'if historians have a Valhalla, a hall of heroes, he has earned his place with this book' - Dominic Sandbrook, Evening Standard 'a triumphant success. The result is a highly enjoyable book, based on a vast amount of reading, written with attractive simplicity, brimming with acute observations, and often very witty. Anyone who wants to know what historical writing has contributed to our culture should start here' - Keith Thomas, Guardian 'This book is magnificent: a daunting combination of vast range, profound learning and high literary art. In 500 superbly crafted pages (miraculously succinct for the task in hand), Burrow's chapters treat of almost every imporant historian of the last two-and-a-half thousand years' - John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph

John Burrow was professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex from 1981 to 1995 and Professor of European Thought at Oxford from 1995 to 2000. His earlier books include Evolution and Society: a study in Victorian Social Theory (1966), A Liberal Descent: four Victorian Historians (1981), which won the Wolfson Prize for History, Gibbon (1984) and The Crisis of Reason: European Thought 1848-1914 (2000). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.