The rules of history
Making History: the storytellers who shaped the past
Richard Cohen (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25)
EDWARD GIBBON, whose account of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is one of the most celebrated of all historical works, reflected in an unpublished manuscript: ‘Every man of genius who writes history infuses into it, perhaps unconsciously, the character of his own spirit. His characters, despite their extensive variety of passion and situation, seem to have only one manner of thinking and feeling, and that is the manner of the author’. Here, Richard Cohen demonstrates how Gibbon’s own Christian experience and antipathy to religious fanaticism persuaded him to ascribe the demise of Rome in part to the propagation of the gospel.
Where the genius of Vladimir Putin resides is open to question, but had the Russian president written his now infamous a little earlier, Mr Cohen would almost certainly have included it in his magisterial and wide-ranging examination of the way that historians and other significant witnesses distort through their own prejudices what have become the records of human experience.
