ABSTRACT
While planning the series of which this was the concluding volume, the late Professor Denys Hay asked each of his authors to say something about their sources and methods. For the historian of recent times, such matters are inextricably entangled with the special difficulties of recent history (already briefly touched upon in the opening pages of this book). But there is also an embarrassing profusion of available information on many topics. Historians of the twentieth century quickly discover the boundless scope of what may be judged legitimate source material, much of which is bound to remain unexplored by them. Even when faced with the apparently simple task of recommending specific further reading, this problem continues to dog them. There is so vast a body of printed documentary material and secondary scholarship on recent history that it is very hard to set out in a few pages anything other than very personal and (some may well think) idiosyncratic recommendations about where to go next.
