First past the post

Peter Clarke

• The People of England by Maurice Ashley
  Weidenfeld, 240 pp, £11.50, October 1982, ISBN 0 297 78178 2
• A New History of England, 410-1975 by L.C.B. Seaman
  Macmillan, 576 pp, £6.95, August 1982, ISBN 0 333 33415 9
• The Making of Modern British Politics, 1867-1939 by Martin Pugh
  Blackwell, 337 pp, £19.50, May 1982, ISBN 0 631 12985 5

It is notorious that all societies manifest some sense of their history as part of their own collective self-consciousness. The past is drawn upon selectively, compounding nationhood, cultural heritage, class identity or historical destiny in the creation of a necessary myth. The myth may be necessary in order to fortify the ambitions of the restless, to gratify the complacency of the satisfied or to console the amour-propre of the dispossessed. The functions of the past, in this sense, are governed by the needs of the present. Much general interest in history arises in this way, explicitly or implicitly, and historians would be less widely read if they did not cater for it. Yet their own professional concerns, so they disdainfully affirm, are otherwise.