What is the place of History in English National Life today, and do historians have a public role in the future?

During the last century or so there has developed a new ‘public role’ for history: the past as personal history, a vital element in the nourishing of people in society. During the past decades a new perception of what history is has manifested itself on two levels: first a shift of focus from the political to the personal in the subjects historians write about; secondly, the way in which an avid public has appropriated what a contemporary journalist, Boyd Tonkins, calls ‘the most nourishing diet of all – history’...