Michael Burleigh

Among writers of history a variety of genres flourish: they include battles, biographies and a significant date, such as 1066, 1492 or 1940. The television documentary maker, Denys Blakeway, has opted for 1936 in the belief that it was a better vintage, so to speak, than 1935 or 1937. Many Britons lived parallel lives, some in the new Ideal Home suburbs; a residue in what were euphemistically called Special Areas in the North East, South Wales and Scotland, as desperate then as they often are nowadays, even though the deprivation is not entirely material.

Norman Stone forsook the chair of modern history at Oxford university for Ankara after realising that the ‘conversation at high tables would generally have made the exchanges in the bus- stop in the rain outside seem exhilarating’. Norman Stone forsook the chair of modern history at Oxford university for Ankara after realising that the ‘conversation at high tables would generally have made the exchanges in the bus- stop in the rain outside seem exhilarating’. Dur- ing an earlier incarnation at Cambridge, Stone taught a galaxy of historians. His protégés include David Blackbourn, Harald James and Richard Overy, followed by Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, all bar two now working at Harvard or Princeton.