The indispensable key to English history is the Jurassic divide

For Hawes, the indispensable key to English history is the Jurassic divide - a boundary line running north-north-east from the Exe estuary to the mouth of the Humber. On one side are the relatively young sedimentary rocks of lowland England, on the other the old rocks of the West Country moors, Wales and the Marches, the Pennines and Scotland. Hawes contends that this physical divide underlies virtually every other divide in English history - social, economic, political or cultural. 

J. Law. 'as old as the hills', SF 84 (2024), 37

People want to know where they came from but they also want to know where they could have gone

Family history constantly goes back to the future, mapping the distances that grow between the branches, asking why some flourish and others wither – historical questions which are always more than a matter of individual character. People want to know where they came from but they also want to know where they could have gone and why their branch of the family did not go there.

A. Light, Common People: The History of An English Family (2014), loc. 1,680

The uncertain merits of things like scythes and pitchforks when used in a battle against crossbows and broadswords.

Susan did not know much about history. It always seemed a particularly dull subject. The same stupid things were done over and over again by tedious people. What was the point? One king was pretty much like another. The class was learning about some revolt in which some peasants had wanted to stop being peasants and, since the nobles had won, had stopped being peasants really quickly. Had they bothered to learn to read and acquire some history books they’d have learned about the uncertain merits of things like scythes and pitchforks when used in a battle against crossbows and broadswords.

T. Pratchett, Soul Music (1994), 39

She was dismissive of any notion that people in the past were essentially just like those of the present

She was dismissive of any notion that people in the past were essentially just like those of the present. ‘To pretend so,’ she declared forthrightly, ‘is an evasion and a betrayal, turning our back on them so as to be easy among familiar things.’ It was precisely the contrast between antiquity and the world of her upbringing, which felt as vivid to her as that between an Aegean summer and the drizzle of an English February, which helps to explain her passion for Alexander.

Tom Holland, 'Introduction', M. Renault, Fire from Heaven (1969), loc. 87

Those who fancy that they would relish life in a bygone era assume that they would arrive in the earlier milieu with all the health, wealth, and social status needed to enjoy their visit

Needless to say, those who fancy that they would relish life in a bygone era assume that they would arrive in the earlier milieu with all the health, wealth, and social status needed to enjoy their visit. Nobody would wish to find himself an Irish peasant during the Famine of the 1840s, or a medieval serf, or a slave in the Athenian silver mines at Laureion. Actually, if one were translated to the body of such a dweller in former times, chosen at random, one would be hundreds of times more likely to find oneself a downtrodden proletarian than a baron or an Athenian eupatrid, because the affluent in those days were such a tiny fraction of the whole. For that matter, such a translation would drastically cut one’s life expectancy, because there were so many illnesses and injuries that in those days were fatal.

L. Sprague deCamp, Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers (1976), loc. 485

The old postcards to not detect Maurilia as it was but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia

It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old postcards to not detect Maurilia as it was but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.

I. Calvino, Invisible cities (1972), tr. W. Weaver (1974),  27 

It will never be forgotten, it will always be preserved

It will never be forgotten, it will always be preserved. We will preserve it, we who are the younger brothers, the children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren, we who are the [family extensions] - the hair, eyebrows, nails - the colour and the blood, we who are the descendants ... we who have been born and lived where lived and governed all the precious ancient Chichimeca kings.

The Nahau historian Chimalpahin, quoted in C. Townsend, Fifth Sun (2019), 197

The general historical chapters represent a miserable level of performance

One of the most disappointing of all county histories is Polwhele's Devon. The general historical chapters represent a miserable level of performance, though the parochial descriptions are valuable. Even so, Polwhele covered only a small part of the county and the work as a whole is third-rate. 

W.G. Hoskins, Local history in England (2nd ed. 1972), 20 

Their education is unlikely to have left them with any historical panorama or with any idea of a continuing tradition

Their education is unlikely to have left them with any historical panorama or with any idea of a continuing tradition ... a great many people, though they may possess a considerable amount of disconnected information, have little idea of an historical or ideological pattern or process. Their minds rarely go back beyond the times of their own grandparents 

R. Hoggart, The uses of literacy (1957), 167

This is written about the working class, but does seem to be about all people. Maybe that was not so in the 1950s.

To believe that change, and in particular the speed of change, is something peculiar to the twentieth century, is an error

In one generation, between roughly  1840 and 1870, Kentish Town was substantially altered from a suburban village, surrounded by fields, into the townscape we see today. To believe that change, and in particular the speed of change, is something peculiar to the twentieth century, is an error, at least where the physical environment is concerned.. Except in a few specific places, like New Town sites, the changes seen by many people today are as nothing compared with the paroxysms of alteration and despoliation weathered by their great-grandparents.

G. Tindall, The fields beneath (1977; 2010 edition), 143

Scholars customarily overvalue the influence of historical truth as against historical myth

Scholars customarily overvalue the influence of historical truth as against historical myth. Thomas Innes, by exact scholarship, revalued the sources of ancient Scottish and Irish history, providing a base in which all late scholars would build. Incidentally he removed centuries of false history, and thereby destroyed the historical foundations of whig theories and the historical justification of the Hanoverian succession to the throne of Scotland. But did the political cause of Jacobitism gain anything from his work? Probably not. We may doubt whether the Chevalier de St George [The Old Pretender] even read it. In fact very few people read it. Even the greatest historian of the eighteenth century [Gibbon] was not among them. 

H.R. Trevor Roper, The invention of Scotland (2014), 71

All the myths of England come not from the Anglo-Saxons but from the Celts

For what people believe is true is a force, even if it is not true. Myth may be a driving force: such as the myth of inevitability, encountered in Calvin, or of invincibility, as at Sparta. Myth may also be the soul of history, engendering imaginative literature in poetry or prose.

Some races, it seems, are more mythopoeic than others. The myths of ancient Greece are as inseparable from Greek history as they are from Greek literature. The Anglo-Saxons, on the other hand, have been the least mythopoeic of peoples. The English have created one of the great literatures of the world. Yet, have they a singe myth that they can call their own? Almost all peoples have a myth of their own origin: a heroic age; divine descent; the discovery and colonisation of their land. The Anglo-Saxons have no such thing: no halo of romance surrounds the misty figures of their alleged leaders , Hengist and Horsa. All the myths of England come not from the Anglo-Saxons but from the Celts.

H.R. Trevor Roper, The invention of Scotland (2014), xxi

So the whole of Bismarck's career absolutely rested on the longevity of the old man

Bismarck was able to achieve all this not just because he was a shrewd politician, but because Kaiser Wilhelm lived for ninety-one years, as Jonathan Steinberg explains:

'Wilhelm I was born in 1797. Had he lived his biblical three score and ten, he would have died in 1867, before the unification of Germany. Friedrich III would have come to the throne as a youngish man and he would have fired Bismarck. He in fact did not come to the throne in 1867, nor in 1877, nor in 1887, because the old man would not die, and as long as Wilhelm I was there - he died in March 1888 at the age of ninety-one - Bismarck had a job. So the whole of Bismarck's career absolutely rested on the longevity of the old man.' 

N. MacGregor, Germany: memories of a nation (2014), 394

Their messiness disappears and they gain a certain logic and clarity that one never feels at the time

In retrospect, when historical events are gathered up, analyzed and categorized into articles and books, their messiness disappears and they gain a certain logic and clarity that one never feels at the time. For me, as for millions of ordinary Iranians, the war came out of nowhere one mild fall morning: unexpected, unwelcome and utterly senseless.

A. Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), 157

You have to pretend that individual women were more important than they were

“Often, if you want to write about women in history,” the novelist Hilary Mantel has said, “you have to distort history to do it, or substitute fantasy for facts; you have to pretend that individual women were more important than they were or that we know more about them than we do.” But when it comes to Wilder, we don’t have to pretend. 

...

That is always a problem, in writing about poor people. The powerful, the rich and influential, tend to have a healthy sense of their self-importance. They keep things: letters, portraits, and key documents, such as the farm record of Thomas Jefferson, which preserved the number and identity of his slaves. No matter how far they may travel, people of high status and position are likely to be rooted by their very wealth, protecting fragile ephemera in a manse or great home. They have a Mount Vernon, a Monticello, a Montpelier. But the Ingallses were not people of power or wealth. Generation after generation, they traveled light, leaving things behind.

C. Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2016), 5 and 28

I fear I should never be a success at Oxford ... I should never talk or drink enough

'I fear I should never be a success at Oxford ... I should never talk or drink enough.' However, by the post-war period, Cambridge was beginning to develop a reputation - unfortunate in Steven's view - for narrower professionalism. Trevor-Roper diagnosed the same disease at Oxford, and was determined to lead the alliance that would purge it.

M. Dinshaw, Outlandish knight: the Byzantine life of Steven Runciman (2016), 365

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets

Until the late modern era, more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. They extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites - kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers - who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

Y.N. Hariri, Sapiens (2011), 114


'kings, government officials, soldiers, priests' is how I got my degree.

One had to read the books of second-rate novelists to have an authentic picture of an epoch

Elsewhere he (Lampedusa) argued that history could not be understood properly without a knowledge of literature, especially minor literature. To find out what shopkeepers and railway workers were thinking in the 1920s, he remarked, there was not point reading the works of Giovanni Gentile. One had to read the books of second-rate novelists to have an authentic picture of an epoch, and although this might require patience, a strong stomach and a dose of bad taste, it was worth it. 'Ungrammatical, illogical, hysterical, ignorant, fatuous, "snobbish", in short pitiful as they are, they give us the true portrait of Demos, our lord and master. One has to read them.

D. Gilmour, The last leopard (1988, revised edition 2007), 46

Was there really no one in the White House or No. 10 Downing Street who remembered Kipling?

However, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are the the grossest examples of what presentism mean in practice. No one with any knowledge of the murky manoeuvres that carved what is now Iraq out of the defeated Ottoman Empire after the First World War could possibly have thought it a good idea to try, by force of arms, to turn that artificial, riven state into a beacon of democracy for the Middle East. No one who had studied the defeats inflicted on British forces in Afghanistan in the nineteenth century would willingly have dispatched troops, with no knowledge of the local languages and culture, to that harsh terrain with its warrior ethos. Was there really no one in the White House or No. 10 Downing Street who remembered Kipling?

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
and the women come out to cut up what remains,
jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
and go to your gawd like a soldier.

D. Marquand, Mammon's Kingdom (2014), 66

Personally, I find it comforting that some people also base their opposition to Iraq and Afhganistan on  practical grounds rather than the absurdity of UN sanctioned international law.

The silent killer of history’s obligation to truth and objectivity

British historians have viewed computing technology variously as the handmaiden of postmodernism, as a witless accomplice in the collapse of narrative, and as the silent killer of history’s obligation to truth and objectivity

W. G. Thomas III, ‘Computing and the Historical Imagination’, ed. S. Schreibman, R. G. Siemens, and J. Unsworth, A Companion to Digital Humanities (2004), 61

Not in my hands it isn't