Writing the History of Middle Earth

Colin Kidd

• Barbarism and Religion Vol 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737-64 by J.G.A. Pocock
  Cambridge, 339 pp, £55.00, October 1999, ISBN 0 521 77921 9
• Barbarism and Religion Vol 2: Narratives of Civil Government by J.G.A. Pocock
  Cambridge, 422 pp, £55.00, October 1999, ISBN 0 521 77921 9

Tall, silver-haired and bearded, with a mesmerising voice and beguiling manner of delivery, John Pocock has long struck me as the Gandalf of the historical profession. The range, altitude and stylistic sophistication of his writing seem almost other-worldly, though legend has it that his distinctive accent derives from a small community of Channel Islanders in New Zealand. In prewar academia there, the teenage Pocock, the son of a classicist, could observe such notables as Karl Popper and an offensive visitor from Australia, the young professor of Greek at Sydney, Enoch Powell. Trained as a historian in New Zealand and by Herbert Butterfield at Cambridge, Pocock has since the mid-1950s woven a spell over the history of early modern British political thought, a subject whose contours he has refashioned in unexpected ways and endowed with an allure which has captivated younger generations of scholars.