In defence of redoing the past
Review by Parshotam Mehra
In Defence of History by Richard J Evans. Granta Books, London. Pages 307. £ 12.99.

How man progressed to build a sick society
by Surjit Hans

The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine edited by Roy Porter. Cambridge University, Cambridge. Pages 400. £ 24.95.

Medical revolution started after World War II. Penicillin and bypass surgery came into vogue. The medical revolution has its ambiguities. It increased longevity in the developed countries but population in the underdeveloped world.

It is not sure about its aims. To make man long-living or to help him lead a meaningful life till the eve of death? Is medicine a service industry or a profession? Is medical help a political right or an individual responsibility?

Disillusionment is spreading as a result of medical advances. Alternative medicine is a viable business. Its critics point out that modern medicine is treating, in fact, the insurance companies and doctors but hardly the patients.

About 45 lakh years ago man lived in groups of 50 to 100. Low density of population ruled out contagious diseases like smallpox or measles. Constant movement did not make human wastes a source of disease.

Twenty-five lakh years ago, man started making tools. Agricultural revolution started about 10,000 years ago; dog, sheep, goat, pig, horse and fowl were domesticated. By inventing agriculture, man cultivated disease as well. We share 65 diseases with dogs, 50 with cattle, 46 with sheep and goats, 42 with pigs, 35 with horses, and 26 with poultry.

Mosquito-breeding sites developed in jungle clearing and stagnant water near the dwellings. Faeces-feeding flies flourished. Fleas and lice colonised the outside of human body; amoebas, hook worms, parasitic worms moved into the interior.

Until recently the cities were so unhealthy that they could not reproduce their population. Wherever the armies marched pathogens flourished. Sometimes a war was won by disease, and not by combatants; typhus in Napoleon’s expedition into Russia in 1812. The Roman Empire unified the Mediterranean world and most of its deadly pathogens.

Until 552 AD Japan seems to have escaped epidemics. In the year the Buddhist missionaries from Korea brought enlightenment and smallpox.

The Spaniards conquered the Canary Islands and native Guanches were finished off first with guns and then with disease. In the 15th century the Portuguese drew Africa and Africans into Iberian pathogenic community.

Smallpox arrived in the Caribbean in 1518, and entered Mexico and South America soon afterwards, killing millions in epidemic after epidemic. Charles Darwin wrote in 1836, “Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.”

Evidence suggests that typhus was originally Arab. Yellow fever was from Africa and cholera from South-East Asia.

The Industrial Revolution made its own contribution to human illness: black, brown and white lung diseases of coalminers, textile and asbestos workers. Cancer, heart-related ailments and Alzheimer’s disease could be in ancient times as well but they have come into their own in the modern times.

The institution of khandani hakim starts with the Greeks and is exemplified by Asclepius and his descendants, including Hippocrates. Religious healing was sought particularly in chronic cases. Epidemics led to religious, public ceremonies. A fifth century BC epidemic led to the worship of Asclepius, who superseded Apollo.

The theory of humours — dry, cold, wet, hot — comes from the Greeks to reach India through the Arabs.

The practical Romans invented public works, sewers, aquaducts and hospitals for the armies.

The legendary Galen (Arabic: Jalinoos) (129-216) was studied everywhere. He belonged to Fergamum (now in Turkey). His physique was a substitute glory for the vanished Greek empire. His diagnostic method included pulse-taking and examination of urine (baul). He carried on the Alexandrian tradition of dissection.

To begin with, Christianity like Judaism had an ambiguous attitude towards medicine. Healing miracles in the gospels emphasised the power of faith to cure disease. Christianity wanted “good” death, leading to eternal life. Hence the priest at bedside as well as a doctor.

Christian charity led to the foundation of hospitals to look after the sick, the old, the poor and the stranger.

With Caliph Harun al-Rashid (reign 786-809) Greek science began to be taken over by the Arabs. In the ninth century 129 works of Galen were translated into Arabic. Today there are more Galenic texts in Arabic than in the original Greek. Al-Razi (Latin: Rhazes) described small-pox and measles accurately; al-Biruni speaks of herbs in India and Afghanistan. Ibn Sina (Avicenna) prepared his compendium of medicine in the 11th century. Arab physicians (hakim) were philosophers as well. Following the Arabs, Ph.Ds are called Doctors.

What is disease is not a simple question. Hamlet’s “melancholy” is “depression” of the ordinary man. In 1800 what was “hysteria” in a woman was diagnosed “hypochondria” in man. Illness is a subjective feeling; disease is an objective thing. Tribal medicine has a point, holiness and healing, salvation and salubrity are etymologically connected.

Christianity ennobles the soul and disparages the body, the prison house of the soul. In the Middle Ages chastity, fasting and self-flagellation were the hallmarks of holiness. Suicide was a mortal sin: being a God’s creature a man was not entitled to dispose of his body. Pain is a necessary evil to Christianity; an alarm bell to modern medicine.

Pain. Should it be enjoyed, endured or shunned? Epicureans were devising means of damage limitation. Stoics wanted to soar above it. A number of Christian sects regard medicine impious, reject inoculation, vaccination and blood transfusion. Christ asked the physicians to heal themselves. Healing is “a gift of the spirit”.

Catholicism invented the healing power of relics, shrines and saints. To relieve tooth-ache one appealed to St Apollonia, who had been martyred by having her teeth yanked out. In the 14th century Black Death led to expiatory flagellant movements and anti-Semitic riots.

In Tudor and Stuart times the crown and corporations responded to epidemics by containment, bolting the city gates, banning markets and quarantining the sufferer. The preachers thundered, “It is not the clean keeping and sweeping of our houses and streets that can drive away this fearful messenger of God’s wrath.” The populace sided with the priests. Witchcraft could produce bodily harm (an idea universally believed in the countryside of my childhood). Epilepsy was called the “sacred disease.”

In the 17th century the body was widely viewed as machine and sickness was a mechanical breakdown. Right upto 1800 AD medicine had no diagnostic instruments. Feeling the pulse, sounding the chest, taking blood pressure, inspecting the throat, taking temperature — physical examination was a 19th century development.

The divergent answers to “what is disease?” are not entirely dependent on class, history and outlook. Even today experimentalists, epidemiologists, public health experts and clinicians are at loggerheads regarding the classification and causes of diseases. Sickness is not simply the work of pathogens; it is a function of social relations.

Sickness is not without its lighter side. The spread of the venereal disease (cherished and cultivated by the 19th century artists) led to the quip — an hour with Venus might require a lifetime of Mercury.

Small-pox was eradicated in 1979, Yuppie flu (ME or chronic fatigue syndrome) has appeared. Diseases like empires, rise and fall.

Until the 20th century bleeding, vomiting, sweating and purging were the chief cures, appropriately called “heroic medicine”, The Spectator wrote in 1711, “When a nation abounds in physicians it grews thin of people.”

In the British pharmacopeia of 1824 only opium did some good. Stethoscope was introduced in 1816. (To begin with it connected with only one ear.) Thermometer in 1850; X-ray in 1895, and aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) in 1899, and sulphonamide in 1935. Major diseases have declined but subjective sensation of illness in individuals has increased. People are now more sensitive to bodily symptoms.

To the Greeks (like Indians) the body was sacred, and no dissection. The Pope permitted dissection during Black Death so that a cause of pestilence might be discovered. Teaching anatomy by dissection started in 1537 (two years before the death of Guru Nanak). Harvey discovered blood circulation in 1628. Lavoisier explained the chemistry of respiration at the time of the French Revolution.Pasteur was a chemist, not a physician. He was sceptical of spontaneous generation. Fermentation led to the discovery of micro-organisms, and then to the germ theory of disease. He developed rabies vaccine in 1885. Following Pasteur’s ideas, Koch discovered bacillae of TB and cholera in 1882 and 1883. Malaria was conquered by Ross in Calcutta in 1898.

The 20th century discoveries are the molecular understanding of antigens and antibodies, hormone(s) (Greek: literarry “I excite, arouse”, insulin produced from the “istlets of langerhans” in the pancreas, neurology, DNA, randomised clinical trials and epidemiology. (More than anything else, epidemiology demonstrated the connection between smoking and lung cancer.)

Surgery could not advance in the absence of anaesthesia introduced in 1840. Nitrousoxide, ether and then chloroform. Lister’s carbolic acid in 1865 was the first anti-septic. By 1912 all the cavities and organs of the body had been explored and conquered.

Organ transplants have led to ethical and legal problems. When is a living person morally entitled to donate his organ? Should there be market in organs? (A writer in the Guardian recently advocated it.) Can the dead be assumed to have consented to the donation? At what point one is dead enough to donate?

Surrogate motherhood has arrived. Artificial hip joints are available. Cosmetic surgery is a fashion, not a treatment. Critics point out that modern hospital medicine has contributed little but cost. Public health measures in the 19th century actually brought down mortality.

Ancient pharmacopeia has mere prestige than curative potency. The first century “Herbal” of Dioscorides has 500 entries. It is better known as “De Materia Medica”. Fortyfour of its drugs survived into the 20th century. Only about 11 have any definite pharmacological action. I am not sure if we have done the exercise with our brahmi bootis. Have we extracted the active elements in saunf, ajwain (ptychotis ajowan), or banafsha (viola serpens)?

Quinine, an alkaloid came from Peru. Paracetamol, derived from acetanilide, was first used medically in 1893.

Staining of microbes and animal cells by dyestuffs was necessary for their observation under the microscope. It lead to the medical breakthrough in that a drug could replace the dye. The first such drug was one which attached itself to (killed) spirochaete bacterium of syphilis. Sulphanilamide was synthesised in 1908 during studies on dyes; 30 years later it began to save lives.

Hormone chemistry led to the pill, widely available after 1960.

Alongwith the medical revolution, the pharmaceutical industry has expanded greatly. By 1980 ten pharmaceutical companies were among the top 50 corporations of USA.

To the Greeks the rational self was the ideal. It was especially so to the ethical and political man. The irrational was the enemy of human dignity and freedom. Passions were mysterious forces of fate or the transcendental “fires” of the geniuses or artists. In the psychic civil war, theatre became a therapy. Suffering led to wisdom, bloodshed to purity; blindness to insight.

Renaissance madness was aligned with folly. Half-naked, dressed in straw or hides, representing a sub-human condition. The 18th century was particularly fond of nerves. The word “neurosis” comes from the period. With the advent of lunatic asylum the mad have lost their status. They no longer partake of obscure truths. Earlier madness spoke and society listened.

The pressures of civilisation have alienated man from his soul. The experts disagree if madness is a disease or perversion. Well-meaning critics believe that there is no such thing as mental illness. Psychiatry is as good as alchemy and astrology.

Concern with the health of the people was central to the revolution of 1789. The importance of hygiene was realised first by army and navy doctors. In industrial England working class suffered from fevers characteristic of camps, ships and prisons. Early in the 19th century the medical profession, not least by encouraging grave-robbing, appeared to value the poor more-highly as corpses than as patients. Later medical organisation, public health, and poor relief were integral to political reform.

To begin with, hygiene was a moral cause — a rationale for better living and a critique of industrialism; many of its proponents were women.

Between the wars the average man with his wife and children, became the central focus of organised medicine. Eugenics and nutrition had their advocates.

Germans carried on experiments on the Jews; the Japanese performed vivisection on the Chinese and the Soviets on the dissidents in psychiatric wards. Medicine is central to monstrous politics, because it depends on and also helps define the boundaries of humanity.

Sometimes success is bought at too heavy a price. Illness induced not by nature or circumstance or the patient’s own behaviour, but by the drugs and the procedures used to diagnose or treat original condition are called iatrogenic complications. The Boston University Medical Centre, Massachusetts, followed the progress of more than 800 patients. Out of the patients under study 290 developed iatrogenic disorders, many of them drug induced. Of these 76 suffered major complications, and in 15 cases these contributed to their death.

Modern medicine is seized of the question: What is the purpose of medicine? Ignorance of aging process makes it impossible even now to be certain about the long-term effects of medical interventions. The ideal strategy is to maintain the body in good mental and physical condition until shortly before death. Of what use is increase in longevity plagued by degenerative disease and mental impairment?

The editor believes that the book would widen the horizons of medical practitioners in the English-speaking world. Our Punjabi physician-writers like Mama Dhillon, Ravinder and Ambrish would find the book adding something to their literary concerns.

With lust from great granduncle
By Nirmal Sandhu

The Company of Women by Khushwant Singh, Viking, New Delhi. Pages 296. Rs 395.

Khushwant Singh’s latest novel “The Company of Women” detailing his sexual fantasies provokes this immediate reaction: “This is a book which should not be thrown away lightly; it should be thrown away with some force.”

But then you understand KS’s game: he wants to tease, titillate and outrage his reader so that he can attract attention and sell his stuff. The crafty salesman and his publishers cash in on a carefully projected image of notoriety.

During the formal release of the book when a lady interviewer asked KS when you last had sex, he was annoyed. “What a stupid question. I won’t answer that,” he reacted. That’s because the proclaimed master of eroticism is in reality a gentleman leading a disciplined life.

In spite of — or perhaps because of — his dirty writings, KS attracts a good number of women admirers. He is down-to-earth, witty, lavish with compliments and hence loveable in sharp contrast to his philanderer-protagonist, Mohan Kumar, who goes around sex shopping, treating every woman, maharani or mehtrani, as a sex object.

The profound statement KS makes in the book at the ripe age of 85 is: “Lust is the foundation of love.” Any teenager will tell you this. What lets down the reader the most is the absence of love in the book. It is all about lust. Why a young, handsome millionaire businessman like Mohan Kumar, after a divorce from his nagging wife, chooses to bed only dark and often ugly women of different countries, castes, class and religions strains common sense and appears contrived.

When it comes to the nitty-gritty of the act, KS’s in-out, in-out approach is tiresomely repetitive and his over-emphasis on the size is irritating. More than the size, as any sexologist would tell him, it is the ability to prolong the act that matters. He needs to study D.H Lawrence’s style of building up a relationship culminating in copulation. If “The Company of Women” is compared with “Fear of Flying”, KS looks like a schoolboy in need of basic tuition from Erica Jong.

The book, which is devoid of any literary worth, also lacks KS’s famed sense of humour. Only this one is a bit funny:

“Wouldn’t it be nicer if we settled Pak-India problems this way rather than by abusing each other and fighting?” suggests Mohan Kumar’s Pakistani partner soon after a love-making session.

“Sure,” Mohan Kumar replied. “And with Pakistan always on top?”

“Of course! Pakistan must always be on top.”

KS and controversy are inseparable. Such is his reputation that even a simple peck by the octogenarian on the Pakistani envoy’s daughter becomes controversial with newspapers writing editorials on it. How can this book be without controversy then? His admirers may let it pass, but Dalit leaders Kanshi Ram and Mayawati have a good reason to haul up KS for the protagonist’s observation: “...as a class the so-called untouchable women were in fact the most touchable.”

If that can be laughed off, KS again courts controversy with this one on Lord Krishna: “He had a lifelong affair with his aunt, Radha, and innumerable village girls, married and unmarried. People worshipped him and no one dared to call him a womanizer or the women in his life harlots.”

The right punishment for such thoughtless observations is to deny KS the pleasure of seeing his book taken to court. Any controversy about a book pushes up its sales and comes as a blessing for the author and the publishers.

KS’s erotic obsession reminds one of the story of the lunatic who is asked to associate words with pictures as part of a psychiatric test. The madman replies “sex” to all of them. The despairing analyst finally blurts out: “My dear fellow, your problem is that you’re erotically obsessed.” “Me?” says the patient. “You’re the one with the dirty pictures.”

KS, however, owns it up and thus justifies: “As a man gets older, his sex instincts travel from his middle to his head. What he wanted to do in his younger days but did not because of nervousness, lack of response or opportunity, he does in his mind.”

Mohan Kumar takes his hired woman to a club. Seeing her, one of his friends quips: “Not bad for bad purposes.”

This book too may evoke a similar response in an average reader.

Lewd Carroll’s real Alice
by Rumina Sethi

Lewis Carroll: a Portrait with Background by Donald Thomas. John Murray, London. Pages 404. £ 25.

DESPITE the apparent seclusion of his life in Christ Church, Oxford, Lewis Carroll as the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the don, logician, child-lover and a prolifically versatile writer, held radical political views, well-informed as he was about the vices of his age.

The paradox-forging man had many paradoxes; he saw mid-Victorian London at its most raffish, while his library contained books on the criminal underworld, homosexuality and prostitution. He was an anxious prude, yet left to the world the unfettered imagination in “Alice” and “The Hunting Snark”. He was a restrained man yet he became a victim of the Victorian prudery that swept the late 19th century.

He was as close to the twilight underworld of psychology, crime and vice as he was to the golden world of Wonderland. Harry Furniss, one of his last illustrators, rightly saw Carroll as “a wit, gentleman, a bore and an egotist... not selfish, but a liberal-minded, liberal- handed philanthropist... his egotism was all but second childhood.”

Donald Thomas in his biography sets him against a detailed study of his age using material from the Victorian press — much that has not been seen before and which has been gathered by Thomas over many years. Carroll is one of those figures who appears most clearly when seen against this background, as one who showed a sustained interest in law, madness and crime, counting the most eminent advocates and judges among his close friends.

Although in today’s society Carroll would quite probably have been ostracised and possibly prosecuted for his photographs of nude children, Donald Thomas shows that he was innocent of the charges of pornography often held against him. He was importunate in persuading “little nudities” to pose before his lens, yet described any attempt to overcome their reluctance as “a crime before God”; seemingly he was his own worst enemy in defending his name. Though an introvert, Carroll was an inveterate lover of theatre and child actresses (like Ellen Terry) in the bohemia of the pre-Raphillites.

All this makes the task of a biographer of Carroll peculiar and inauspicious. It has to be an exercise in describing the unpalatable for the sake of the palatable and then at best reconciling the two.

Carroll’s sexuality, because it involved young girls, is a tricky point of intersection between what is enduringly admired in him and what is often detested. In 1945 the photographer-historian Helmut Gernsheim established the truth of Carroll photographing young girls in the nude. His readers had forgotten two facts about him: his credentials as a photographer and Joyce’s pun “Lewd Carroll” which was not only amusing but true.

The newly invented camera was “Carroll’s passport to respectable middle-class and artistic homes”, a kind of amusement by this “Casanova of the Victorian nursery”. It is true that his innumerable pictures of young Alice, the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, sufficiently indicate his love for her. In fact it is believed that he proposed to her and was not only rejected but his entry to the Dean’s garden was also banned.

Carroll’s creative writings may appear as a spontaneous tale told on a summer afternoon on the Cherwell, but Thomas shows it as the result of his classical education and his deep reflection on the momentous changes in mid-Victorian law and society. For no small reason then, the Alice books have become an enduring and universally recognised metaphor. The continued fascination with this extremely enigmatic writer, though unadventurous and sedentary, is attested by the publication of three major biographics of Carroll over the past few years, and what is really interesting is the complexities of his methods of concealment, a tight web of allusions, association and inference which challenge the most persistent cryptographers.

Though this biography contains a wide range of critical commentary on Carroll’s books and his involvement in Oxford’s controversies, it is difficult to displace Morton Cohen’s 1995 standard biography, quite justifiably claimed as a milestone by his publisher. But what is creditable about Thomas’s biography is that it deals more elaborately with the rift between Carroll and his father.

The present biography also provides a wealth of evidence to support the fact that the Alice books are the product of the most unusual and fertile imagination in English literature. Though William Empson feared that critical analysis would destroy the atmosphere of the books altogether, it cannot be denied that the works operate at a far deeper level than a mere jeu d’esprit.

Carroll’s relevance leaps across historical barriers to surrealists in Europe who regarded him as one of their “sponsors”; even the Beatles found him, deeply inspirational. We today find an affinity with him, especially when we see him as a curator of the Common Room at Christ Church changing the labels on the wine bottles and secretly having a laugh at the fellow dons enjoying a claret and taking it to be burgundy. Such deflation of pomposity and etiquette on the dinning table is a visible characteristic in the humour of the Alice books.

And then his interest in young girls has influenced an American magazine on transgenerational sex to be named Wonderland causing much embarrassment to his admirers who by now know that Carroll was guilty of paedophilia because of his reluctance to have a sexual relationship with adult women. His remark that his girl friendships “get wrecked at the critical point where the stream and the river meet” could be an indication of his erotic attraction for pre-pubescent girls. It is also well known that he preferred 12-year-old girls which he said was an “ideal age” and this gains relevance to the law in England in 1875 which allowed girls of this age to give sexual consent. Girls of 14 years age he said were “kissable” without the permission of their mothers.

Isa Bowman, the writer of an intimate portrait, “Lewis Carroll as I knew him” (1899) stayed in his flat between the age of 12 and 14. But this has not been clearly elaborated in the biography though it is suggested that there seems to be a link between Carroll’s celibacy and his love of young girls.

Speculations at being jilted by a woman or his fear of sex being the psychological causes of his obsession with young girls are also scattered through the biography. Dreams of childhood in his early poetry, especially in the poem “Solitude”, could be also a reason for his love of children. Indeed, in his own words, “four fifths” of his life was childhood. As Virginia Woolf claimed, “childhood remained in him entire”.

And is it not true that at the heart of the Alice books is Carroll’s dream identification with his child heroine? He always sees through her eyes. Travelling on a train he told Kathleen Eschwege, “I am fond of children (except boys) and have more child-friends than I could possibly count on my fingers, even if I were a centipede (by the way have they fingers? I’m afraid they’re only feet, but, of course, they use them for the same purpose and that is why no other insects, except centipedes, ever succeed in doing Long Multiplication”.

It is amusing to see in Cohen’s biography an eloquent account of Carroll’s pure-mindedness and the asexual nature of his love for young girls. But a reader of his works would be outraged to know that this was not the reason for his friendship with the young Alice Liddell.

The recent multiplication of biographies is a result of the inability of his biographers to tell the whole truth about the relationship of the conservative Oxford don with the unorthodox creator of Alice, the strange stiff professor and his love of young girls. This could be because of the unavailability of firsthand reported experience, which undoubtedly forms the backbone of definitive biographies, and the lack of adult confidants in Carroll’s life.

Donald Thomas’ biography, like the others, is more of a conjecture on Carroll’s “inner life” within the context of the late 19th century England.

In defence of redoing the past
by Parshotam Mehra

In Defence of History by Richard J Evans. Granta Books, London. Pages 307. £ 12.99.

In a discipline that is age-old and never ceases to ask — and endeavours to answer — some fundamental questions about how things came to be the way they did, there is no dearth of active and incisive minds. And also thought-provoking studies. One such is Richard J Evans, Professor-elect of Modern History at Cambridge, and his stimulating book under review.

Evans’s major gambit is that the sort of questions that exercised E.H. Carr in his essentially “left”-oriented “What is History” or for that matter G.R. Elton in his largely “right”-oriented “The Practice of History” are somewhat outdated. The 1960s when these works were composed were singularly innocent of such later developments as gender or gay history or, even the history of discourses which alone, many scholars today believe, constitutes history.

Nor is that all. The new-fangled post-modernist theory rejects many of the assumption and methods which the historian usually swears by. For historical truth is whatever the community of historians decides it is. Nor are archives sacrosanct for the truth in them is conditioned by the assumptions the historians brings to them. And the “original” papers by which he sets much store are essentially protective of the interests which the people who wrote them sought to defend.

It is essential to remember that the post-modernist theory of the 1980s, best summarised in Keith Jankins, “On What is History? From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White”, has vehemently attacked the notion of scientific history based on rigorous investigation of primary sources. And denies any such thing as historical truth or objectivity. The question, as its protagonists view it, is no longer “what is history?” but “is it possible to do history at all?” They do not view history as a record of the past, more or less faithful to the facts, but “as an invention or fiction” of historians themselves. In sum, the post-modernist challenge is to undermine the authority of the discipline and question the very mystique of the historian’s enterprise and the purpose of his work.

In challenging the post-modernists, it is essential to underline that the problem the historian faces is how knowledge about the past has to be acquired. And whether it is possible to do so successfully. How does society as it evolves ever attain the kind of objective certainty about the great issues of our time, which could serve as a reliable basis for taking vital decisions about the future in the new millennium so close to hand. Evans underlines the fact that when it comes to understanding the past historians are the acknowledged experts but when it comes to understanding how we understand the past, there are no experts. All the same, while practising historians may not have a god-given monopoly to pronounce on the theory of history and other related issues, they have as much right to think and write about them as anybody else. For their experience of actually engaging in historical research gives them an edge over those who have not gone through the mill. And this qualifies them to make their own by no means unimportant contribution to the ongoing debate.

The book draws on the work of some outstanding historians to underwrite their contribution to the subject and their contemporary relevance. It reverts to Carr’s oft-cited adage that history was “an unending dialogue between the present and the past”. And differs from chronology in that it tried to grasp how discrete historical facts were interconnected. More, history performs its function only if it is tried to meta-history.

In the event, Carr’s monumental 14-volume “A History of Soviet Russia” was designed to write the history “not of the events of the revolution... but of the political, social and economic order which emerged from it”. No wonder in his reflections on “What is History”, Carr spelt out his view of history as progress seen from the point of view of the human race in a Soviet-styled planned economy. It comes uncomfortably close to Sir Lewis Namier’s jibe that historians “remember the future and imagine the past”. It also echoes, in retrospect, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” thesis that insofar as liberal-democratic, free-market capitalism had triumphed all along the line, history had now drawn to its inevitable close, or end.

In sharp contrast to Carr, Elton believed that good historians rejected theory and suppressed their present-day concerns when they researched the past. The fact is that historians do not just listen to evidence. but engage in a dialogue with it, while bringing to bear on it theories and ideas formulated in the present.

Carr’s and Elton’s definitions of history, it should be obvious, have conspicuous holes in them for historical objectivity is by no means conformity to an imagined future, as Carr would have us believe. Much less simply a matter of reading the documents and reconstructing the past in its own terms. as Elton professed.

To say all this is not to unsay that the hyper-relativism of the postmodernists is not easily sustainable either. For in the final count they would postulate that no kind of objective knowledge of the past, in the sense of patterns of interconnectedness that makes it history, rather than a dry-as-dust chronicle, is ever possible.

The fundamental problem here is that if all theories are equally valid, why should the post-modernists have an edge over others. The arguments about freeing history from the constricting shackles of objective fact to enable it to become more democratic, more sceptical and more tolerant does not really wash. For in the bargain, you give a licence to anyone who wants to suppress, distort or cover up the past. Nor is their use of jargon and professed specialised knowledge — and the claim to be scientific — really decieve. At best, it turns out to be a camouflage for the desire to “prioritise” a particular way of reading texts that runs counter to their postulate of the essential arbitrariness and openness of textuality. In the event, deconstruction can be used to justify or rewrite anything.

It should follow that post-modernist history has rejected the path of reason and progress which was so central to modernist historiography and has directed its attention towards the irrational in history, the extraordinary, the transgressive and the magical. All the same, it must be conceded that in its more constructive modes post-modernism has encouraged historians to look more closely at documents, take their surface patina more seriously and to view texts and narratives in new ways.

In its essence history is an empirical discipline, concerned with the content of knowledge rather than its nature. It enables a construction of the past reality that may be partial and provisional — which partly explains why history continues to be rewritten — and certainly will not be objective but is nevertheless true. As Trevelyan put it, “the poetry of history” lies in the realisation that “the dead were and are not”. And yet “they were once as real as we and we shall tomorrow be shadows like them”. In reconstructing the past the historian’s imagination, unlike the poet’s, should not be “roaming at large” but concentrate on “pursuing the fact and fastening upon it”.

The idea of objectivity involves a belief in the reality of the past and to truth as corresponding to that reality. The truth about patterns and linkages of facts is in the end discovered, not invented, found, not made. In the final count, we have to accept the fact that the past really happened. And scrupulously, and carefully, and self-critically, find out how it did. Our conclusion is invariably tenable and always less than final.

In a scholarly work of considerable depth and dimension, two brief comments may be in order. One, the author’s near-obsession with the post-modernists, both in their theory and practice, makes his study a little less than balanced. That the trend is not unimportant may be easily conceded but is it that important as to overshadow or keep out of reckoning much else that is both relevant and significant?

Two, while Evans’s range of scholarship and understanding of the subject is impressive, the unending stringe of citations and referrences makes his narrative at times turgid and his arguments tiresome.

The true craft of the historian lies not only in his mastery of detail and overarching comprehension but in a tale that makes for effortless, fascinating reading.