The Control of the Past: Herbert Butterfield and the Pitfalls of Official History - Paperback

by Patrick Salmon (Author)

Written by one of the few historians employed by the British government, this important book details how successive governments have applied a selective approach to the past in order to tell or re-tell Britain's national history, with implications for the future. Providing a unique overview of the main trends of official history in Britain since the Second World War, the book details how Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979) became one of the earliest and strongest critics of what he saw as the British government's attempts to control the past through the writing of so-called, 'official histories'.

Author Biography

Patrick Salmon is chief historian at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, a department of the government of the United Kingdom. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.