The outsider who came in from the cold

Professor McIntire disowns any claim to have written a conventional biography of the Cam- bridge historian Herbert Butter- field. His book is a detailed, scholarly study of the intellectual odyssey of a complex character, who wrestled all his life with the problems of writing history. As such it is not an easy read.a

His biographer presents his subject as a classic case of enduring parental influence. He ‘idolised’ his father. A textile worker, married to a domestic servant, the father was a deeply religious Wesleyan Methodist, forced by poverty to leave school at eight. The son, born in 1900, fulfilled his father’s hopes by becoming a Methodist lay preacher. Having an intense Protestant concern with his own spiritual life, it was natural that he should stress ‘the all- surpassing influence of human personality in history’. This was more than Carlyle’s dictum that history was the sum of ‘innumerable biographies’; it committed him to a Berlinesque defence of free will against determinism.