A Chinese restaurant in the Mile End Road seems a funny place for it. But it was here that I learnt of one of the most exciting — and, as it turns out, one of the most disappointing — projects ever broached in the history of ideas.

John Burrow, who was then Professor of European Thought at Oxford, mentioned in passing that he had just come from a chat with Stuart Proffitt, the famed editor at Penguin Books, credited in the industry with conceiving or nursing some of the most spectacular publishing successes of our time. Burrow was at work on a survey of how people have thought and written about history from ancient times to the present day. Proffitt wanted him to call it The History of History. Burrow jibbed. He opted instead for the less impactful, less declamatory alternative: A History of Histories.

The author was still thinking about his choice when he wrote the preface, which is really a defence of a pluralistic vision of the subject. Meanwhile, the phrase “the history of history” appears repeatedly in the blurb and the PR material, suggesting that the publisher has never been fully reconciled to the author’s preference. In retrospect, the publisher seems to have been right.

Burrow’s reasons for choosing the more timid phrase are unconvincing. He did not want to be “teleological”, but he could still admit that history is a universal practice and passion. He did not want to imply that “consensus” prevails. But it is an observable fact that virtually all people represent the past to themselves and to each other. You can tell the story of how they have done so without renouncing the equally clear fact that they have done so in different ways.

Burrow’s real reason for his title comes towards the end of his list of excuses. He could not be “comprehensive”. His book ignores the world outside the West, virtually ignores everything outside a fragment of western Europe, and, even within that narrow compass, becomes heavily Anglo-centric. A history of histories that does not mention Confucius or Ibn Khaldun seems amputated. A history of western historiography without any wider context is defective. How, for instance, can we judge the conventional — and, I think, false — assertion with which Burrow begins, that history “was born” in ancient Greece, without considering other possibilities? Even as a narrative of western historical writing, the book seems capricious. Burrow’s chapter on the Enlightenment focuses almost entirely on Gibbon, Hume and Robertson, while confining Voltaire and Montesquieu to two sentences and five subordinate phrases.

The material is puzzlingly distributed. Nearly half the book is about ancient Greek and Roman writers, treated selectively but at a leisurely pace. Thereafter, everything is hurried, until by the 20th century coverage is as rapid and random as a drunken reel. The author leaves out just about everything most readers might find interesting about the period — the dialogues historians have falteringly sustained with science, linguistics and philosophy; the debates about how to teach history; the rise or revival of popular history, “family history”, “heritage” and historical fiction; the impact of electronic media, especially television and film; the influence of the changing ideological landscapes of the century, the way globalisation has changed our thinking about the past, and diffused western models worldwide.

Throughout, Burrow’s approach is frustratingly old-fashioned, as he catalogues one damned historian after another. We never meet readers of the historians’ own days, and rarely get a sense of the society and culture that surrounded them. On the few occasions when Burrow does locate historians’ thought in the philosophy of their times — fleetingly, among ancient Greeks and Romans — the effect is to make us lament what we are missing.

To appreciate this book, therefore, one must dismiss the claim that it is a history of histories, or the hope that it might be the history of history, and accept it for what it is: a collection of essays on historians who happen to interest the author. Burrow’s gifts then emerge. He is a sensitive, cultured humanist, an observant reader and a fluent writer. The pages on the ancients fly by, delighting the reader with their sonority and skill. His command of western tradition is unexcelled, and he weaves in frequent reminders of how the work of the great historians of antiquity ripples through the imaginations of later generations: how Livy informs the paintings of David and the

historical sense of schoolboys; how Plutarch influenced Shakespeare; how, when supposedly planning a massacre, Catherine de’ Medici “must have” recalled Tacitus’s portraits of power-women; how Herodotus and Thucydides still overshadow us. Even when his readings are conventional, the author makes us see texts afresh with insightful comparisons.

Herodotus reminds him of Homer, Bernal Diaz, more arrestingly, of Xenophon. Carlyle becomes inseparable from the image of Goebbels comforting Hitler in the bunker with readings from that tedious Victorian sage. And Burrow has an unerring eye for the best passages in classical texts. On a single page, he evokes Livy’s mind by uniting an anecdote of a flute-players’strike in 311BC with the story of a vestal virgin disciplined for making jokes. He reveals the crowings of history’s victors and the cravings of the vanquished.

Perhaps one day Burrow will use these admirable talents to attempt The History of History. Not only would it make a more impactful title. It would surely be a more exciting book.

A History of Histories: Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the 20th Century

by John Burrow

Allen Lane £25 p576

Available at the Books First price of £22.50 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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