You turn on the television, you listen to a public debate between politicians and you know that there are different views on things. But then people somehow come and simplify the past and part of the challenge is to make the diversity of the past, the way it could have gone in different directions, the way people in the past were not all sitting in some kind of common zeitgeist nor spouting the same discourse — to try to make that diversity something that is interesting and which also fulfils a civic function, because if you can encourage a sense of humane scepticism about overarching interpretations — "it has to be this way, history was clearly leading in one direction" — if you can encourage some kind of humane scepticism about that, that is actually part and parcel of living in a democracy, because democracy rests on
legitimating differing views. 

NS: Supposing we get into a time machine with a guillotine. In English history, which would be one's first target? I suspect in my case it might be Lloyd George. If Lloyd George had been guillotined in 1902, say, because they always used to say the rot set in with Lloyd George, much could have been avoided. More seriously, people have to know history in the background. Without it, you couldn't really understand the present crisis. 

DJ: Do you think each period throws up its own special history? Your coming of age, Norman was the '80s, which was a very exciting time. You helped to provide a sort of historical narrative that Mrs Thatcher and people like that needed to understand why they were doing what they were doing. My father [Paul Johnson] provided a similar book at exactly that time, Modern Times, which Ronald Reagan read, and it helped him, I think, to understand his role. It's the same today, isn't it?

NS: Oh, I'm not so sure. The thing is, we're landed with quite of lot of big technical problems. The book which I'm a great admirer of is Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money: a wonderful book putting the current financial crisis into some sort of perspective. And of course you have to look at history from this point of view. As to the grand narrative side of it, I have a weakness for A. J. P. Taylor, who's always a bit on the defensive because English History ended up being more or less propaganda for the Labour government. He wrote it in 1965 and it is an "Easy Answers for England" sort of book. Fast-forward to 1975 and the man is very depressed, his savings eaten up by inflation as he looks out over Twisden Road with litter blowing about. I wonder what he'd have done with that book if he'd written it ten years later. 

DJ: Obviously, history isn't simply invalidated when the caravan moves on and we then see things differently. Jeremy just mentioned Gibbon. We still read Gibbon because he still has interesting things to say about us as well as his own time, let alone the Romans. But how can history help us to meet the challenges of the present and the future? Isn't there a danger that history has now been reduced to entertainment? It's simply good television, it generates a lot of money for publishers, and it's one step up from journalism but not really fundamentally different. How can we make history be more than that?

JB: First, let's be pluralist. There are multiple ways in which history exists and the fact that there is a journalistic and entertaining strand is not a bad thing. History is useful if it encourages people to have a sense that time doesn't have an impact in a predictable fashion. There is not a predictable pattern of cause and effect, and also, people make a difference. I would say that academic history as a whole, Norman may or may not agree, has been moved very much against the dominance of Marxist determinism over the last 30 years. So Marxism now doesn't really have much purchase in the intellectual community. What that means in practice is one understands the role of contingency, individuals, groups, maybe whole societies at particular moments. 

You started off by asking what we would make of the political situation. One of the things we clearly have seen since the General Election is that individuals and small groups of people make a difference, just as the electorate as a whole — everybody who voted and those who didn't vote — also made a difference. This is a tremendously important point because if what you want — and I suspect this is very dear to your views, Daniel — is an engaged society with a sense of cultural values, then a self-awareness that one does have a role is important to it. An historicised imagination does help to show that people have a role. When you look to the past, you don't write a history of the 1950s saying, "Well, nothing then mattered and the people didn't count." You might write a history which exaggerates the importance of some aspects, that's a different question, but what you actually do is give agency to people, and particularly these days we've moved away from giving agency to these abstractions of great historical forces. We're much more concerned to put the weight on people, both social groups and collectivities, and as individuals.