ABSTRACT
One of the trends in professional historical writing since the early 1990s has been the growing focus on telling the big narrative through a multiplicity of smaller narratives. Some of these small stories confirm that big narrative; others contradict it. The success of two bestsellers, Stalingrad by Antony Beevor (1998) and A People’s Tragedy by Orlando Figes (1996), show how popular this approach is with the wider reading public. The question to ask is, why have they sold so well? My answer would be that by concentrating on individuals these historians engage our interest in our fellow human beings. It is the people in the past who we want to know about, to think about and to feel empathy for. Yes, we are interested in understanding the big events but we need to make sense of these in terms of their impact on the lives of ordinary human beings.
