Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past

Making History is a lengthy biographic review of noted historians, from Herodotus to the present, organized around the ideas of “what makes for good history?” and “who is empowered to write it?” Cohen is a senior figure in the British community of letters, an editor and publisher since the early 70s who’s worked with almost every significant literary and historical author since then, and he’s also served as public intellectual giving lectures and writing newspaper articles.

This perspective carries through the book, for both good and ill. History is primarily about storytelling, about engaging the imaginative and emotional faculties of readers to make the past come alive. Of course, fidelity to the truth and hard work in the archives and organizing primary sources is important, but the argument of this book is that it’s better to be engaging and a little wrong (even knowingly wrong, sometimes history requires mythmaking) than it is to be boring.

Some of the word portraits are quite engaging. I didn’t know that Edward Gibbon was tiny (4’ 8”), with a shock of ginger hair and a notably bulbous and ugly face. The way that different societies have seen the past, and the flourishing of history since the Enlightenment, it is quite a story. And yet there are gaps. A whole chapter on the sprawling and bitter conflict between British historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and A.J.P. Taylor left me unclear about what the conflict was about. There are chapters on women and Black historians, though shoved in at the back in the same way that these types of history are often secondary concerns.

I will say that this book was good enough to make me get the author’s By The Sword, a history of that weapon and the people who used it, but I also feel at loose ends.