When Historians Start Prating

There is a particular style of historical writing and lecturing which irritates me disproportionately. It is not history itself that bothers me; on the contrary, I find the attempt to understand the past endlessly fascinating, which is why I watch a good deal of historical “documentaries” and avidly read both historical nonfiction and fiction.

What irritates me is a certain manner of presenting it, particularly among modern historians addressing a general audience who feel obliged not merely to recount what happened but to perform history. Their language becomes mannered, portentous and self-consciously authoritative, as though the ordinary business of establishing what happened, when it happened and how we know it happened were insufficiently impressive in themselves.

The most conspicuous example is the relentless use of the historical present: the habit of describing events which occurred centuries ago as though they were taking place before us. Instead of saying, “William invaded England in 1066 and defeated Harold at Hastings”, the historian must have it, “William invades England and defeats Harold at Hastings.” The usual justification is that the historical present lends immediacy and vividness to the narrative. Perhaps, in moderation, it can. A carefully-chosen transition into the historical present can sometimes give a particular episode additional dramatic force. But when the device becomes the habitual tense of an entire narrative, I find it not so much vivid as unbearably affected. There is something ostentatiously theatrical about the practice.

The past tense performs a vital intellectual function. It places events within a temporal framework. When I read, “Henry returned to London, met the king and subsequently travelled to France”, the grammar itself assists me in understanding that these are completed events belonging to a past sequence. Once the prose becomes, “Henry returns to London, meets the king and then travels to France”, that useful distinction has disappeared. I can of course infer from the context that Henry is not literally doing these things now, but I am required to maintain that distinction for myself.

That becomes increasingly tiresome when dates and other explicit temporal markers cease to appear. The longer the narrative continues in the historical present, the more the reader is obliged to reconstruct chronology from context, memory and occasional hints. The grammatical tense, which in ordinary historical prose would continually remind us that we are dealing with completed events, has been deliberately stripped of that function. There is nothing inherently wrong with making the reader think, but there seems little virtue in making him or her perform a piece of temporal decoding which the magnificent English language already provides the means to avoid.

The problem becomes particularly acute when the historian wants to discuss the actual present while still narrating the historical past in the present tense. We are told that William invades, Harold marches, the armies meet and Harold dies. Then, suddenly, the historian wishes to tell us what the site of the battle is like today, or how modern historians interpret the event, or what the political consequences are in the present day. The writer must then somehow distinguish between two different senses of the present: the historical present, which refers to a long-dead past, and the ordinary present, which actually refers to now.

Thus we get formulations along the lines of: “William invades England and Harold marches south to meet him. The battle takes place at Hastings. Today, the site is…” The reader understands perfectly well what is intended, but the grammatical absurdity is difficult to ignore. The word is has been doing two entirely different jobs within the same narrative frame: it has been used to describe events in 1066 and then, without any change of tense, to describe something existing in 2026.

The same difficulty arises when the historian moves between different historical periods. A narrative may begin with the Norman Conquest, proceed through the twelfth century, make comparisons with the seventeenth century, and finally draw some conclusion about modern Britain, all while maintaining the present tense. The result is a prose landscape containing several different “presents”, none of which is actually the present. Dates and contextual clues must continually tell us which present we are supposed to be imagining.

This strikes me as an unnecessarily elaborate arrangement. The ordinary distinction between was and is, happened and happens, already gives us an elegant grammatical means of distinguishing the historical past from the contemporary world. Yet the historical-present style voluntarily relinquishes that distinction and then has to compensate for its absence with dates, adverbs, explanatory qualifications and occasional excursions back into the ordinary past tense. The historian can consequently find himself having to climb in and out of his or her own narrative tense in order to prevent the reader becoming confused.

There is a further irritation when the historian has to return explicitly to the “true” present after having spent considerable time persuading us to inhabit a fictional grammatical present in the past. The prose can begin to sound as though the historian is constantly reminding us which temporal universe we are currently supposed to occupy.

I suspect that part of my irritation arises from the fact that the historical present can seem to embody a particular kind of literary pretension. The historian appears to be saying, implicitly, Look how immediate this is; look how vividly I can bring the past to life. But the past does not need to be made grammatically present in order to be interesting. Indeed, there is something rather more powerful in allowing the past to remain past. The fact that these people are dead, that their circumstances have vanished and that their actions can now only be reconstructed from surviving evidence is itself part of what makes history interesting.

This brings me to another habit which I find equally irritating: the tone of absolute authority adopted by historians who are essentially transmitting information from secondary sources. There is nothing objectionable, by the way, about using secondary scholarship. Obviously historians must read the work of other historians, and much of what any educated person knows about the past will necessarily come through a chain of secondary and tertiary sources. My objection is to the transformation of this accumulated information into a performance of personal authority.

A historian may announce that Elizabeth II was born in 1926 and died in 2022 with the solemn assurance of someone unveiling a significant scholarly discovery. Yet there is a distinction between possessing information and demonstrating historical expertise. Almost anyone can establish the dates of Elizabeth II's birth and most of us know when she died. One can consult an encyclopaedia, a reference book or any number of readily-available sources and obtain the answer almost immediately. The interesting historical question is not necessarily whether the monarch was born in 1926; it is how historical knowledge is established, what evidence survives, what conclusions can legitimately be drawn from it, and where uncertainty begins.

This distinction becomes much more important as one moves further back in time. Tell me that a mediaeval king was born on a particular date and I may reasonably ask how that date is known. Is there a contemporary record? A later chronicle? An inscription? A genealogical tradition? Do the sources agree? How close are they to the events they describe? What interests or assumptions shaped their accounts? Do modern historians dispute the conventional interpretation? These questions seem to me considerably more interesting than the bare assertion of the resulting “fact”.

There is something peculiarly unsatisfactory about these tv historians who have effectively become animated encyclopaedias while retaining the tone of an authority who has personally recovered the truth from the ruins of the past. The information may be perfectly accurate, but the manner of its presentation can conceal the considerable distinction between evidence, inference, established interpretation and mere repetition of a conventional account.

The problem, therefore, is not that historians use secondary sources - which are indispensable. Nor is it that historians occasionally employ the historical present. Both are perfectly legitimate. What irritates me is the combination of the two with an excessive certainty of tone: the historian recounts inherited interpretations in the present tense, strips away the temporal distinctions that ordinary prose supplies, and then presents the resulting narrative with an authority which can give the impression that the historian possesses some privileged access to the past.

But no historian has access to the absolute reality of the past itself. What survives are traces: documents, buildings, objects, inscriptions, accounts, records, letters, archaeological remains and traditions, all of which have to be interpreted. Even where the underlying facts are beyond reasonable dispute, our knowledge of them still has a history of its own. A responsible historian ought therefore to be capable of distinguishing between what is directly attested, what is inferred, what is widely accepted, what is disputed, what is merely plausible - and what is being revalued or reinterpreted through the prism of the present.

Tell me what is believed to have happened, when it happened, what evidence allows us to say that it happened, and tell me where the evidence becomes uncertain. If there are competing interpretations, explain them. If something is merely conventional wisdom, distinguish it from something established by unusually strong evidence. Above all, allow the language to reflect the chronology rather than requiring the reader or watcher to disentangle it. The historian's task is to make that evidence intelligible, not to pretend that the past is occurring before us.