ABSTRACT
When approached by a publishing house to preface a collection of articles and papers by an autobiographical introduction, it is difficult not to imagine the sound of fluttering wings, harps and such like. Since I am feeling in reasonably good health and wish to speculate a little further on the manner in which the fallibility and subjectivity of the historian might affect – who knows, perhaps even improve – his work, I shall take the risk and postpone a full-fledged confession to a later volume in this series of Collected Essays, limiting myself here to the minimum required to provide the present selection with an appropriate background.
