What makes a good historian? A new book, Journeys of the Mind, by one of the best of the past 50 years, Peter Brown, promises some answers.
Brown is the pioneer of a whole way of looking at a historical period, ‘late antiquity’, between the fall of Rome and the beginning of the Middle Ages. It includes the rise of two great religions, Christianity and Islam.
When he began his studies, back in the 1950s, Brown tells us, there wasn’t even an accepted name for
