On History

If you have been involved with something all your life – reading it, studying it, carrying our research on it, delivering lectures about it, publishing drawings about it, compiling text-books about it, writing novels about it, and teaching tens of thousands of lessons about it – presumably it is important to you. For that reason History has always been important to me.

I don’t think it is worthwhile trying to justify this. You either accept it or you don’t. A concert pianist does not walk to the front of the stage before every recital and deliver a homily on they he is what he is; he just plays the damn piano. Spencer Tracy, the great Hollywood actor, just said the damn lines.

Well, I do History.