Diarmaid MacCulloch: Oxford Professor Breaks Down His Writing Process | How I Write

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? That's exactly right. Uh it's right at the the heart of what I do. I've said my father was a a a country parson, uh a Church of England rector, and truth mattered a lot to him. Uh and that was of the the things he without making it a big point, passionately impressed on me. He was a man committed to truth, uh in a 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? Parsons freehold is the fact you cannot be sacked. Mm. Like tenure. 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 after apart from that, you could say what you wish.

And uh I admired that in my dad tremendously. He he had no money, lived in this ridiculous huge house which we couldn't afford to. He But he had freedom to speak. And that's what I've carried forward into my historian's world. I 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 defence against lies. Uh the person who is taken over by lies is no longer sane. So I'm defending the human race against madness. Uh and I w look at present-day societies and I see societies constructed on lies, and those lies are pernicious. I've seen societies uh across the Atlantic from here uh demote holidays.

national holidays because they r uh they offend against a racist white supremacist narrative. Martin Luther King demoted as a day d uh King Day. And that must be stopped Tampering with museum museum labelling 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.

Uh in in this country we 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. Uh they can help you cure cancer, but they do not make you a good person. uh a 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, uh, and show you a story which makes that essential.

If you're with a you know 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? Be skeptical and then be sympathetic. Uh and the scepticism stops you being too sympathetic. After all, all of 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 scepticism. 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 be maybe particularly interesting because of who they are, what they're doing, what they've done. 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. Oh sure. I mean hi history is about human beings. Uh human beings create structures and that has a history in itself, but at the centre 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. Uh it's easier in the present in one sense because you've got so many uh perspectives. in so many different ways on the person you're looking at. You've got personal memories which you might t t tap into. But if you go back centuries, you 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.

So what is your what are your weeks like? I guess I have this idea that you're sitting in a library and office. Oxford and dim light, candlelit, you're there with a cup of coffee and you do that for like fourteen hours a day'til 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

Well, you present a a a slightly frightening picture of it. Uh you 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. Uh I uh can work between those two out of limits. and there must always be some sleep in the middle of them as well. Oh you're a napper.

I'm a Napa, yes, I'm absolutely unashamed since my twenties. This is not an old person thing. Yeah. Good. I nap almost every day. I've actually eleven twenty in the morning right now. I've already had Uhhuh. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But within that I'm I'm pretty systematic and a bit ruthless. Morning is my best time. uh, half eight onwards till lunchtime and there must be a lunchtime break. So that's quite a s substantial slab of the day.

And then another substantial slab from mid afternoon till seven. 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 walk work in the other one, and th thank goodness for Sir Geoffrey's advice. It stops you feeling guilty. You you simply cannot work well if you just work nonstop.

You were 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 Well, with the sense that probably what the conventional story

is set out to be is not entirely the truth. Mhm. So in fact what I did, uh, for two major biographies which I've written, uh, 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 seventeenth century uh writers on that period, on the th the uh century before the sixteenth century. So in in that case it it's Bishop Burnett

on the Reformation or John Stripe, names which don't mean much to people now. But they were the first people to synthesise all this. They looked at the original sources available to them. So get what Stripe and uh Burnett said, and then i it it stops you reinventing the wheel because you see how people in the seventeenth century thought about the sixteenth, the readers of Burnett, the readers of Stripe.

I it's quite a comforting task because these are very monumental works. Uh 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 uh, shall we say, dominated by the cliches, but know what they are. Sure, sure. And then you can go back to the original sources and and look for yourself.

How about in terms of mode 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. Um there's a 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.

Um how do you think future generations will look back at historians now in that I hope that they will say we did our best. And I'm a certain cautious optimism about that because uh one of the duties I've laid upon myself is to be one of the judges of the Wolfson History Prize. Yeah, I want to hear about that. Well this is a prize uh which rewards good historians in this country, the United Kingdom, writing about anything in history. Uh and the criterion is that this is

Fine history. It is beautifully written. Uh it is there for inspiring and exciting, but it must be available for a popular audience. So we look at our pile of perhaps one hundred and eighty books each year, and instantly you can say, Oh that is too technical. Uh that is written for h 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 uh Judges Pool we get to a a a set of six books, which are challenging the way history is done. Uh for instance, uh last year we looked books on slavery. Uh we had rather quite a lot of them actually, and each of them were challenging the the narrative of complacency in Western history.

and uh simply by providing a story based on data uh were saying to the readership, Look, actually this was a story of naked greed and profit. Whatever uh the governing class of a slaveholding culture were saying, whatever noises they made about free speech and liberty. Underneath it was this disgusting human traffic, uh, making human beings into work animals.

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? Huh. W I'm not sure, frankly. Purple prose is definitely a g a 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. Uh I like it if it makes me smile. I uh 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 cle uh and illuminating. Uh i i that's that's good prose. I wouldn't say a purple prose.

Uh and there is something about leaden prose which it's easy to recognise too. Leaden prose that which is cliche written which is unimaginative. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh and Well, frankly, a lot of historians write like that. And if they're writing about the provision of water supply in nineteenth century Wigan, that is fine.

that's that's not the sort of book which is likely to win win the Wolfson Prize. But I don't despise it. It's a sort of book which can feed in to the wider conversation about history in its period and perhaps other periods too. So horses for courses, uh, great writing in history is is not what all historians ought to do. Mm-hmm. 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?

Yes, there uh there undoubtedly are. Um 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 s uh well distorted because it makes him into one of the the the the the the i essential players, which in a sense he was. Uh but yes, th there is there is history which is

deceiving usually because of what it leaves out. So it it's it it's always possible to write beguiling history which Terribly misleading. And the historian's motto really ought to be Yes, comma but. Yes, but is the meta uh is the the the ideal framework to look at the past. Yes, I do see that. But actually I also see this Uh and that balances the story and also stops me idealising the past, making uh a a a a standard, a glorious standard at which I judge the present. Hm.

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.

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. Um but For example, I just watched a movie called Train Dreams, and Train Dreams takes place in basically the 1930s. It's a about the logging culture of Northwest America. It follows this this this one man. Uh 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 nineteen twenties from reading a book about logging the nineteen twenties and approaching it very directly, or watching a movie like this and sort of approaching it from the side. 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 the attacking it very directly versus kind of from the My problem, if I take my specialism, the Tudor period, the sixteenth century, is that we only have part of the story ever now surviving. Those primary sources are partial. They are they are fragments.

and therefore are things that I can never say. In my narrative, I must, when I come to such a place, of the the the evidence missing, I can say Uh we may think that's the first time. It is quite likely. The overwhelming sense of what this is is dot dot dot. Degrees of confidence. I then contrast that, say if I was writing about Thomas Cromwell with Hilary Mantel, about whom I uh with whom I spoke a lot. Mm-hmm. We were doing the same project, but she was a novelist, I'm a historian.

She was liberated from that. Because if 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 gap. And it may well be that the filling in the gaps is is technically wrong. Right. Uh and uh there are lots of examples in Hillary's writing like that. uh she created a romance in Antwerp for Cromwell to account for an illegitimate child who we who we know about.

Uh uh a and that isn't right. It simply isn't right. On the other hand, she wanted to make the background of it right. Ha so one of the things she did with the third part of her trilogy, the Wolf Hall trilogy, was to send me the type script or the Yeah. I a virtual equivalent of a TypeScript. Uh the PDF. And say well can you look at this and have a look at the uh the historicity of it. Can you point out the mistake?

Not the fictions, the mistakes. Right. And so that's what I did. I wrote to her back saying, Look, I trying to change your story. All I'm saying is that actually It was not the abbot of Saint Bartholomew's here, it was the prior of Saint Bartholomew's. You want to get that right, won't you? And said, yes, she said. That's the sort of thing I did with uh that type script.

Uh a and that's the way a historian can help a novelist. But we need to recognise that this is not an entire crossover. We we are next to each other in what we're doing. Uh and in the case of Hilary Mantell, she was a novelist who when she was writing about the past wanted to get the past right. Mm-hmm. But that is not to say that she had stopped telling stories. So we we have uh we are two professions

uh can be of i 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. Uh she would admit to me that there perhaps wasn't enough religion in the the mind of the Thomas Cromwell she presented, but she knew that. But the character of the

And his relations with other people were startlingly right. Yeah. I I read the first of her novels without knowing how And I thought, your 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 Woolsey, his first great employer. He adored Woolsey. And that meant that he detested Anne Bullen. Uh 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. Sure. 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. Uh I'd spotted that, but Hilary nerved me to pursue it as I went on looking at the sources. 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 Base.

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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, all those sorts of things in one place for our entire team to look. 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'cause 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. And so then as your writing, going places, traveling, how do you use that to inform the work that you're doing?

I think that sense of place is hugely important to historian because then you begin to see uh the character you're looking at. I I was terribly impressed by writing the uh I was terribly impressed by reading the essays of Robert Caro about his first work on Commissioner Moses and then on uh L B J. And he says that the only way that he could understand LBJ was to go to Texas. What awesome. Lived there for three years.

Appreciate the terrible loneliness and poverty of the situation. Well that's that perhaps an extreme example. But I I grew up in rural East Anglia, the county of Suffolk. My father was a a country parson, the the rector of the parish in which we lived. He had a lovely, wonderful church to look after, which came from the s well, a lot of it was sixteenth century.

And that's really what inf 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.

n nerdy little boy that I was. So Place right from the start was hugely central to m my sense of being historian. My doctoral thesis uh at Cambridge was on suffer. The place from which I came I knew the landscape of the But going on the same thing applied and I 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.'Cause it's great for the uh the viewer.

Uh and and you do a lot uh of walking along streets looking thoughtful in historical documentaries'cause then you can lay some uh voiceover across the top. Meanwhile the viewer is looking at the landscape. And and to be in a place became so important. I mean th th 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 the Four. who built um 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, etcetera, etc. I was left to my own devices. d in a deserted cathedral, normally crammed with tourists, for forty five minutes. I wandered around it, no one stopping me, wandering anywhere. And I got the sense of St. Basil's Cathedral. An extraordinary building. Everyone knows it. It looks like a series of ice cream cornets. Uh in vivid colours. On Red Square.

Wow. So we're inside this building and what you realise inside is something which you would not see otherwise. The plan is perfectly logical. Uh 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 Uh and I experienced that and then the cameramen came uh up and said, Right, we're ready And I could change the script. Mm-hmm. I said, Look, here we are, in St Basil's Cathedral. Uh 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 plane we're waiting for the plane to go home, I wrote that up in the text of the book. So it was an extraordinary example of how a 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 T V experience alongside writing.

Yeah, I I I have a friend, we had dinner one time and yeah, I spent a lot of time travelling 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 a 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 Goodwill Hunting when uh Robin Williams is with Matt Damon and Robin Williams is the teacher and Matt Damon is, you know, kind of this punk kid, super book smart, and they're sitting on the park bench and you know, 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. M 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.

You're right, but it y you can tell people about it. That's part of your job as a historian. You're you're trying to allow them to get into a a place or a person's mind which they won't otherwise do. And that's been true from the beginning. I think the perhaps the the first great historian we have, Thucydides, uh, who was exactly the sort of person you've just described. He was a player. He had been a general in the Athenian army, which in the ul in the end had been defeated.

He knew the experience of defeat and disappointment, which is 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 They had overreached themselves.

Uh a 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 a triumphant narrative. But that's that's a mistake. Uh historians generally lead rather undramatic lives. Right. Uh but Thucydides shows that you can uh be dramatic. I think to lead too dramatic a life would mean you would never have time to write the history. Exactly. Uh 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 at for the excuses, you c you can look for the ways in which they are constructing a narrative Let's them off the hook. Uh or uh let's the hero off the hook. 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? Yeah.

Uh it is uh generally written by the victors, and that's something one has to fight against all the time. And look at the other thing. Use that word fight again. Fight against because it's not true. Uh the the history written by the 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 the there weren't many contemporary examples of how to do it, while 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 a nation where there was a bit of Christianity but wasn't very good. And his story is of the the glory of the mission. uh uh h headed by Augustine the monk from Rome.

Uh and it's sorta 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 em emerged and flourished from the mission. But th the truth is that we wouldn't know much about the period if we didn't have beads. And he he left us this this precious resource.

i 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. Uh w I I have various uh i in in University of Oxford I have m 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. Uh and and opening up the tomb.

uh of graves of Anglo Saxons in the period, you see that there is an extraordinary phenomenon in the eighty years or so after Augustine arrived, of very richly furnished Christian graves of women. And these women are clearly exceptionally important. Uh we can fit them against Bede's story, and we can say, yes, they they're 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. Right. They were leading the missions just as much as the bishops, the male bishops, who were B Heroes. So that's 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.

What uh what popped to mind for me is, you know, if I'm thinking, hey, I'm with a sitting down with a historian, hey, what's your what are you trying to do here? What's your goal? Well, my goal is to to 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 um the Book on America by Howardson, right?

And at the very still remember the intro, he basically says the American story, uh a 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 store.

And actually, maybe we should have that more. Maybe what we should do is say, hey, I'm gonna do a biased account this way. I'm gonna do a biased account that way. I'm gonna do a biased account this way. And somehow in the almost cubist composition of all those accounts, we'll somehow get the truth. I think that's right, uh, 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 in the books which I feel crudely speaking matter from the books I've written, particularly the one on Christianity, they start uh 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 the the our passionately held convictions, But there's any honesty.

You know, you were talking about being a friend to the reader. Then we were talking about how 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 the historian. There's the friend, there's a guide. What are the other ones that you're trying to do? Mm, well you might try out council law? Uh yeah, a non directive counsellor? Was not expecting that.

Why that? Well, because you're helping people look at a subject which is always going to be a a look at themselves. And so you're providing a story which again always a trying to avoid never succeeding, but trying to avoid bias. direction the sort of things a a non directive counsellor does. I think there's 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, I it's not entertaining me. That's a black mark against it, another thing, criterion for the Wolfson Prize judging. It's gotta be entertaining. It's got to be entertaining without making a fetish of it. Uh I like uh uh crafting a sentence which is funny. But it must be funny in a constructive way. Uh irony is the the good side of it. It must tell you something about the subject. But 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. Uh, and I did insert some of those into my very large volume on sex and Christianity. 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 uh humility.

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. We underestimate the role of lunacy in history. Ha ha. Some people in the past are just mad. Yeah.

Yeah. And we'll do things which are there i in the record. I mean I think of a building actually which can phrase this to me. It's a building which features in Dan Brown's novels, The Rosslyn Chapel, now a centre in Scotland of tourism, uh mixed up with all Dan Brown's silly s theories about um you know Um whatever Dan Brown writes about. Mystical nonsense. Uh and i it's a bizarre building. It was built in the mid-fifteenth century. Uh it's incomplete. It's incredibly lavish.

Uh, and yet his ground plan is r absurdly simple. Well, it was had a patron, the the the Earl who built it, the uh a s the Sinclair Earl, I 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 isn't is is not very sensible. I've not heard enough people say.

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. Uh and that may be because they're ill, and the obvious example is Henry VII.

uh, who in his later years was constantly in pain. He was also a terrible narcissist, uh, and that is a factor throughout his career, but in the last decade there is real physical pain. Uh a doctor once pointed that out to me as I tried to explain the it bewildering turnarounds in his last twelve months of life. And the doctor said to me, Well, 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.

Uh and that really needs to be part of the picture. Absolutely. Last question. Oxford says, hey, you're gonna teach one semester curriculum on how to be a historian, how to How to research, how to write, how to think, how to find truth, how to be properly humble. How do you structure that curriculum?

Ha well I started with a game actually, a game which I invented uh at a college I used to teach at, and the game is called Elizabeth the First with a Carrot. And this is a game with twenty questions in for your audience, and the the t uh above them is the rubric which of the following statements is a historical statement and which isn't? So statement number one is uh Elizabeth I came to the throne in fifteen fifty eight.

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 fifteen fifty nine. Well, she didn't. So that's not historical statement, but you then have to get into questions of disproving and proving things. Ah, and there are statements such as what's one of my other ones in this list of twenty questions? Uh Elizabeth the First was a true daughter of her father,

Well, you can take that two ways. It could be sort of metaphorical she's as magnificent as Henry VIII.

Or she actually was genetically his daughter. Uh the first one is sort of not history. The second is not proved well, maybe provable with a bit of DNA work. But they go through and the last question, number twenty, is Elizabeth I was a character Now uh my audience by now, uh 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.

Uh it may be a Tudor idiom, a carrot, which relates to Queen, and sh we know that she had ginger hair, for instance. Maybe there was a Tudor metaphor for people who had Red hair they're 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. Right. 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.

Uh, 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. Uh my course this term is going to keep you sane. And this is where we start with the game. Wonderful. Thank you very much. Pleasure. Thank you for your clever, intelligent, sane questions.