Beyond the Tunnel of History
A revised and Expanded Version of the 1989 BBC Reith Lectures
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Orlando Figes
Orlando Figes was born in London in 1959. He studied History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating with a double-starred First in 1982, and then went on to do a PhD in History at Trinity College...
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John Brewer
John Brewer was born in Liverpool in 1947. He was educated at Cambridge and Harvard Universities, completing his PhD in 1973. At Cambridge he was first Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, then Fellow of ...
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David Cannadine
David Cannadine is the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Professor of British History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. He is a graduate of Clare College, Cambridge, St John’s Colle...
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Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institut...
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Peter Burke
Peter Burke (born 1937) was educated at St Ignatius’ College, Stamford Hill, London, and St John’s College, Oxford. He interrupted work on his D.Phil. at St Antony’s College, Oxford, to become one of the first...
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Jeremy Black
Jeremy Black was born in London in 1955. After graduating with a starred First from Cambridge, he undertook research at Oxford and has subsequently been Professor of History at the universities of Durham and (...
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Asa Briggs
Asa Briggs was born in 1921 in Keighley, Yorkshire. With degrees (taken simultaneously) from Cambridge and London Universities, Briggs went on to work in the Intelligence Corps, was a Fellow of Worcester Colle...
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John Morrill
John Morrill is Professor of British and Irish History at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow (and sometime Vice Master and Acting Master) of Selwyn College. He has written and edited 19 books and is a...
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John Keegan
John Keegan was born in 1934. He is married to the biographer Susanne Keegan and they have four children. He was educated at King’s College (Taunton), Wimbledon College and Balliol College, Oxford, of which he...
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Introduction: Historians Today
Historians are Very Important People (for reasons I’ll come to in a moment). Some of them, anyway. In these essays, I have written about some of the best and most important among them. The essays were original...
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Highways of Freedom
There is no passport as effective as linguistic ability, no better way to enter the life and culture of others than to speak their language. But I discovered when still very young that an open-minded desire fo...
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Re-Crossing the Somme
The configuration of that part of Northern France from where I come is rather deceptive. It is is an extended plain which runs north of Paris to the Maas Valley at Namur in Belgium, north across to Germany and...
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Home Sweet Home!
I was brought up near the Somme and as a young teenager I attended the Lycée at Abbeville. I was still very much a provincial in those days, almost oblivious of the implications of the global conflict from whi...
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Channel of History
We are on the beach at Calais, not far from the place where the cross-Channel ferries dock today. From the luminosity of the sky it seems we are in mid-summer. The sea is its usual sandy-brown, with just the o...
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Towards the Light
When Irish scholars brought their ‘Philosophy of Light’ to Laon in northern France they also brought with them a knowledge of Greek. Absurd, in a way, that the culture of south-eastern Europe should become the...
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Première Place
I live in Paris just by that vast grassy square, the Champ de Mars, almost in the shadow of the colossal iron structure that dominates it, the Eiffel Tower. And it came as a surprise (not only to me but, I sus...
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Bruegel’s Babels
I was invited to talk on Belgian radio about my book Le Génie du Nord (Genius of the North), an extended essay on the north and ‘northemness’. The interviewer, a young Francophone Belgian poet, asked me tongue-in...
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Travelling Back
Among British travellers making contact again with the Continent after the long interval of the Napoleonic Wars, John Ruskin was perhaps the most influential. His social thinking combined with his aestheticism...
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Out of the Trench
They are soon to open a Museum of the First World War in Picardy. The place chosen for the site lies slightly east of the Somme battlefields, in Péronne. Of course they had to think of the comfort and convenie...
