Margaret Macmillan is enlightening on the pitfalls of oral history, emphasising that memories are highly malleable and that there is no such thing as repressed memory syndrome. She tells us that the notorious sign supposedly erected outside Shanghai Park in the 1920s, which read "Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted", never in fact existed. Similarly, when Dean Acheson recorded in his autobiography exactly where he had been sitting in relation to President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull when they took the decision to freeze Japan's assets in 1941-a vital decision preceding Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour - it took the historian Arthur Schlesinger to discover that Acheson hadn't even been in Washington that day. Old men forget, but old politicians forget selectively.
The author is also agreeably politically incorrect in her warning that initiatives such as the Black History Month can sometimes go too far: Mary Seacole is now virtually the only person whom schoolchildren associate with the Crimean War. Because statues of Socrates depicted a man with a flat nose it does not mean - as an entire black historical genre now claims - that Athenian civilisation was based on ideas originating in sub-Saharan Africa. The pre-emptive guilt that many Western historians tend to adopt when faced with criticisms of cultural imperialism - "the story of Dead White European Males" - needs to be shrugged off, with common sense returning. Perhaps the election of President Obama might help in that respect.
This book rightly points out that we have seen a "history craze" in recent years, with movies, entire TV channels, websites, new museums and so on devoted to the study and enjoyment of the past. Macmillan believes that we ought to celebrate the fact that there is now a Chimneypot Preservation and Protection Society and that Perth, Ontario held a week of celebrations in 1993 to celebrate the centenary of the year that it sent a giant cheese to the Chicago World's Fair. It is nonetheless somewhat hyperbolic to state that "In the UK, David Starkey's series on British monarchs have made him as rich and famous as the Kings and Queens themselves", however much Dr Starkey might like you to think that.
