Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century
This unprecedented book, by one of Britain's leading intellectual historians, describes the intellectual impact that the study and consideration of the past has had in the western world over the past 2500 years, treating the practise of history not as an isolated pursuit but as an aspect of human society and an essential part of the cultural history of Europe and America. It magnificently brings to life the work of historians from the Greeks to the present, including Livy, Tacitus, Bede, Froissart, Clarendon, Gibbon, Macaulay, Michelet, Prescott and Parkman, explaining their distinctive qualities and allowing the modern reader to appreciate and enjoy them. But is also examines subjects as diverse as the new perspectives brought about by the rise of Rome, the interests of medieval chroniclers, the introduction into historical narratives of what the eighteenth century called 'sentiment', the effects of Romanticism and the emergence towards the end of the nineteenth century of an historical profession.
