Word: burrows
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...fact that this needs stating, or that we must intermittently re-emphasize history's relevance to understanding ourselves, points to a problem that has hounded the discipline in recent years - its tendency toward clubby academic isolation. A fine antidote to this trend is John Burrow's A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century, an ambitious and accessible account of the historian's craft over the last 2,500 years. In the tradition of Ford Madox Ford's The March of Literature and Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy...
Along with Herodotus - hailed here as "a marker set down against the oblivion with which time threatens all human deeds" - and Thucydides, the earliest exponent of realpolitik, Burrow devotes the first third of his book to a long line of Greco-Roman historians. He goes on to discuss "the radical and pervasive" impact of the Bible on history - for example, in the writings of the 6th century French Bishop Gregory of Tours, whom he dubs "Trollope with blood." Equally intriguing is Burrow's discussion of the secular historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, a fabricator who claimed that his 12th century account...
Inevitably, the immensity of Burrow's task requires as much omission as inclusion, and from the get-go he states his intention to bypass memoirs. Fortunately, at first, he seems to forget his own criterion. For instance, several pages are devoted to Xenophon's The Persian Expedition, a masterful account of a small Greek army trapped behind enemy lines, deep in the heart of the Persian Empire. Yet one of the stars of the show was Xenophon himself, his book a subtle piece of self-promotion. Likewise, Burrow makes a welcome exception for a memoir by Bernal...
...military trials of World War II without Churchill, or the Soviets, Mao and Nixon without Kissinger? Their extensive memoirs were written in part to contribute to history, but also as a personal defense against future historians. This dynamic - the statesman as historian - would have been a fascinating one for Burrow to explore...
...book ends by discussing history's changing nature in today's highly visual world, along with the advent of the Internet. Burrow astutely recognizes Ken Burns' U.S. television series on the American Civil War for what it is - a trailblazing masterpiece, "matching the scale of events it recounted in a way no printed book could do." As Burrow suggests, this is just part of a broader shift in the way the past has come to be packaged. When Burrow was a boy, he learned Latin and translated the Roman historians Livy and Tacitus. Today, children still learn about...