Diarmaid MacCulloch is an author, a professor at Oxford, and he's obsessed with history. A real expert who's been studying it for decades.
In this episode, we talked about how history is assessed, the role of a historian in society, and how to take everything you learn in the research phase and turn it into clear, vivid, and entertaining writing.
Hope you enjoy!
Transcript
00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:26 The role of historians
00:04:09 Core principles of history
00:06:23 Diarmaid's writing routine
00:08:17 Primary vs secondary sources
00:12:33 The keys to beautiful writing
00:14:26 Famous books that got facts wrong
00:16:09 Historical facts vs anecdotal stories
00:23:13 Sense of place
00:32:07 Is history really written by the victors?
00:35:06 Tell readers your biases
00:37:16 What should historians be?
00:42:26 Advice for young writers
David (00:00–00:39):
One of the things I’ve picked up from your work is that historians almost guard the morals of our society. Is that a fair way to put it?
Diarmaid (00:39–01:16):
That’s exactly right; it’s at the heart of what I do. My father was a country parson, a Church of England rector, and truth mattered a lot to him. Without making a big point of it, he passionately impressed that on me. He was a man committed to truth in a uniquely privileged position because the Church of England had a curious thing for its parish clergy called parson’s freehold.
David (01:16–01:19):
What’s that? Like tenure?
Diarmaid (01:20–04:07):
Exactly tenure. In a parish, you could not be sacked unless you denied the Trinity or ran off with the organist’s wife or husband. But apart from that, you could say what you wished. 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.
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. I wish to spread that sanity to my readers who are constantly assailed by lies, particularly by the powerful. History is 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.
I look at present-day societies and see societies constructed on lies. Those lies are pernicious. I’ve seen societies across the Atlantic demote national holidays because they offend against a racist white supremacist narrative, Martin Luther King Day demoted as King Day. That must be stopped.
Tampering with museum labeling in order to create a sanitized narrative is a wicked thing to do, and it’s also an insane thing to do. The historian is the guardian of sanity in society.
There are other important disciplines which human beings pursue at the university level. In this country, we label them STEM subjects: science, technology, mathematics, and medicine. All of which are good things; 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, or 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.
David (04:09–04:22):
If a budding historian comes to you and says, “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?
Diarmaid (04:23–05:06):
Be skeptical, and then be sympathetic. The skepticism stops you from being too sympathetic. After all, all of us have agendas, some of them good, some of them bad. Only gradually can you see which is which. So, always listen to a statement with a certain skepticism. Why is this person saying this? Are they lying to me? But also remember that they are basically interesting because they are human beings. They may be particularly interesting because of who they are, what they’re doing, and what they’ve done.
David (05:06–05:29):
With that second point, it seems 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.
Diarmaid (05:30–06:22):
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. 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.
David (06:23–06:44):
So, what are your weeks like? I guess I have this idea that you’re sitting in a library in Oxford in dim light, and you’re there with a cup of coffee, and you do that for 14 hours a day till your back hurts. Then you just walk back and go to sleep and maybe have a conversation or two about what’s going on. What is the actual work of being a historian?
Diarmaid (06:45–07:15):
You present a slightly frightening picture of it. I like having a routine. Not everyone does. I’m a tidy person, and my schedule when 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.
David (07:16–07:17):
Oh, you’re a napper.
Diarmaid (07:17–07:21):
I’m a napper, yes, absolutely unashamed. Since my 20s, this is not an old person thing.
David (07:21–07:22):
I’m the same way.
Diarmaid (07:22–07:23):
Good.
David (07:23–07:29):
I nap almost every day. It’s 11:20 in the morning right now. I’ve already had a nap today.
Diarmaid (07:29–08:15):
Within that, I’m pretty systematic and a bit ruthless. Morning is my best time—8:30 onwards until lunchtime. And there must be a lunchtime break. That’s quite a substantial slab of the day, and then another substantial slab from mid-afternoon until 7:00, and that’s enough.
My old doctoral supervisor was a workaholic, Sir Geoffrey Elton. He did say to me, “Divide your day into thirds and work for two of those thirds, and do not work in the other one.” Thank goodness for Sir Geoffrey’s advice; it stops you from feeling guilty. You simply cannot work well if you just work nonstop.
David (08:17–08:36):
You shared some sequencing earlier, which was reading the secondary sources and then going back to the primary sources. What’s good about that is you have a general sense of what people have said. Okay, now let me go investigate for myself. With that, would you say skepticism and...
Diarmaid (08:36–10:04):
...well, with the sense that probably what the conventional story is set out to be is not entirely the truth.
In fact, what I did for two major biographies that 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. 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 Strype—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 Strype and Burnett said. It stops you from reinventing the wheel because you see how people in the 17th century thought about the 16th—the readers of Burnet, the readers of Strype. It’s quite a comforting task because these are very monumental works. Burnett’s work runs into eight volumes in its early Victorian edition. Strype, similarly, wrote endless books.
So, read them; get the cliches in your mind. Do not be dominated by the cliches, but know what they are.
David (10:04–10:05):
Sure, sure.
Diarmaid (10:05–10:09):
Then you can go back to the original sources and look for yourself.
David (10:10–10:44):
How about in terms of modes of inquiry? It seems to me like we live in a time where 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 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?
Diarmaid (10:45–10:59):
I hope that they will say we did our best. I’m certain of 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.
David (10:59–11:00):
Yeah, I want to hear about that.
Diarmaid (11:00–12:32):
Well, this is a prize which rewards good historians in this country, the United Kingdom, writing about anything in history. The criterion is that this is fine history, it is beautifully written, and 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. Every year we find in the Wolfson Prize judges pool a set of six books which are challenging the way history is done. For instance, last year we looked at books on slavery. We had quite a lot of them actually, and each of them was challenging the narrative of complacency in Western history. 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.”
David (12:33–12:49):
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? What is going on there? When you said that is beautifully written, what are the things that you’re looking for?
Diarmaid (12:51–14:24):
I’m not sure, frankly. Purple prose is definitely a downer. Any prose which is purple is not appropriate.
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. There is something about leaden prose which is easy to recognize too. Leaden prose—that which is cliche-ridden, which is unimaginative. Frankly, a lot of historians write like that. 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 into 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.
David (14:26–14:35):
Do you think that there are history books that are uniquely privileged in the canon because they’re beautifully written but actually get a lot of things wrong?
Diarmaid (14:37–16:08):
Yes, there undoubtedly are. Winston Churchill, for instance, is perhaps an amateur historian but a beautiful crafter of prose. He 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.
Yes, there is history that is deceiving, usually because of what it leaves out. So it’s always possible to write beguiling history, which is terribly misleading. The historian’s motto really ought to be “yes, but.”
“Yes, but” is the ideal framework to look at the past. “Yes, I do see that, but I also see this.” That balances the story and stops me from idealizing the past, making a glorious standard at which I judge the present. It’s not as simple, and at first sight, it may not be so satisfying, but it is more true than the simplifying, heroic versions of the past.
David (16:09–17:27):
When I think of historians, I think of nonfiction writers who are giving me facts, stories, and anecdotes about a certain moment in time.
For example, I just watched a movie called Train Dreams. It takes place in the 1930s and is about the logging culture of Northwest America. It follows this one man in a fictional story, but the writers did a bunch of research. They went to Idaho and Washington where these trees were being cut down.
I was thinking to myself, 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, approaching it very directly, or watching a movie like this and approaching it from the side? I’m not sure.
It seems like history in the way that I defined it—nonfiction facts, stories, anecdotes—is one way of understanding the past. But there are also myths, fictions, music, and all sorts of less direct ways that we can understand the past. As you try to understand a specific time period, how much are you looking at?
Diarmaid (17:29–17:29):
The.
David (17:30–17:33):
Attacking it very directly versus kind of from the side?
Diarmaid (17:34–18:46):
My problem, if I take my specialism, the Tudor period, the 16th century, is that we only have part of the story surviving now. Those primary sources are partial, they are fragments, and therefore there are things that I can never say in my narrative.
When I come to such a place where evidence is missing, I can say, “We may think that it is quite likely...” The overwhelming sense of what this is, is degrees of confidence.
I then contrast that: if I was writing about Thomas Cromwell with Hilary Mantel, we were doing the same project, but she was a novelist, and I was a historian. She was liberated from the need to always say “may have.” She could simply present the story and fill in the gaps, even if that filling in the gaps is technically wrong.
David (18:46–18:46):
Right.
Diarmaid (18:47–19:33):
There are lots of examples in Hillary’s writing like that. She created a romance in Antwerp for Cromwell to account for an illegitimate child, who we know about. That simply isn’t right.
On the other hand, she wanted to make the background right. So one of the things she did with the third part of her Wolf Hall trilogy was send me the typescript, or the virtual equivalent of a typescript, the PDF, and say, “Can you look at this and have a look at the historicity of it? Can you point out the mistakes? Not the fictions, the mistakes.”
David (19:34–19:34):
Right.
Diarmaid (19:34–21:34):
And so that’s what I did. I wrote her back saying, “I’m 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?”
“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.
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 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, 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, 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. The Protestant story told in the great historians of the past has made them allies because they’re both Protestant reformers.
David (21:34–21:35):
Sure.
Diarmaid (21:35–22:05):
We forget that people can share an ideology while still detesting each other because something may be more important. In this case, it was the fact that Cromwell adored his old master and detested Anne Bullen because she blamed Wolsey 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.
David (22:07–23:46):
Okay, we’re talking about how to get your writing done and how to be more productive at work. I recommend a tool called Basecamp. It’s a project management tool, and it’s different from the others, which are loud, noisy, and cluttered. They have feature bloat. Basecamp keeps things simple so you can focus on what matters: getting the work done.
For us, Basecamp is a place to track what we’re doing with “How I Write,” when episodes are recorded, where we’re recording them, the publishing day, and all those things in one place for our entire team. I had Jason Fried, the founder of Basecamp, on the show. I noticed he really cares about writing. He cares about manifestos, great copy, and telling a great story. He and his co-founder have written five books, and they bring the same care and attention to detail to their books as they do their software. If you’re wondering how to be more productive and make your team more cohesive, I recommend Basecamp.
All right, back to the episode. Tell me about sense of place, about writing about a city, a country, or a region. What we’re really talking about is that there are the facts on the page, and then there are the things that go beyond the facts that paint a more holistic picture of what’s going on. As you’re writing, going places, and traveling, how do you use that to inform your work?
Diarmaid (23:46–24:14):
I think that sense of place is hugely important to historians because then you begin to see the character you’re looking at. I was terribly impressed by reading the essays of Robert Caro about his first work on Commissioner Moses and then on LBJ. He said that the only way he could understand LBJ was to go to Texas and live there for three years.
David (24:14–24:16):
Appreciate...
Diarmaid (24:16–26:54):
The terrible loneliness and poverty of the situation. 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 16th century, and that’s really what inspired me to become a Tudor historian, because I felt this place. I spent so much time in this wonderful church and looked at the tombs of the gentry.
I enjoyed the paradox that the biggest tomb was of someone who, after the Protestant Reformation, was still a Roman Catholic and yet was buried in the parish church of his ancestors. I loved that paradox even when I was a boy. So place, right from the start, was hugely central to my sense of being a historian. My doctoral thesis at Cambridge was on Suffolk, the place from which I came. I knew the landscape.
In later years, I did a lot of historical documentaries, which took us across the world. It became so important to sense the streets of a town or a city and to walk down them. Of course, it’s great for the viewer; 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 being in a place became so important.
The most vivid example of this was 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. We were setting up, the cameramen were getting their angles, deciding where to film, and I was left to my own devices in a deserted cathedral, normally crammed with tourists.
For 45 minutes I wandered around, no one stopping me. I got the sense of St. Basil’s Cathedral. Everyone knows it. It looks like a series of ice cream cornets in vivid colors.
David (26:54–26:57):
Is it that classic kind of Russian Orthodox square?
Diarmaid (26:57–28:18):
It’s got more domes than you can shake a stick at. It’s an astounding thing beside the Kremlin. We were inside this building, and what you realize is something 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, its sense of claustrophobia, and its crowdedness. It is the mind of a mad czar, and I experienced that. 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 look at the plan, but no one ever does. They look at the reality.” I would not have seen that.
When we got on the planet and were waiting for our plane to go home, I wrote that up in the text of the book. It was an extraordinary example of how place could alter the way 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.
David (28:18–30:07):
I have a friend, and we had dinner one time. I spend a lot of time traveling because there are things that I can only understand about a place or a culture when I’m on the road. My friend insisted that with the Internet now, I don’t need to travel so much.
We sort of got into it, and it reminded me of that scene from Good Will Hunting when Robin Williams is with Matt Damon. Robin Williams is the teacher, and Matt Damon is this punk kid, super book smart. They’re sitting on the park bench, and he says to Matt Damon, “If I ask you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written: 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.”
Then 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.”
It’s poetic, vivid, pure, and true, and I think that’s why that scene resonates with people so much.
I think this is the great virtue of history and also the great tragedy of history: 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 learn all about it. Isn’t that a gift, a miracle of modern civilization? At the same time, this sense of place is so vivid that a book can never capture it.
Diarmaid (30:07–31:37):
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. That’s been true from the beginning.
I think perhaps the first great historian we have, Thucydides, was exactly the sort of person you’ve just described. He was a player. He had been a general in the Athenian army, which was ultimately defeated. He knew the experience of defeat and disappointment, which I think is one of the most valuable qualities a historian can bring to the table. You need to understand what it feels like to be disappointed, rejected, to fail.
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. 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.
David (31:37–31:38):
Exactly.
Diarmaid (31:38–32:07):
So there is a judicious compromise in the middle. Such experiences, which we all have as human beings, like disappointment and failure, are so important because then you can start spotting it in the supposedly successful people. You can look for the excuses and the ways in which they are constructing a narrative that lets them off the hook or lets the hero off the hook.
David (32:07–32:14):
Do you think the mantra that was told to me a thousand times as a kid, “History is written by the victors,” is true?
Diarmaid (32:14–32:23):
Yes, it is generally written by the victors, and that’s something one has to fight against all the time.
David (32:23–32:24):
Why do you use that word, “fight against?”
Diarmaid (32:24–34:45):
Because 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. He created the story of the English-speaking people, the Gens Anglorum. 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. His story is of the glory of the mission headed by Augustine, the monk from Rome.
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 that emerged and flourished from the mission.
The truth is that we wouldn’t know much about the period if we didn’t have Bede. He left us this precious resource in which you can see his motivations and agendas, which you can add to because we now have other ways of dealing with the period: archaeology, for instance.
I have many friends who are archaeologists at the University of Oxford, some of them Anglo-Saxon archaeologists, and they’ve drawn my attention to the fact that women are far more important in that story of the Anglo-Saxon Christian mission than Bede would allow.
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: very richly furnished Christian graves of women. These women are clearly exceptionally important.
We can fit them against Bede’s story, and we can say that they’re not just queens or princesses; they’re probably abbesses and the heads of monasteries, which contained not just nuns, but monks too.
David (34:45–34:45):
Right.
Diarmaid (34:45–35:05):
They were leading the missions just as much as the bishops, the male bishops who were Bede’s heroes. 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.
David (35:06–36:06):
What popped into my mind is, if I’m sitting down with a historian, I’m thinking, “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, I remember in high school, I read Howard Zinn’s book on America, A People’s History of the United States. I remember in the intro, he basically says the American story has been told like this. What I’m trying to do here is almost—this isn’t quite right, but I think the thrust of what I’m saying is fair enough—I’m almost trying to do 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.” And somehow in the almost cubist composition of all those accounts, we’ll somehow get—
Diarmaid (36:06–36:37):
The truth. 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 of knowledge—we must tell our readers.
So in the books, from the books I’ve written, particularly the one on Christianity, they start in the introduction by saying, “This is who I am.”
David (36:37–36:38):
Right.
Diarmaid (36:38–37:15):
And you, dear reader, need to know this. I hope it will make you feel more secure because as you read a passage you will 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 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.
David (37:16–37:36):
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?
Diarmaid (37:37–38:25):
Well, you might try out counselor. A non-directive counselor.
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’m very easily bored, and if a book is boring me, if it’s not entertaining me, that’s a black mark against it. Another criterion for the Wolfson Prize.
David (38:25–38:27):
Judging this, it’s gotta be entertaining.
Diarmaid (38:27–39:09):
It’s got to be entertaining without making 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 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.
David (39:09–40:03):
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, 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—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.
Diarmaid (40:03–40:11):
We underestimate the role of lunacy in history. Some people in the past are just mad.
David (40:11–40:12):
Yeah.
Diarmaid (40:12–42:23):
And we’ll do things which are there in the record. I mean, I think of a building actually, which conveys this to me.
It’s a building which features in Dan Brown’s novels, the Rosslyn Chapel, now a center in Scotland of tourism, mixed up with all Dan Brown’s silly theories about 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. The 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, “Remember, he’s in terrible pain. You need to understand this complete change of attitude to a particular person and by how he feels in the morning.” And that really needs to be part of the picture.
David (42:24–42:42):
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?
Diarmaid (42:43–45:28):
I started with a game I invented at a college where I used to teach. It’s called “Elizabeth I Was a Carrot,” a 20-question game for the audience. Above the questions is the rubric: Which of the following statements is a historical statement, and which isn’t?
Statement number one: “Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558.” That’s a historical statement. It’s not a very interesting one, but it’s 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 a historical statement. You then have to get into questions of disproving and proving things.
There are statements such as, and what are my other ones in this list of 20 questions? “Elizabeth I was a true daughter of her father.” You can take that two ways: it could be metaphorical, she’s as magnificent as Henry VIII, or she actually was genetically his daughter. The first one is not history, and the second is not proved. Well, maybe provable with a bit of DNA work.
They go through, and the last question, number 20, is: “Elizabeth I was a carrot.” My audience by now—usually sixth formers rather than undergraduates—are getting into the spirit of the game. They think, “Well, this sounds like nonsense, but maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s a Tudor idiom, a carrot relating to the queen. We know she had ginger hair. Maybe there was a Tudor metaphor for people with 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 through 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 if we don’t enjoy it, it’s not worth doing. But it’s also passionately important to get it right because it’s about sanity.
I think before I started the game, I would make that point: my course this term is going to keep you sane, and this is where we start with the game.
David (45:29–45:30):
Wonderful. Thank you very much.
Diarmaid (45:31–45:36):
Pleasure. Thank you for your clever, intelligent, sane questions.
