YOU MAY HAVE HEARD the joke about a special type of school pupil who can sit in a class and take information through the ears to the hand that holds a pen, writing notes, without it passing through the brain. High-grade students are very unlikely to be like that and if you have made only some progress with the skills described in this study guide you will not be one of them. This joke, however, points, at a much more sophisticated level, to the relationship between History students and the books they read.

History books that did not carry some reflection of the writer would be as dry as Kessings Archives, a weekly publication of raw news data. A history book is one person’s account of the past and, in several ways, it will reflect the writer. There is a hint of this idea in Hans Holborn’s comment ‘Knowledge of the past can only be obtained through the subjective experience of the scholar’.

A book will reflect the writer in several ways. This can be in the author's chosen focus, say, political history, or economic and social history, cultural history or gender issues. The book will also reflect a style of presentation, say strongly narrative style or a heavily analytical style. The book, also, may be associated with one of the speculative philosophies of History, St Augustine’s, Immanuel Kant’s, Spengler’s or, more notably, Marx’s interpretation of History. Christopher Hill's 69-page pamphlet (still in print since 1940) The English Revolution 1640 is a particularly sharp example of the Marxist interpretation. Beyond these individualities, the writer may favour one form of explanation over another. Readers will need to delve into discussions on the critical philosophy of History to have a fuller understanding of the explanation issue: Undergraduate History Study – The Guide to Success (Sempringham, 1997) is a helpful point of departure for these questions. The reality of historical research is that much evidence on what we really want to know about the past is ambiguous or absent. This point is nicely made in Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s account in Enigma: the Battle for the Code (which deciphered the Nazi radio orders in the Second World War). Sebag-Montefiore wrote that it was not the brilliant scientist Alan Turing who made the crucial breakthrough but a 22-year-old History undergraduate, Harry Hinsley ‘… who in the course of his medieval studies, had become adept at making the most of scant historical evidence‘. It is because information is incomplete that space is provided to reflect, to an extent, the History writer’s ideas about human beings, the possibilities of human behaviour and the nature of the world.