Keith Thomas

Most of what we know and think is secondhand. ‘Almost all the opinions we have are taken by authority and upon credit,’ wrote Montaigne, in an age when the sum of human knowledge was a great deal less than it has since become. Nowadays, we cannot begin to verify the vast structure of accepted scientific doctrine for ourselves, but have to take it on trust. Even researchers conducting laboratory experiments at the scientific coalface are heavily reliant on the say-so of others. If they are to achieve anything, they must assume that the materials with which they work are what they purport to be, that their instruments are reliable, that the tables to which they refer have been accurately printed, that accounts of previous experiments are not fabrications and that their laboratory technicians are not practical jokers. Of course, it is possible to test all these things. But not only would such checks consume an inordinate amount of time: they would be impossible to conduct without further dependence on the testimony of others. As C.A.J. Coady recently showed in his Testimony: A Philosophical Study, epistemic individualism, the idea that we should doubt everything except what we have established single-handedly for ourselves, is an absurdity.

Raphael Samuel and I were undergraduates together at Balliol in the early Fifties. Bibliographically omnivorous, buried under piles of notes and unfinished essays, inkstained and dishevelled, he exuded intellectual intensity and passionate left-wing commitment. I remember his appearing at breakfast one morning, tearful and wearing a black tie. Asked what the matter was, he burst out, weeping: ‘Uncle Joe is dead!’ In his new book he tells us that he was brought up in a ‘bookish, religiously Communist family’ and that there was a bust of J.V. Stalin on the kitchen mantelpiece. He was certainly bookish, for I remember browsing on the shelves of his college room and picking up a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, a set book for our History prelims, only to find in it the daunting inscription: ‘To Raphael on his eighth birthday.’

The stately home is England’s most characteristic contribution to international tourism. Many countries have old houses which are open to the public. But neither the châteaux of the Loire nor the Palladian villas of the Brenta nor the antebellum homes of Natchez can offer the spectacle of an ancient house, set in its own gardens and park, surrounded by its agricultural estates, crammed with furniture, books and paintings from the past and, best of all, still occupied by a descendant of the family which built it. It is this irresistible combination of architectural distinction, aesthetic display and genealogical continuity which has made the English country house so crucial a national icon.

On Guy Fawkes Day 1665, Samuel Pepys paid a visit to John Evelyn, his fellow diarist, administrative colleague and lifelong friend. Evelyn had an astonishing range of interests, from numismatics to town planning. He also possessed the leisure in which to pursue them, thanks to a family fortune founded on manufacturing gunpowder for Elizabeth I. He had spent most of the Civil War period and...

Newton used to turn down the corners of the pages of his books so that they pointed to the exact passage he wished to recall. J.H. Plumb once showed me a set of Swift’s works given him by G.M. Trevelyan; it had originally belonged to Macaulay, who had drawn a line all the way down the margin of every page as he read it, no doubt committing the whole to memory. The pencilled dots in the margin of many books in the Codrington Library at All Souls are certain evidence that A.L. Rowse was there before you. My old tutor, Christopher Hill, used to pencil on the back endpaper of his books a list of the pages and topics which had caught his attention. He rubbed out his notes if he sold the book, but not always very thoroughly, so one can usually recognise a volume which belonged to him.