INTERVIEW / HELEN CARR & SUZANNAH LIPSCOMB
“I hope we can make people feel that history is more generous and expansive than they had realised”
ON THE History Extra PODCAST
Matt Elton Your new book is entitled What Is History, Now? What does it set out to do?
Helen Carr It manifests the realisation that 2021 is the 60th anniversary of the What Is History? lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge by my great-grandfather, EH Carr. Those lectures were then published in a book that has become very well known among students of history, because its main point – that history is interpretation – was really ground-breaking and, in some ways, quite an antagonistic perspective at the time.
I felt that the anniversary provided a good opportunity to give the book a reappraisal – and this was before the momentous events of 2020, including the tragic death of George Floyd and the toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol, which sparked so much conversation about history. I felt it was a very timely moment to revisit some key questions. What is history? Who does it belong to? How can we talk about it and tell it? And what are the ways in which people get into history?
Other books have revisited EH Carr’s work since it came out. David Cannadine edited an excellent one entitled (without a comma!) in 2002, for instance. But our book
