From: "John Beamish" 

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1815961,00.html

The concluding three paras sum it up well.


History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the
story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have
to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or
even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction,
it is the enemy of abstraction.

The bizarre but wonderful William Gerhardi wrote a polemical introduction
to his book, The Romanovs, a foreword he called a 'Historian's Credo', a
series of furious and marvellously eccentric aphorisms. One paragraph
reads: 'History must at last convince of the uselessness of insensate mass
movements riding roughshod, now as ever, over anonymous suffering and
claiming priority in the name of some newly clothed abstraction. If it does
not teach that, it does not teach anything.'

It was appropriate to write that as he did in 1939, and it is appropriate
for us all to remember it today.

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