ABSTRACT
You always remember where it was that you first read the books that changed your life.
I first read Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian in September 1976 in rocky, medusa-infested coves on the Aegean islands of Hydra and Spetsai. While Macaulay was storming the Whig citadel of Holland House, Mavrocordatos and his fellow pan-Hellenes were launching armed fishing boats from those thyme-scented bays against the Turkish fleet. But such was the spell cast by John Clive’s book that my imagination did not drift towards Missolonghi or Navarino. It was quite elsewhere, in virtuous Clapham, industrious Leeds and pullulating Calcutta. Later, John would give me a respectable cloth-bound signed edition of his book. But it is the dog-eared, suntan-oil-stained paperback hauled around the islands, that I truly cherish. For it was in its pages that I first began to comprehend the deep wells that produced the glorious gush of Macaulay’s famous vehemence. And it was in its pages that I first encountered John Clive.
