been taking their science into pubs, into cafes and pubs about once a month and talking about their work to a room full of half-drunk people, essentially. He said, it's brilliant. Everybody loves doing it. That was his view. And why not have a discussion in a pub about colonialism, about the First World War, about the history of race and empire in the Netherlands. Always remember my old mentor, Jack Plum, who Rob kindly mentioned, said, he used to say to us, his students, you belong to an ancient craft that began by shouting in the agora. It's time to start shouting a bit again, I think. Otherwise, my friends, the atrophy will be irreversible. It will be. Our children's children, if not our children, will just not see the point. The golden chain of memory will be broken. The practice will be ever-convined to a tinier number of scholars doing nothing but talking to each other in ever-diminishing numbers about less and less. While the world of the past will be left to the movies, the historical romances who make free with the truth, and no one, no one will expect historians to be tellers of tales. There are many, many horrors. Anybody since I began, this is my last paragraph, anyone think of where a great novel in which the honour of the past has somehow miraculously been preserved in the line of an old song? I could sing it for you, maybe that would help. Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clemens. Yes, Liddy, in the third grade? Where does that come from? You know. Yes! Stand up. 1984. Exactly right. It's all well. It's all well. Thank you. You're my new girlfriend. Well, you don't have to be, you don't have to be. There are many horrors in all worlds 1984. O'Brien's rats and all the rest, but the biggest horror is Big Brother's erasure of the past. A wholly successful exercise in cultural lobotomy that dooms mankind to live in a perpetual present. Only that song whistle tune over her by Winston Smith gives him a moment of pause to grieve over the loss. In those circumstances, not perhaps a futurist fantasy, history will indeed just be history. And we will have lost that attribute of our humanity, second only to the power of language, the incomparable treasure of our shared memory. Here's all well on Winston Smith, when long after his matters have gone bad. Everything faded into mist. The past was erased. The erasure was forgotten. The lie had become truth. Thank you.