MacMillan has some interesting things to say about the study of history, an activity which she has pursued with great distinction. I particularly enjoyed being reminded of the crack about F. D. R.’s successor, ‘To err is Truman’, and learning about Feuerstein’s invention of the Lazi nation. And she is surely right to insist that the study of history should be regarded as a process which subjects the past to continuous review. In that way, all our prejudices, including MacMillan’s, can be balanced.
However, as I read her book, I found myself straying back to David Cannadine’s Making History Now and Then. MacMillan allows that it may be an advantage for history to be enjoyable to read. Cannadine certainly is enjoyable, and he covers much of the same ground as MacMillan. He also reminds us of two remarks by great statesmen: Václav Havel’s ‘Any society that is alive is a society with a history’ and Winston Churchill (himself an accomplished abuser of history):
History, with its flickering lamp, stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passions of former days.
He then asked, ‘What is the worth of all this?’ We will, of course, never know the answer to that question, but that should not prevent us from trying to find it.
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