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A History of Histories
A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century.
- GenresHistory
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Published January 29, 2009
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December 1, 2025
History is a funny old bugger and it always will be, because it is everything and nothing. It’s an arty science and a science art. There’s 1,000 ways to do it and once you’ve studied every single one, someone will develop the 1,001th.
We need to stop overthinking things and just do what we can to understand what the hell is going on as best we can, with an open and enquiring mind.
It will never be a perfect understanding because, newsflash, history is done by people about people. You will never perfectly understand anyone, ever, let alone Richard Ancientman, who is so alien in thought and belief system to you that if he smelled a Dorito he would die and if he saw an AI video he would kill himself on the spot.
Burrow is keenly aware of all this nuance and he reminds the reader often, in case they’re not.
His own practice of the science-art (scart?) of history extends to a couple of interesting choices:
There is no chapter of notes or footnotes. Everything Burrow has to say, therefore, is in the (quite long) text itself. I don’t mind that, but it might be a little dense for the average reader (who wouldn’t pick up a historiography book in the first place to be fair).
There is no conclusion. Burrow says there can be no conclusion due to the ongoing nature of the writing of history. I say, you could have tried, John.
The bibliography is pretty slim and select given the topic. However it is good and covers the heavy hitters.
Very importantly for this kind of wide-ranging and analytic book, Burrow is cogent of his limits and intentions and spells them out clearly. He’s limited to European texts, outside of a few minor references such as to Ancient Egyptian records. He’s chosen a specific starting and stopping point in time, and for the ease of structure he’s grouping works together to cover in themed chapters in a somewhat chronological, somewhat whimsical way. He also makes clear the kind of texts he’s including or not including (autobiographies can do one). He’s not particularly interested in assessing the accuracy or, more accurately, the spectrum of accuracy on which a particular work sits.
He’s also transparently aware that in doing history about history, he is subject to the whims and fashions that influence his own approach. He tries not to get too bogged down, then, in a tit for tat ‘this is bad history’ vs ‘this is good history’. The approach is more to assess what the histories Burrow has selected feel like. What’s it like to study them? What’s the vibe? What can we say, and is it fun?
His chapters operate as a summary-cum-vibes-check, giving a little taster of the historian(s) in question’s biggest themes, foibles, and typology.
I think the intended method of consumption here is to dip in and out. Back to back it can get a bit tedious, especially if there are a few characters in a row that Burrow doesn’t seem to fussed about. My secondhand copy, for example, only had 4 sentences underlined, all in the same mid-book chapter. It feels like someone picked it up for the summary on one man, used it, and chucked it. Burrow probably wouldn’t have minded that, I don’t think, and there’s a sense that he intentionally made each chapter stand alone to encourage use in this way.
As an author, he clearly has favourites. The chapters on Thucydides, Tacitus, Machiavelli and his chums, and Hume and Gibbon are significantly longer than average, and because Burrow is mostly interested in explaining how he feels about things, that increased length is mostly because he is going into loving detail. That’s okay because, really, you should only be writing historiography if you’re a dangerously massive nerd for this shit. Having faves is to be expected, although more on that later as he does go a bit overboard.
Generally, though, Burrow is at his best when a little bit of that favouritism leaks through, as it occasionally leads to a very fun wry humour and tipping of the proverbial hat. Take, for example, his chapter on Gregory of Tours; it’s light and filled with the mischievous glee of a grandfather talking about the exploits of his favourite great-grandson.
Burrow’s best jokes betray something of an old-fashioned cadence and rhythm in his writing style. Something Oxbridgey. Something nineteenth century-ish.
He does, indeed, write like he’s trying to piss you off.
Long, long sentences with 18 clauses come thick and fast. I kind of like it because I’m a glutton for punishment, but it will absolutely be a barrier to entry for most, and I can’t even imagine what it would be like trying to consume this as an audiobook.
Something else that stuck out to me, though it doesn’t occur too often, is the presence of some strange claims scattered around.
I think there’s a couple of reasons for this.
Firstly, in order to keep some chapters brief (historiographical review of the bible in only 8 pages, fucking hell), Burrow presumes a fair amount of prior knowledge in the reader. This means he kind of has to charge through some things that might, in reality, be subjective or kind of need more breathing room as an idea.
Secondly, Burrow was, of course, a hugely important figure in the field of intellectual history when he was writing. His main area of expertise was the 17th-19th century, and I think you can tell he’s not necessarily a history expert in the other eras, more of an ‘expert on what people say about the history’ of that era.
So now you’re saying, what is a ‘strange claim’? I’ll give you some examples. At one point he states:
‘Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon have been preserved for us by the authority and popularity they early acquired, which ensured multiple copying and hence survival (though sometimes precarious) through the ensuing centuries. We can be reasonably sure that nothing of comparable quality has been lost – the ancient librarians showed good taste, in Alexandria and later in Byzantium…’
Even allowing for the fact that Burrow is specifically talking about historical works, here, it’s just a bit of an unnecessary claim. You could write dozens of books defending this thesis and still not quite prove it.
Burrow does correct note that copyists were concerned most of all with popularity – but popularity surely not now, nor ever, has correlated particularly well with ‘quality’. Not to mention the many places for works to become lost between the ancient copyists and now, regardless of relative quality.
I mentioned before that Burrow openly discusses limiting himself in terms of cultural works. In his own words:
‘No attempt has been made to deal with historiography outside the European cultural tradition (to which Egypt and Babylon are taken to contribute), notably Arabic and Chinese examples. Such exclusions are merely concessions to limitations of space, time and the author’s knowledge.’
This is a welcome transparency. Though he doesn’t go on to stress the point, it’s worth bearing in mind that this limitation at times extends into analysis, especially in those early chapters on topics he is not necessarily an expert on.
For example, you would be forgiven for believing, after completing the first quarter of the book, that the only ‘modern’ historians worth talking about are Gibbon, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Auerbach. Every comparative analysis, it seems, relates to one of them.
Another, related limitation during the early part of the book is that because Burrow is not interested in overarching analyses between chapters and isn’t an expert, he’s not really saying anything. An uneducated reader could learn one of the essays by rote and pass themselves off as erudite, while an educated reader will mostly find little new, little challenging, where most of the interest comes through someone else’s emotive response to well-known figures.
The lack of an overall framework means, for example, that Burrow does fairly well to occasionally note the Orientalist, racist, anti-Semitic, and otherwise European supremacist ideas in many of the works he surveys although he doesn’t go into much depth on this, which fits his M.O. He’s not attempting a critical review – just a review.
It’s not a criticism of his work, then, just something that I think the critical reader should be aware of going in, that there’s no detailed tracking of thought through any kind of critical interpretive methodology. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, although it does somewhat blunt the kinds of insights or analysis Burrow can get to grips with.
It bleeds through worse for me when it comes to cultural and comparative references. Burrow is very Bri’ish; who the hell else would reference the curriculum of public schoolboys that much? So there’s a kind of recurring image of this very old-fashioned writing style telling you, at length, about how Polybius makes him feel, that comes across as quite myopic.
If you treat this book as a jumping off point for further inquiry – which I think is Burrow’s intention – then this isn’t really a problem. Don’t like the writing style? Move on. Need just a summary of a work? Read on.
However, a complete lack of an underlying framework is not possible, of course. Everyone brings their own biases and assumptions, which shape the words they use, the stories they tell, and their feelings on it all. Burrow acknowledge this in his introduction and is aware of it in his analyses – usually, she says ominously.
Burrow’s biggest apparent bias comes out swinging as early as the second chapter, which is on Thucydides. Thucy is one of Burrow’s most favourite boys, and he goes into a lot of detail on the content and flavour of Thucy’s work. The detail, though, starts to derail a bit when a strange theme begins to emerge.
‘Almost all historians except the very dullest have some characteristic weakness: some complicity, idealisation, identification; some impulse to indignation, to right wrongs, to deliver a message. It is often the source of their most interesting writing. But Thucydides seems immune. Surely no more lucid, unillusioned intelligence has ever applied itself to the writing of history.’
Okay! So Burrow thinks Thucydides is the smartest boy who ever lived because he is the perfect centrist.
(Fucking hell btw. Just kiss already. I have my historical faves too but girl, if you wanna talk about most historians having a weakness due to identification or idealisation…)
For Burrow, Thucy is ‘diagnostic’ in his approach and his personal moderation is a theme returned to time and time again. ‘The opposite of moderation was fanaticism’ Burrow says, going on to draw really over the top parallels between factionalism in the ancient Peloponnese and. Um.
A red-scare view of communism?
I’ll quote the passage at length so it’s clear how much Burrow is projecting:
‘Thucydides’ depictions of the psychology of fanaticism among the Corcyreans … still resonate, and one is reminded of the – often hotly disputed – claim for a perennial human nature. The Corcyrean democrats, feeling themselves threatened, began a massacre of fellow citizens. According to Thucydides … “to fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings”: aggression became courage and moderation cowardice. “Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect.” To attempt to opt out of the plotting and counter-plotting was “disrupting the unity of the party”, and fervent party members felt confidence in each other as partners in crime. The one standard became the will of the party at any particular moment.’
This is so on the nose that it could basically be a passage from Animal Farm.
Burrow explicitly links Thucy’s ideas to modern political culture at the start and uses English terms which are certainly loaded versions of the Greek terms.
He’s relying on Warner’s translation (I think). Compare Warner’s/Burrow’s loaded translations versus the Greek and some other translations of what I think is the same passage:
…τής τε έταιριας διαλυτής (Thucydides 3.86.5
…disrupting the unity of the party (Warner/Burrow)
…to break up your party (Crawley)
…to be a dissolver of society (Hobbes, who Burrow cites elsewhere in this chapter)
‘Party’ is a bit of an old-fashioned word to use for the έταιριας (hetairias/hetaireia). In context a better translation is clique or conspiratorial group.
‘Disrupting the unity’ is also an extremely odd choice for διαλυτής (dialutes) – it’s really more like ‘the undoer’, ‘the one who breaks up the thing’. Burrow’s phrasing, not just when quoted Warner’s translation but in his commentary around the quotes seems quite purposely… Mao-ish.
Thucydides, meanwhile, is trying to get across a sense of the smallness of these destabilising groups. They were conspirators, they were a terror because cliques could destroy whole towns through personal power and charisma. Think how Thucydides characterises populists like Cleon, something Burrow’s notes at length. Thucy was very aware and very unhappy at how quickly rash decisions could be made by small numbers of highly motivated political agents. To try to draw parallels between this and a modern pseudo-communist police state is so weird.
Have you seen that video of Pitbull saying ‘smells like COMMUNISM?’ That’s just how I think all Americans and silent generation/boomer Brits are, tbh.
This wilfully ignorant phrasing combined with Burrow’s effusive praise of Thucy being ‘immune’ to the biases of other writers leads to an inevitable conclusion that Burrow is reading analytical, unparalleled intelligence in Thucydides because he’s attracted to the moderation in Thucydides’ position. He’s then mistaking this moderation for a symptom of pure intelligence. Worse – he’s equating it with intelligence.
The problem with this is twofold:
It’s doesn’t make you smarter to be a moderate.
Being a moderate doesn’t make you above, or outside of, ‘politics’ – it’s still a political position.
The first point is hopefully pretty self-explanatory. Equating intelligence with moderation is like when guys think they’ve won an argument because they made the other person start crying.
The second point should also be obvious. Thucydides is not ‘outside’ of the politics and an unbiased witness, because that’s not possible. It’s just that his bias is also Burrow’s, and so now Burrow wants to kiss him.
When a moderate shames someone for ‘making things political’ what they mean is wah wah I am a baby, ‘hey, I find change scary and you are talking about change so shut up.’
This is a political position.
So Burrow’s dewey eyed panegyric for Thucydides comes off as a bit weird and very political, in fact. It is the single biggest display of overt politicism and bias in the whole book so it’s kind of a shame that it happens in such an earlier chapter.
If you’re able to rise above, scoff, and move on, or maybe if you don’t hate mealy-mouthed conservatism as much as I do, it’s not too much of a blocker to getting something out of this book. It doesn’t come up in every chapter. After all, Burrow is trying to make sure he stands at a bit of a remove from each of his subjects and trying to be politically impartial – remember, he said historians showing idealisation etc is a weakness.
But there is an underlying conservatism that peeks out from behind the curtain most fully here, and reappears occasionally throughout; as when Burrow sprinkles in a few ‘barbarians’, ‘savage’, ‘troglodytes’, ‘advanced countries’ and even ‘Indian territory’ to describe the so-called ‘vast differences in characteristic forms of society’ in late 18th century Scotland.
It’s completely understandable if that would render your interest in Burrow’s opinions null and void. So if it’s going to piss you off to read so much from someone who evidently thinks ‘reason’ is like a special unlockable cooldown ability when you reach level 20 in Europeanism, don’t even try.
In the end, A History of Histories is best approached as an erudite, eccentric tour led by a deeply knowledgeable, queerly old-fashioned, and occasionally overexcited guide.
Burrow is at his strongest when he’s revelling in the historians he adores and at his most charming when he lets humour and affection slip through. His openness about the limits of his scope, his conscious avoidance of footnote-laden scholasticism, and his refusal to impose a grand theory make the book more accessible as a pocketbook guide: a companionable wander through 2,500 years of people trying to make sense of people from the past.
But the same qualities make its flaws hard to ignore. Burrow’s Eurocentrism, his public schoolboy sensibility, and his tendency to conflate moderation and a certain British politeness with intelligence give parts of the book a dated, conservative tang. His occasional analogies to communism feel jarringly anachronistic and his determination not to engage critical lenses sometimes collapses into simply reproducing the biases of his favourites.
Still, if you’re willing to take the tour on its own terms as a selective, personable, often charming overview rather than a rigorous interrogation there’s much here to enjoy, and even more to chase up afterwards.
Read my full review here: https://open.substack.com/pub/jesswal...
We need to stop overthinking things and just do what we can to understand what the hell is going on as best we can, with an open and enquiring mind.
It will never be a perfect understanding because, newsflash, history is done by people about people. You will never perfectly understand anyone, ever, let alone Richard Ancientman, who is so alien in thought and belief system to you that if he smelled a Dorito he would die and if he saw an AI video he would kill himself on the spot.
Burrow is keenly aware of all this nuance and he reminds the reader often, in case they’re not.
His own practice of the science-art (scart?) of history extends to a couple of interesting choices:
There is no chapter of notes or footnotes. Everything Burrow has to say, therefore, is in the (quite long) text itself. I don’t mind that, but it might be a little dense for the average reader (who wouldn’t pick up a historiography book in the first place to be fair).
There is no conclusion. Burrow says there can be no conclusion due to the ongoing nature of the writing of history. I say, you could have tried, John.
The bibliography is pretty slim and select given the topic. However it is good and covers the heavy hitters.
Very importantly for this kind of wide-ranging and analytic book, Burrow is cogent of his limits and intentions and spells them out clearly. He’s limited to European texts, outside of a few minor references such as to Ancient Egyptian records. He’s chosen a specific starting and stopping point in time, and for the ease of structure he’s grouping works together to cover in themed chapters in a somewhat chronological, somewhat whimsical way. He also makes clear the kind of texts he’s including or not including (autobiographies can do one). He’s not particularly interested in assessing the accuracy or, more accurately, the spectrum of accuracy on which a particular work sits.
He’s also transparently aware that in doing history about history, he is subject to the whims and fashions that influence his own approach. He tries not to get too bogged down, then, in a tit for tat ‘this is bad history’ vs ‘this is good history’. The approach is more to assess what the histories Burrow has selected feel like. What’s it like to study them? What’s the vibe? What can we say, and is it fun?
His chapters operate as a summary-cum-vibes-check, giving a little taster of the historian(s) in question’s biggest themes, foibles, and typology.
I think the intended method of consumption here is to dip in and out. Back to back it can get a bit tedious, especially if there are a few characters in a row that Burrow doesn’t seem to fussed about. My secondhand copy, for example, only had 4 sentences underlined, all in the same mid-book chapter. It feels like someone picked it up for the summary on one man, used it, and chucked it. Burrow probably wouldn’t have minded that, I don’t think, and there’s a sense that he intentionally made each chapter stand alone to encourage use in this way.
As an author, he clearly has favourites. The chapters on Thucydides, Tacitus, Machiavelli and his chums, and Hume and Gibbon are significantly longer than average, and because Burrow is mostly interested in explaining how he feels about things, that increased length is mostly because he is going into loving detail. That’s okay because, really, you should only be writing historiography if you’re a dangerously massive nerd for this shit. Having faves is to be expected, although more on that later as he does go a bit overboard.
Generally, though, Burrow is at his best when a little bit of that favouritism leaks through, as it occasionally leads to a very fun wry humour and tipping of the proverbial hat. Take, for example, his chapter on Gregory of Tours; it’s light and filled with the mischievous glee of a grandfather talking about the exploits of his favourite great-grandson.
Burrow’s best jokes betray something of an old-fashioned cadence and rhythm in his writing style. Something Oxbridgey. Something nineteenth century-ish.
He does, indeed, write like he’s trying to piss you off.
Long, long sentences with 18 clauses come thick and fast. I kind of like it because I’m a glutton for punishment, but it will absolutely be a barrier to entry for most, and I can’t even imagine what it would be like trying to consume this as an audiobook.
Something else that stuck out to me, though it doesn’t occur too often, is the presence of some strange claims scattered around.
I think there’s a couple of reasons for this.
Firstly, in order to keep some chapters brief (historiographical review of the bible in only 8 pages, fucking hell), Burrow presumes a fair amount of prior knowledge in the reader. This means he kind of has to charge through some things that might, in reality, be subjective or kind of need more breathing room as an idea.
Secondly, Burrow was, of course, a hugely important figure in the field of intellectual history when he was writing. His main area of expertise was the 17th-19th century, and I think you can tell he’s not necessarily a history expert in the other eras, more of an ‘expert on what people say about the history’ of that era.
So now you’re saying, what is a ‘strange claim’? I’ll give you some examples. At one point he states:
‘Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon have been preserved for us by the authority and popularity they early acquired, which ensured multiple copying and hence survival (though sometimes precarious) through the ensuing centuries. We can be reasonably sure that nothing of comparable quality has been lost – the ancient librarians showed good taste, in Alexandria and later in Byzantium…’
Even allowing for the fact that Burrow is specifically talking about historical works, here, it’s just a bit of an unnecessary claim. You could write dozens of books defending this thesis and still not quite prove it.
Burrow does correct note that copyists were concerned most of all with popularity – but popularity surely not now, nor ever, has correlated particularly well with ‘quality’. Not to mention the many places for works to become lost between the ancient copyists and now, regardless of relative quality.
I mentioned before that Burrow openly discusses limiting himself in terms of cultural works. In his own words:
‘No attempt has been made to deal with historiography outside the European cultural tradition (to which Egypt and Babylon are taken to contribute), notably Arabic and Chinese examples. Such exclusions are merely concessions to limitations of space, time and the author’s knowledge.’
This is a welcome transparency. Though he doesn’t go on to stress the point, it’s worth bearing in mind that this limitation at times extends into analysis, especially in those early chapters on topics he is not necessarily an expert on.
For example, you would be forgiven for believing, after completing the first quarter of the book, that the only ‘modern’ historians worth talking about are Gibbon, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Auerbach. Every comparative analysis, it seems, relates to one of them.
Another, related limitation during the early part of the book is that because Burrow is not interested in overarching analyses between chapters and isn’t an expert, he’s not really saying anything. An uneducated reader could learn one of the essays by rote and pass themselves off as erudite, while an educated reader will mostly find little new, little challenging, where most of the interest comes through someone else’s emotive response to well-known figures.
The lack of an overall framework means, for example, that Burrow does fairly well to occasionally note the Orientalist, racist, anti-Semitic, and otherwise European supremacist ideas in many of the works he surveys although he doesn’t go into much depth on this, which fits his M.O. He’s not attempting a critical review – just a review.
It’s not a criticism of his work, then, just something that I think the critical reader should be aware of going in, that there’s no detailed tracking of thought through any kind of critical interpretive methodology. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, although it does somewhat blunt the kinds of insights or analysis Burrow can get to grips with.
It bleeds through worse for me when it comes to cultural and comparative references. Burrow is very Bri’ish; who the hell else would reference the curriculum of public schoolboys that much? So there’s a kind of recurring image of this very old-fashioned writing style telling you, at length, about how Polybius makes him feel, that comes across as quite myopic.
If you treat this book as a jumping off point for further inquiry – which I think is Burrow’s intention – then this isn’t really a problem. Don’t like the writing style? Move on. Need just a summary of a work? Read on.
However, a complete lack of an underlying framework is not possible, of course. Everyone brings their own biases and assumptions, which shape the words they use, the stories they tell, and their feelings on it all. Burrow acknowledge this in his introduction and is aware of it in his analyses – usually, she says ominously.
Burrow’s biggest apparent bias comes out swinging as early as the second chapter, which is on Thucydides. Thucy is one of Burrow’s most favourite boys, and he goes into a lot of detail on the content and flavour of Thucy’s work. The detail, though, starts to derail a bit when a strange theme begins to emerge.
‘Almost all historians except the very dullest have some characteristic weakness: some complicity, idealisation, identification; some impulse to indignation, to right wrongs, to deliver a message. It is often the source of their most interesting writing. But Thucydides seems immune. Surely no more lucid, unillusioned intelligence has ever applied itself to the writing of history.’
Okay! So Burrow thinks Thucydides is the smartest boy who ever lived because he is the perfect centrist.
(Fucking hell btw. Just kiss already. I have my historical faves too but girl, if you wanna talk about most historians having a weakness due to identification or idealisation…)
For Burrow, Thucy is ‘diagnostic’ in his approach and his personal moderation is a theme returned to time and time again. ‘The opposite of moderation was fanaticism’ Burrow says, going on to draw really over the top parallels between factionalism in the ancient Peloponnese and. Um.
A red-scare view of communism?
I’ll quote the passage at length so it’s clear how much Burrow is projecting:
‘Thucydides’ depictions of the psychology of fanaticism among the Corcyreans … still resonate, and one is reminded of the – often hotly disputed – claim for a perennial human nature. The Corcyrean democrats, feeling themselves threatened, began a massacre of fellow citizens. According to Thucydides … “to fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings”: aggression became courage and moderation cowardice. “Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect.” To attempt to opt out of the plotting and counter-plotting was “disrupting the unity of the party”, and fervent party members felt confidence in each other as partners in crime. The one standard became the will of the party at any particular moment.’
This is so on the nose that it could basically be a passage from Animal Farm.
Burrow explicitly links Thucy’s ideas to modern political culture at the start and uses English terms which are certainly loaded versions of the Greek terms.
He’s relying on Warner’s translation (I think). Compare Warner’s/Burrow’s loaded translations versus the Greek and some other translations of what I think is the same passage:
…τής τε έταιριας διαλυτής (Thucydides 3.86.5
…disrupting the unity of the party (Warner/Burrow)
…to break up your party (Crawley)
…to be a dissolver of society (Hobbes, who Burrow cites elsewhere in this chapter)
‘Party’ is a bit of an old-fashioned word to use for the έταιριας (hetairias/hetaireia). In context a better translation is clique or conspiratorial group.
‘Disrupting the unity’ is also an extremely odd choice for διαλυτής (dialutes) – it’s really more like ‘the undoer’, ‘the one who breaks up the thing’. Burrow’s phrasing, not just when quoted Warner’s translation but in his commentary around the quotes seems quite purposely… Mao-ish.
Thucydides, meanwhile, is trying to get across a sense of the smallness of these destabilising groups. They were conspirators, they were a terror because cliques could destroy whole towns through personal power and charisma. Think how Thucydides characterises populists like Cleon, something Burrow’s notes at length. Thucy was very aware and very unhappy at how quickly rash decisions could be made by small numbers of highly motivated political agents. To try to draw parallels between this and a modern pseudo-communist police state is so weird.
Have you seen that video of Pitbull saying ‘smells like COMMUNISM?’ That’s just how I think all Americans and silent generation/boomer Brits are, tbh.
This wilfully ignorant phrasing combined with Burrow’s effusive praise of Thucy being ‘immune’ to the biases of other writers leads to an inevitable conclusion that Burrow is reading analytical, unparalleled intelligence in Thucydides because he’s attracted to the moderation in Thucydides’ position. He’s then mistaking this moderation for a symptom of pure intelligence. Worse – he’s equating it with intelligence.
The problem with this is twofold:
It’s doesn’t make you smarter to be a moderate.
Being a moderate doesn’t make you above, or outside of, ‘politics’ – it’s still a political position.
The first point is hopefully pretty self-explanatory. Equating intelligence with moderation is like when guys think they’ve won an argument because they made the other person start crying.
The second point should also be obvious. Thucydides is not ‘outside’ of the politics and an unbiased witness, because that’s not possible. It’s just that his bias is also Burrow’s, and so now Burrow wants to kiss him.
When a moderate shames someone for ‘making things political’ what they mean is wah wah I am a baby, ‘hey, I find change scary and you are talking about change so shut up.’
This is a political position.
So Burrow’s dewey eyed panegyric for Thucydides comes off as a bit weird and very political, in fact. It is the single biggest display of overt politicism and bias in the whole book so it’s kind of a shame that it happens in such an earlier chapter.
If you’re able to rise above, scoff, and move on, or maybe if you don’t hate mealy-mouthed conservatism as much as I do, it’s not too much of a blocker to getting something out of this book. It doesn’t come up in every chapter. After all, Burrow is trying to make sure he stands at a bit of a remove from each of his subjects and trying to be politically impartial – remember, he said historians showing idealisation etc is a weakness.
But there is an underlying conservatism that peeks out from behind the curtain most fully here, and reappears occasionally throughout; as when Burrow sprinkles in a few ‘barbarians’, ‘savage’, ‘troglodytes’, ‘advanced countries’ and even ‘Indian territory’ to describe the so-called ‘vast differences in characteristic forms of society’ in late 18th century Scotland.
It’s completely understandable if that would render your interest in Burrow’s opinions null and void. So if it’s going to piss you off to read so much from someone who evidently thinks ‘reason’ is like a special unlockable cooldown ability when you reach level 20 in Europeanism, don’t even try.
In the end, A History of Histories is best approached as an erudite, eccentric tour led by a deeply knowledgeable, queerly old-fashioned, and occasionally overexcited guide.
Burrow is at his strongest when he’s revelling in the historians he adores and at his most charming when he lets humour and affection slip through. His openness about the limits of his scope, his conscious avoidance of footnote-laden scholasticism, and his refusal to impose a grand theory make the book more accessible as a pocketbook guide: a companionable wander through 2,500 years of people trying to make sense of people from the past.
But the same qualities make its flaws hard to ignore. Burrow’s Eurocentrism, his public schoolboy sensibility, and his tendency to conflate moderation and a certain British politeness with intelligence give parts of the book a dated, conservative tang. His occasional analogies to communism feel jarringly anachronistic and his determination not to engage critical lenses sometimes collapses into simply reproducing the biases of his favourites.
Still, if you’re willing to take the tour on its own terms as a selective, personable, often charming overview rather than a rigorous interrogation there’s much here to enjoy, and even more to chase up afterwards.
Read my full review here: https://open.substack.com/pub/jesswal...
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