← How I Write
How I Write
Diarmaid MacCulloch: Oxford Professor Breaks Down His Writing Process | How I Write
00:45:38
Loading summary
Transcript66 lines
- [00:00]
A
Dermaid McCulloch is an author, a professor at Oxford. And the guy is just obsessed with history, like a real, real expert who's been studying it for decades. So we talked about how do you do history? What is, what is the role of a historian in society? And then also, how do you take everything that you learn in the research phase, take all of that and then turn it into clear, vivid and entertaining writing? What is the role of a historian? One of the things I've picked up from your work is that they almost guard the morals of our society. Is that a fair way to put it?
- [00:40]
B
That's exactly right. It's right at the heart of what I do. I've said my father was a country parson, a Church of England rector, and truth mattered a lot to him. And that was the things he, without making it a big point, passionately impressed on me. He was a man committed to truth in a peculiarly privileged position because the Church of England in those days had a curious thing for its clergy or its parish clergy called parsons freehold. What's that? Parson's freehold is the fact you cannot.
- [01:17]
A
Be sacked unless it's like tenure.
- [01:20]
B
It's exactly tenure. In a parish. You cannot be sacked or could not be sacked unless you denied the Trinity or ran off with the organist's wife or the organist's husband. But apart from that, you could say what you wished. And I admired that in my dad tremendously. He had no money, lived in this ridiculous huge house which we couldn't afford to heat. But he had freedom to speak. And that's what I've carried forward into my historian's world. I have freedom to speak, and that is the essential gift of sanity. And I wish to spread that sanity to my readers who are constantly assailed by lies, particularly by the powerful. And history is there as a defense against lies. The person who is taken over by lies is no longer sane. So I'm defending the human race against madness. And I look at present day societies and I see societies constructed on lies. And those lies are pernicious. I've seen societies across the Atlantic from here, demote holidays, national holidays, because they offend against a racist white supremacist narrative. Martin Luther King demoted as a day King day. And that must be stopped. Tampering with museum labeling in order to create a sanitized narrative. That's a wicked thing to do. And it's also an insane thing to do. So the historian is the guardian of sanity in society. There are other important disciplines which human beings pursue at university level or whatever. In this country, we label them as STEM subjects, which is science, technology, mathematics, medicine. Well, all of which are good things, and they can help you get to the moon, they can help you cure cancer, but they do not make you a good person, a sane person, a balanced person. They do not instill morality in you. That is the job of the humanities, principally history, but alongside it, philosophy, literature, all of which help you see that you're one human being among a vast array of human beings whose opinions need listening to, whose interests need defending, particularly if they're weak. Those are the things that historians can encourage you to do and show you a story which makes that essential.
- [04:09]
A
If you're with a budding historian comes to you and says, hey, what are the core principles? I want to do what you do? What are the core principles that I need to follow as I try to navigate this world of history? What do you tell me?
- [04:23]
B
Be skeptical and then be sympathetic, and the skepticism stops you being too sympathetic. After all, all of us have agendas, and some of them are good agendas, and some of them are bad. And only gradually can you see which is which. So always listen to a statement with a certain skepticism. Why is this person saying this lie to me? But also the fact that they are basically interesting because they are human beings. And maybe they may be particularly interesting because of who they are, what they're doing, what they've done.
- [05:07]
A
Hmm. Well, with that second point, it seems like then, like how much of the history and scholarship that you've done is looking at the original text versus saying, who is this coming from? I need to know who the writers are. Think of the American Constitution. I need to know about Adams and Jefferson and Washington and all those sorts of people, because their life stories are intrinsic to the content itself.
- [05:30]
B
Oh, sure, history is about human beings. Human beings create structures, and that has a history in itself, but at the center are fallible human beings. So all the time you're looking at people in the context of events which they usually don't control, even if they think they do. So that applies to any period. It's easier in the present in one sense, because you've got so many perspectives in so many different ways on the person you're looking at. You've got personal memories which you might tap into, but if you go back centuries, you're still getting the echo of that process. You are looking for that balance between the structure you can understand and the person at the center of it.
- [06:23]
A
So what are your weeks like? I guess I have this Idea that you're sitting in a library in Oxford in dim light canvas. You're there with a cup of coffee and you do that for like 14 hours a day till your back hurts. And then you just walk back and go to sleep and maybe have a conversation or two about what's going on. Like, what is the actual work of being a historian?
- [06:45]
B
Well, you present a slightly frightening picture of it. I like having a routine. Not everyone does. I'm a tidy person and my schedule I'm writing is a fairly tidy one. It doesn't start before half past eight and it never goes on beyond seven at night. I have never worked in the evenings. I can work between those two outer limits. And there must always be some sleep in the middle of them as well.
- [07:16]
A
Oh, you're a napper.
- [07:17]
B
I'm a napper, yes. Absolutely unashamed. Since my twenties. This is not an old person thing.
- [07:22]
A
I'm the same way.
- [07:23]
B
Good.
- [07:23]
A
I nap almost every day. It's actually 11:20 in the morning right now. I've already had a nap today.
- [07:30]
B
Aha, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But within that I'm pretty systematic and a bit ruthless. Morning is my best time, half eight onwards till lunchtime. And there must be a lunchtime break. So that's quite a substantial slab of the day. And then another substantial slab from mid afternoon till 7 and that's enough. My old doctoral supervisor was a workaholic, Sir Geoffrey Elton. But he did say to me, divide your day into three and work for two of those thirds and do not work in the other one. And thank goodness for Sir Geoffrey's advice. It stops you feeling guilty. You simply cannot work well if you just work nonstop.
- [08:17]
A
You sort of shared some sequencing earlier, which was reading the secondary sources and then going back to the primary sources. So it seems like what would be good about that is you have a general sense of this is what people have said. Okay, now let me go investigate for myself. With that, would you say skepticism and.
- [08:37]
B
Well, with the sense that probably what the conventional story is set out to be is not entirely the truth. So in fact, what I did for two major biographies which I've written, first Thomas Cranmer and then Thomas Cromwell, was to go back to the classic sources on my period, the English Reformation as it was then. And I would look at the great 17th century writers on that period, on the century before the 16th century. So in that case it's Bishop Burnet on the Reformation or John Stripe names which don't mean much to people now, but they were the first People to synthesize all this. They looked at the original sources available to them. So get what Streip and Burnett said. And then it stops you reinventing the wheel because you see how people in the 17th century thought about the 16th, the readers of Burnet, the readers of Strype. And that's. It's quite a comforting task because these are very monumental works. Burnett's work runs into eight volumes in its early Victorian edition. Stripe, similarly, he wrote endless books. So read them, get the cliches in your mind. Do not be, shall we say, dominated by the cliches, but know what they are.
- [10:05]
A
Sure, sure.
- [10:05]
B
And then you can go back to the original sources and look for yourself.
- [10:11]
A
How about in terms of modes of inquiry? Like it seems to me like we live in a time of reason is highly valued. The spiritual, the things that are a little bit harder to quantify are valued less. There's great focus on efficiency. If you look at the publishing world with nonfiction, it very much homogenizes writers. It sort of rewards a certain kind of nonfiction writing at the expense of other kinds of nonfiction writing. How do you think future generations will look back at historians now in that world?
- [10:46]
B
I hope that they will say we did our best. And I'm a certain cautious optimism about that because one of the duties I've laid upon myself is to be one of the judges of the Wolfson History Prize.
- [10:59]
A
Yeah, I want to hear about that.
- [11:00]
B
Well, this is a prize which rewards good historians in this country, the United Kingdom, writing about anything in history. And the criterion is that this is fine history, it is beautifully written, it is therefore inspiring and exciting. But it must be available for a popular audience. So we look at our pile of perhaps 180 books each year and instantly you can say that is too technical. That is written for other academics. It won't appeal to historians. But the best are really pushing the frontiers of history. And every year we find in the Wilson Prize judges pool, we get to a set of six books which are challenging the way history is done. For instance, last year we looked books on slavery. We had rather quite a lot of them actually. And each of them were challenging the narrative of complacency in Western history. And simply by providing a story based on data, we're saying to the readership, look, actually this was a story of naked greed and profit. Whatever the governing class of a slaveholding culture was saying, whatever noises they made about free speech and liberty. Underneath it was this disgusting human traffic, making human beings into work animals.
- [12:33]
A
You were talking about when you were talking about the prize, the first thing you said was beautifully written. What are the mechanics of beautiful writing? Is it great storytelling? Is it the purple prose type thing? Like what are. What is going on there? When you said that is beautifully written, what are the things that you're looking for?
- [12:51]
B
I'm not sure, frankly. Purple prose is definitely a downer. Any prose which is purple is not appropriate. Right. Something which shows that the historian writer can sympathize with another human being and illuminate them for a third person. That's very difficult to define. I like it if it makes me smile. I suspect it if it makes me laugh. But a sentence which can make me smile two or three times and still subsequently make me think, that's clever and illuminating. That's good prose. I wouldn't say purple prose. And there is something about leaden prose which it's easy to recognize too. Leaden prose, that which is cliche written, which is unimaginative and. Well, frankly a lot of historians write like that. And if they're writing about the provision of water supply in 19th century Wigan, that is fine. That's not the sort of book which is likely to win the Wolfson Prize, but I don't despise it. It's the sort of book which can feed in to the wider conversation about history and its period and perhaps other periods too. So horses for courses. Great writing in history is not what all historians ought to do.
- [14:26]
A
Do you think that there's history books that are uniquely privileged in the canon because they're beautifully written, but actually get a lot of things wrong?
- [14:37]
B
Yes, there undoubtedly are. Winston Churchill, for instance, who is perhaps an amateur historian, but a beautiful crafter of prose, wrote a history of the Second World War which is patently well distorted because it makes him into one of the essential players, which in a sense he was. But yes, there is history, which is deceiving, usually because of what it leaves out. So it's always possible to write beguiling history, which is terribly misleading. And the historian's motto really ought to be yes, but. Yes, but is the meta. It's the ideal framework to look at the past. Yes, I do see that. But actually I also see this. And that balances the story and also stops me idealizing the past, making a standard, a glorious standard at which I judge the present is the best way of presenting a story. It's not as simple and at first sight it may not be so satisfying. But the satisfying part of it is it is true. It is more true than the simplifying versions the heroic versions of the past.
- [16:09]
A
When I think of historians, I think of nonfiction writers who are giving me facts and stories and anecdotes about a certain moment in time. But, for example, I just watched a movie called Train Dreams. And Train Dreams takes place in basically the 1930s. It's about the logging culture of Northwest America. It follows this one man. It's obviously a fictional story, but the writers, they did a bunch of research. They went to Idaho and Washington where these trees were being cut down. And I was thinking to myself, I'm like, do I get a better sense of what it would have been like to be a logger in the 1920s from reading a book about logging, the 1920s and approaching it very directly, or watching a movie like this and sort of approaching it from the side, and I'm not sure. And all this is to say that it seems like history in the way that I defined it. Nonfiction facts, stories, anecdotes is one way of understanding the past. But then there's also, there's the myths, there's the fictions, there's music, and there's all sorts of less direct ways that we can understand the past. And all this is to say, as you try to understand a specific time period, how much are you looking at.
- [17:29]
B
The.
- [17:30]
A
Attacking it very directly versus kind of from the side?
- [17:34]
B
My problem, if I take my specialism, the Tudor period, the 16th century, is that we only have part of the story ever now, surviving. Those primary sources are partial, they are fragments, and therefore are things that I can never say in my narrative. I must, when I come to such a place, the evidence missing. I can say, we may think that it is quite likely the overwhelming sense of what this is, is degrees of confidence. Yes. I then contrast that. Say, if I was writing about Thomas Cromwell with Hilary Mantel, about whom I. With whom I spoke a lot. We were doing the same project, but she was a novelist, I was a historian. She was liberated from that. Because novelists never have to say, and it sounds odd if they do. They never have to say, may have. They can simply present the story and fill in the gaps. And it may well be that the filling in the gaps is technically wrong.
- [18:46]
A
Right.
- [18:47]
B
And there are lots of examples in Hillary's writing like that she created a romance in Amaz Antwerp for Cromwell to account for an illegitimate child who we know about. And that isn't right. It simply isn't right. On the other hand, she wanted to make the background of it right. So one of the things she did with the third part of her Trilogy, the Wolf hall trilogy, was to send me the typescript, or the, yeah, virtual equivalent of a TypeScript, the PDF, and say, well, can you look at this and have a look at the. The historicity of it? Can you point out the mistakes? Not the fictions, the mistakes.
- [19:34]
A
Right.
- [19:34]
B
And so that's what I did. I wrote her back saying, look, I'm not trying to change your story. All I'm saying is that actually it was not the abbot of St. Bartholomew's here. It was the prior of St. Bartholomew's you want to get that right, won't you? And, yes, she said, that's the sort of thing I did with that typescript. And that's the way a historian can help a novelist. But we need to recognize that this is not an entire crossover. We are next to each other in what we're doing. And in the case of Hilary Mantel, she was a novelist who, when she was writing about the past, wanted to get the past right. But that is not to say that she had stopped telling stories. So our two professions can be incredibly informative to each other. What she can do is to get inside the likely head of a leading character. Her picture of Thomas Cromwell seemed to me totally convincing. She would admit to me that there perhaps wasn't enough religion in the mind of the Thomas Cromwell she presented, but she knew that. But the character and his relations with other people were startlingly right. I read the first of her novels without knowing her, and I thought you. Thomas Cromwell is the Cromwell I know. And you have noticed the two most important things about your man in his brief public career. First is that he is besotted with Cardinal Wolsey, his first great employer. He adored Wolsey, and that meant that he detested Anne Bullen, another reformer like himself, and that the Protestant story told in the great historians of the past has made them allies because they're both Protestant reformers.
- [21:35]
A
Sure.
- [21:36]
B
And we forget that people can share an ideology while still detesting each other, because something may be more important, and in this case, it was the fact that Cromwell adored his old master and detested that old master because she blamed him for slowing up her marriage to the king. So that was really important. I'd spotted that. But Hillary nerved me to pursue it as I went on looking at the sources.
- [22:08]
A
Okay, so we're talking about how do you get your writing done? And if you're thinking about work and how you can be more productive there. Well, I recommend a tool called Basecamp. Basecamp is a project management tool, and it's different from the other ones, which are loud and noisy and cluttered. They have feature bloat. Basecamp says, no, no, no, no, no. We're going to keep things simple so that you can focus on what actually matters, which is just getting the work done, you know? Now, for us, Basecamp is a place where we can track what we're doing with how I write, when episodes are being recorded, where we're recording them, the publishing day, or all those sorts of things in one place for our entire team to look at. And I had the founder of Basecamp, Jason Fried, he came on the show, and I noticed that he really cares about writing. He cares about manifestos, he cares about great copy, he cares about telling a great story. And him and his co founder, they've written five books. And I can tell you that they bring the same care and attention to detail to their books as they do their software. So if you're thinking about work and you're asking, hey, how can I be more productive? How can I make my team more cohesive? Well, then I recommend Basecamp. All right, back to the episode. Tell me about sense of place, about how when you're writing about a city, a country, a region, and. Because what we're really talking about here in that last answer in this one is there's the facts on the page, and then there's the things that go beyond the facts that paint a more holistic picture of what's going on. Like, and so then, as you're writing, going places, traveling, how do you use that to inform the work that you're doing?
- [23:46]
B
I think that sense of place is hugely important to historian because then you begin to see the character you're looking at. I was terribly impressed by writing the. I was terribly impressed by reading the essays of Robert Caro about his first work on Commissioner Moses and then on lbj. And he says that the only way that he could understand LBJ was to go to Texas, go to Austin, live there for three years, appreciate the terrible loneliness and poverty of the situation. Well, that's perhaps an extreme example, but I grew up in rural East Anglia, the county of Suffolk. My father was a country parson, the rector of the parish in which we lived. He had a lovely, wonderful church to look after, which came from the. Well, a lot of it was 16th century, and that's really what inspired me to become a Tudor historian, because I felt this place, literally felt it. I spent so much time in this wonderful church. I looked at the tombs of the gentry there. I enjoyed the paradox of the fact that the biggest tomb was of someone who, after the Protestant Reformation, was still a Roman Catholic and yet was buried still in the parish church of his ancestors. I loved that paradox even when I was a boy, nerdy little boy that I was. So place right from the start was hugely central to my sense of being historian. My doctoral thesis at Cambridge was on Suffolk, the place from which I came. I knew the landscape, but going on the same thing applied. And in later years I did a lot of documentaries, historical documentaries, which took us across the world. And it became so important to sense the streets of a town, a city, to walk down them. Of course, it's great for the viewer, and you do a lot of walking along streets looking thoughtful in historical documentaries, because then you can lay some voiceover across the top. Meanwhile, the viewer is looking at the landscape and to be in a place became so important. The most vivid example of this was for me, Moscow, where we were filming about Ivan the Awesome, often known as Ivan the Terrible, Ivan IV, who built what is now known as St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square. And we were there setting up, as you do, so the cameramen were getting their angles, deciding where to film, etc, etc. I was left to my own devices in a deserted cathedral, normally crammed with tourists. For 45 minutes I wandered around it, no one stopping me wandering anywhere. And I got the sense of St. Basil's Cathedral. Extraordinary building. Everyone knows it. It looks like a series of ice cream cornets in vivid colors.
- [26:55]
A
Is it that classic kind of Russian Orthodox square?
- [26:58]
B
It's got more domes than you can shake a stick at. It's an astounding thing beside the Kremlin. Wow. So we're inside this building and what you realize inside is something which you would not see otherwise. The plan is perfectly logical. It's symmetrical. It's a series of octagons. It's interesting, but no one ever saw the plan apart from the architect and Ivan the Awesome. Everyone experienced the building, which is terrifying in its verticality, in its sense of claustrophobia, in its crowdedness. It is the mind of a mad czar. And I experienced that. And then the cameramen came up and said, right, we're ready. And I could change the script. I said, look, here we are in St Basil's Cathedral. It looks very logical. If you looked at the plan, but no one ever does. They look at the reality. I would not have seen that. And when we got on the planet, we're waiting for our plane to go home. I wrote that up in the text of the book. So it was an extraordinary example of how place could simply alter the way in which you looked at the story you were telling. And it made the story so much more vivid. I'm so grateful for that TV experience alongside writing.
- [28:19]
A
Yeah. I have a friend, we had dinner one time, and I spent a lot of time traveling. Because part of the reason is there's just things that I can only get to understand about a place, a culture, when I'm on the road. And my friend just has strong insistence. He was like, no, we have the Internet now. You do not need to travel so much. I don't know what you're doing. We sort of got into it, and it reminded me, as you were talking of that scene from Good Will Hunting when Robin Williams is with Matt Damon and Robin Williams is the teacher. And Matt Damon is kind of this punk kid, super book smart, and they're sitting on the park bench and he says to Matt Damon, he says, if I ask you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. And Michelangelo, him and the Pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. And then he goes, he says, if I ask you about war, you'd probably throw Shakespeare at me, right? Once more into the breach, dear friends. But you've never been near one. You've never been on a battlefield as you hold your best friend's head in your lap as they gasp their last breath looking to you for help. And it's poetic and it's vivid and it's. And it's pure and it's true. Because I think that that's why that scene resonates with people so much. But I think this is sort of the great virtue of history and also the great tragedy of history, which is, holy cow, I don't even have to go to Geneva to learn about the origins of the Protestant Reformation and what John Calvin did. I can pick up one of your books and I can learn all about it. Isn't that a gift? Isn't that a miracle of modern civilization? And at the same time, this sense of place is so vivid that there's something that a book can never, ever, ever capture.
- [30:08]
B
No, you're right. But you can tell people about it. That's part of your job as a historian. You're trying to allow them to get into a place or a person's mind, which they won't Otherwise do. And that's been true from the begin. I think perhaps the first great historian we have, Thucydides, who was exactly the sort of person you've just described, he was our player. He had been a general in the Athenian army, which in the end had been defeated. He knew the experience of defeat and disappointment, which actually I think again, one of the most valuable qualities that a historian can bring to the table. You need to understand what it feels like to be disappointed, to be rejected, to fail. And Thucydides writings were shaped by that. He needed to account for why the Athenians had been defeated. His answer was arrogance, hubris, they had overreached themselves. And that's a very important lesson. So it's there right from the start of history. So many historians have ignored that because they've thought of their story as a triumphant narrative. But that's a mistake. Historians generally lead rather undramatic lives. But Thucydides shows that you can be dramatic. I think to lead too dramatic a life would mean you'd never have time to write the history.
- [31:37]
A
Exactly.
- [31:39]
B
So there is a judicious compromise in the middle. But such experiences, which we all have as human beings as disappointment, failure, are so important because then you can start spotting it in the supposedly successful people. You can look for the excuses, you can look for the ways in which they are constructing a narrative which lets them off the hook or lets the hero off the hook.
- [32:07]
A
Do you think that the mantra maxim that was told to me a thousand times as a kid, history is written by the victors, True?
- [32:14]
B
Yes, it is generally written by the victors and that's something one has to fight against all the time. And look, why do you use that.
- [32:24]
A
Word, fight against, fight against?
- [32:25]
B
Because it's not true. The history written by the winners is not true, but it contains truth. I think, for instance, of the great Anglo Saxon historian Bede, one of the greatest historians of all time, writing in a period where there weren't many contemporary examples of how to do it. Well, he created the story of the English speaking people, the Gens Anglorum. And it is also the story of how Christianity came with the missionaries from Rome to a nation where there was a bit of Christianity but wasn't very good. And his story is of the glory of the mission headed by Augustine, the monk from Rome. And it's sort of true, but it isn't the whole truth because he played down the reality of the Christianity already there when Augustine arrived. And he played down certain characteristics of the Christianity which emerged, emerged and flourished from the mission. But the truth is that we wouldn't know much about the period if we didn't have Bede. And he left us this precious resource in which you can see his motivations, his agendas, to which you can add, because we now have other ways of dealing with the period. Archaeology, for instance, I have various in University of Oxford, I have many friends who are archaeologists, some of them Anglo Saxon archaeologists, and they've drawn attention, my attention, to the fact that women are far more important in that story of the Anglo Saxon Christian mission than Bede would allow. And opening up the tombs of graves of Anglo Saxons from the period. You see that there is an extraordinary phenomenon in the 80 years or so after Augustine arrived, a very richly furnished Christian graves of women. And these women are clearly exceptionally important. We can fit them against Bede's story and we can say, yes, they're not just queens or princesses, they're probably abbesses. And they as the heads of a monastery which contained not just nuns, but monks too.
- [34:45]
A
Right.
- [34:46]
B
They were leading the missions just as much as the bishops, the male bishops who were Bede's heroes. So that's a way of changing the past, getting past the story of victory, which is Bede's story. But it's beautifully done and thank goodness for Bede.
- [35:07]
A
What popped to mind for me is if I'm thinking, hey, I'm sitting down with a historian, hey, what are you trying to do here? What's your goal? Well, my goal is to tell the truth, of course. My goal is to look at the evidence and say, what actually happened? What is the true story? So obvious as to not be worth mentioning. But then I was thinking of. I remember in high school, I read the book on America by Howard Zinn, right? And at the very still, remember the intro, he basically says, the American story, A People's History of the United States. I think it is the American story has been told like this. It is. What I'm trying to do here is almost. This isn't quite right, but I think that the thrust of what I'm saying is true enough, that it's fair. I'm almost trying to do like a biased account of what has been missing from the American story. And actually, maybe we should have that more. Maybe what we should do is say, hey, I'm going to do a biased account this way. I'm going to do a biased account in that way. I'm going to do a biased account this way. And somehow in the almost cubist composition of all those accounts, we'll Somehow get the truth.
- [36:07]
B
I think that's right in the sense that we all start with biases and we need to know ourselves what those biases are. And having known that, know thyself, the ancient principle right of knowledge, we must tell our readers. So in, in the books which I feel, crudely speaking, matter from the book that I've written, particularly the one on Christianity, they start in the introduction by saying, well, this is what. This is who I am, right. And you, dear reader, need to know this. I hope it will make you feel more secure because as you read a passage you'll be able to say, well, he would say that, wouldn't he, coming from that point of view. And if you don't tell the reader that, then you're being in a sense dishonest. You're depriving them of essential data. None of us are neutral and we can't be. We're human beings and we have passionately held convictions which shape the story which we write. But we may write against our passionately held convictions if there's any honesty about us.
- [37:16]
A
You know, you were talking about being a friend to the reader. Then we were talking about how, at least as I see it, a historian is a guide to an idea, a place, a time. What are the different metaphors that you think about with a historian? There's a friend, there's a guide. What are the other ones that you're trying to do?
- [37:37]
B
Well, you might try out Counselor. Yeah, a non directive counselor was not expecting that.
- [37:45]
A
Why that?
- [37:45]
B
Well, because you're helping people look at a subject which is always going to be a look at themselves. And so you're providing a story which again, always trying to avoid, never succeeding, but trying to avoid bias, direction, the sort of things a non directive counselor does. I think there is a certain analogy there. Entertainer. Oh, of course that's important. I mean I. I'm very easily bored and if a book is boring me, it's not entertaining me. That's a black mark against it. Another thing criterion for the Wolfson Prize judging.
- [38:26]
A
It's got to be entertaining.
- [38:27]
B
It's got to be entertaining without making it a fetish of it. I like crafting a sentence which is funny, but it must be funny in a constructive way. Irony is the good side of it. It must tell you something about the subject. Occasionally it can just be bizarre because human life is bizarre. And there are certain things about it, particularly in the history of Christianity, which of course veers into things which are probably not true but are extremely funny. And I did insert Some of those into my very large volume on sex and Christianity.
- [39:10]
A
You know, I think that you use the word bizarre and wow, that's such a good word. Because for whatever reason, I think that a lot of times when I read history, it ends up being written as if whatever happened was inevitable, is very sort of matter of fact. This is how it was. But, like, when you see reality clearly, the two words that come to mind are bizarre and funny. And this is what comedians totally get, is they look at reality, they're like, that is so weird. And once you get bizarre, you get into mystery, you get into awe, you get into wonder, you get into humility. And I think that when you're reading. No, when you're looking at a time period and you're scratching your head and you're saying, wait, what you're actually beginning to tap, put your finger on the pulse of truth.
- [40:03]
B
We underestimate the role of lunacy in history. Some people in the past are just mad. Yeah. And will do things which are there in the record. I think of a building, actually, which conveys this to me. It's a building building which features in Dan Brown's novels the Roslyn Chapel, now a center in Scotland of tourism, mixed up with all Dan Brown's silly theories about, you know, whatever Dan Brown writes about mystical nonsense. And it's a bizarre building. It was built in the mid 15th century, it's incomplete, it's incredibly lavish, and yet his grand plan is absurdly simple. Well, it had a patron, the Earl who built it. Sinclair Earl had lots of money, but I think he was also mad. He had enough money to indulge his lunacy to build this really quite silly building which is beautiful but is not very sensible. And I've not heard enough people say, look, he's clearly mad. To explain this building, there's too many theories, too much theorizing about something which may actually have this rather simple explanation that even in the terms of his period, he was insane, but he had enough money to get away with it. One thinks of people are not mad, but irrational, and that may be because they're ill. And the obvious example is Henry viii, who in his later years was constantly in pain. He was also a terrible narcissist, and that is a factor throughout his career. But in the last decade, there is real physical pain. A doctor once pointed that out to me as I tried to explain the bewildering turnarounds in his last 12 months of life. And the doctor said to me, look, remember, he's in terrible Pain. You need to understand this complete change of attitude to a particular person by how he feels in the morning. And that really needs to be part of the picture.
- [42:25]
A
Absolutely. Last question. Oxford says, hey, you're going to teach one semester curriculum on how to be a historian, how to research, how to write, how to think, how to find truth, how to be properly humble. How do you structure that curriculum?
- [42:43]
B
Well, I started with a game, actually, a game which I invented at a college I used to teach at. And the game is called Elizabeth I Was a Carrot. And this is a game with 20 questions in for your audience. And above them is the rubric, which of the following statements is a historical statement and which isn't. So, statement number one is, Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558. Now, that is a historical statement. It's not a very interesting one, but it is true. You can check it out. The second question is, elizabeth I came to the throne in 1559. Well, she didn't, so that's not historical statement. But you then have to get into questions of disproving and proving things. And there are statements such as, what song are my other ones in this list of 20 questions? Elizabeth I was a true daughter of her father. Well, you take that two ways. It could be sort of metaphorical. She's as magnificent as Henry viii, or she actually was genetically his daughter. The first one is sort of not history. The second is not proved. Well, maybe provable for the bit of DNA work, but they go through. And the Last question, number 20, is, Elizabeth I was a carrot. Now, my audience by now, usually six formers actually, rather than students, occasionally undergraduates, are by now getting in the spirit of the game and they think, oh, well, this does sound like nonsense, but maybe it isn't. It may be a Tudor idiom, a carrot which relates to Queen. And we know that she had ginger hair, for instance. Maybe there was a Tudor metaphor for people who had red hair. They were called carrots. Well done, I say. In fact, I made it up. It's not true at all. There was no such idiom. And I didn't suggest that to you. That was your idea. Clever one, but wrong. So I'm teaching the different ways in which history works by a game. I've invented other games, but I think that's the best one. History is about play, like all good human activities, and we don't enjoy it, then it's not worth doing. But it's also passionately important to get it right, because it's about sanity. So I think before I started the game. I would make that point my course this term is going to to keep you sane. And this is where we start with the game.
- [45:29]
A
Wonderful. Thank you very much.
- [45:32]
B
Pleasure. Thank you for your clever, intelligent, sane questions.