Whitehall’s murky recesses

Peter Hennessy is one of the most engaging and perceptive commentators of our time, so it was with a feeling of pleasurable anticipation that I approached his latest book. This was increased when I discovered, to my considerable surprise, that he had stood as the Conservative candidate in his school’s 1964 mock general election.

My anticipation was heightened by his introduction, which promises an examination of the roles of myth and imagination in the writing of history. Of the many quotations we are treated to, the one which seemed best to reinforce that promise appears on the very first page, and comes from Enoch Powell:

All history is myth. It is a pattern which men weave out of the materials of the past. The moment a fact enters into history it becomes mythical, because it has been taken and fitted into its place in a set of ordered relationships which is the creation of a human mind and not otherwise present in nature.