Make History Great Again

Scary numbers of British teenagers think Churchill was fictional (and Sherlock Holmes real). The consequences will be Orwellian

MAKING HISTORY by Richard Cohen

784pp, W&N, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £9.99

A recent poll of British teenagers discovered that just under a quarter of them believed that Winston Churchill was a fictional character. Slightly more believed the same about Florence Nightingale; and nearly half of them thought it about Richard the Lionheart. No fewer than 58 per cent, on the other hand, were under the impression that Sherlock Holmes was a real historical figure.

Does this matter? Yes, hugely – though it’s quite hard to summarise in a simple phrase just why it matters so much. People who know no history are reduced to living in a perpetual present; this flattens their understanding of so many things, rather as if the three dimensions of ordinary experience had been squeezed down to two. The effect is, in the end, infantilising.

And infants are easily led. Politics at its worst – aggressive nationalism, for example – relies on the uncritical acceptance of bogus history. It was not on a mere whim that, six months before he invaded Ukraine, Vladimir Putin published a 5,000word pseudo-historical essay arguing that that country was just an artificial offshoot of Russia. George Orwell’s vision of total despotism, based on Soviet Russia, was of a society where history was entirely replaced by the fictions of the Party.

So, hats off to Richard Cohen, who thinks that history really does matter, and has written a huge, fizzing omnium gatherum of a book in order to explain why and how. Cohen is not a professional historian; his previous history of swordfighting relates rather more to his early career as a world-class fencer. But for many years he has been a successful editor and publisher, dealing with eminent historians, among others.

This book is about the writers of history down the ages; yet it also generates plenty of thoughts along the way about the nature of history itself. The coverage is basically chronological, starting with ancient Greek historians and staying broadly Western thereafter (though with one chapter on Islamic historians); but it is heavily weighted towards the 20th century, and is often at its best when describing people Cohen has known and published.

Not that he is ever dull when reaching into the more distant past. Few will forget his description of Edward Gibbon, with his big flapping cheeks, 4ft 8in body, bright ginger hair and – a detail I would have preferred not to know – permanently distended scrotum. Cohen has a magpie’s eye for entertaining facts: we learn, for example, that the Mongols ranked historians lower than prostitutes, and that the 9th-century chronicler al-Baladhuri ate such large quantities of a memory-enhancing nut that it drove him mad. (“Superfood” consumers beware.)

One of Cohen’s themes is that in order to understand a historian, we must see him or her as a rounded, flesh-and-blood human being. This principle may help to justify the vivid descriptions of individual lives here; but in some cases (eg Machiavelli, Trotsky) we go through many pages of their personal adventures to arrive at terribly brief accounts of their actual historical writing. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was not a historian but wrote colourful letters from Istanbul, gets in; Catharine Macaulay, who led a relatively dull life but was one of the most important 18th-century historians, is not even mentioned.

Another theme, inevitably, is the modern debate about whether historical writing can be “objective”. This is linked to the previous theme, as we are all creatures of our society and our personal experience; and Cohen writes sensitively about this in a marvellous chapter about Dom David Knowles, the great historian of monasticism who had literally gone awol from his own monastery in order to live with the woman he loved.

Writing with a conscious agenda to distort the truth is obviously wrong (and no one would accuse Knowles of that). But the big question, not really answered here, is how people can know that they are being more objective rather than less, in a modern world where pure objectivity has been declared impossible. Most would agree, at least, that the effort is worth making. But perhaps not all. When Cohen asked the Marxist Eric Hobsbawm if a historian could be objective, he laughed and said: “Of course not – but I try to obey the rules.” That sounds like a less than wholehearted commitment.

The last of Cohen’s big themes is the idea that fiction can also make a real contribution to historical understanding. From Hilary Mantel he goes back not just to the obvious writers of historical novels, such as Walter Scott, but all the way to