Richard Cohen was once one of our foremost book editors as well as being an Olympic sabre champion. Since moving to New York 20 years ago he has turned author himself, writing books on Tolstoy, the sun and his own sport of swordsmanship. Now he focuses his attention on historians.
His aim, he tells us at the outset of this superb survey from Herodotus to Mary Beard, is to discover the opinions, biases and open prejudices of those who chronicled the past and thus shaped the way we view it. Making History is very much a compendium of his own tastes and enthusiasms, and cheerfully omits such masters as Clarendon and Carlyle, whose histories of the English Civil War and the French Revolution laid the foundations of all subsequent historiography of those events. But Cohen’s prejudices make for a highly entertaining read: his fencer’s eye skewers the quirky and bizarre, and he peppers his informative essays and potted biographies with anecdotes that reveal his chosen historians in all their gamey glory.
We hear, for example, the (possibly apocryphal) story of how those great rivals A.J.P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor Roper were mischievously commissioned to write each other’s obituaries, and then, by accident or design, sent each other’s work for revision in the wrong envelopes. Cohen probes the weak points in their armour: how both men were seduced from writing the big books expected of them by the new genre of TV history – something which Taylor practically invented – or the rewards of tabloid journalism.
He also catches the sadness in their lives – the doubts and disappointments that the donnish point-scoring and vicious reviews could not conceal: how Taylor was bled dry by his wife’s ruinous passion for Dylan Thomas, and how Lord Dacre (as Trevor Roper became) went to his grave with the mocking laughter of long-scorned colleagues ringing in his ears for his over-hasty authentication of the forged Hitler diaries.
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