WHEN Richard Cohen studied the dissolution of the monasteries at Downside School in 1960, the leading authority on the subject was David Knowles, professor of medieval history at Cambridge. Only later did Cohen learn that Knowles had been a monk and a teacher at Downside who had left under something of a cloud. Here was the first intimation that Knowles’s judgements “must surely have been colored by his time in orders”. Later, Cohen wondered how the lives of other historians had shaped what they wrote. Scroll on half a century, and we have his mature reflections on the subject, presented as a 660-page review of those who have “framed the way we conceive the past”.

This is not a book for the professional historian, or for the amateur who wants a systematic chronological survey. Rather, it is for the general reader who has time to enjoy a series of character sketches with commentary, often witty and garrulous commentary, on the big beasts of historical writing down the centuries. Ranging from Herodotus to Mary Beard, Cohen often calls upon friends and colleagues for help. (So long is the list of acknowledgements that they are divided into separate chapters.) Melvyn Bragg’s contribution to the quatercentenary of the Authorised Version, The Book of Books, is cited in chapter 3, “History and Myth: Creating the Bible”, for example.

Each chapter reads like an extended essay — on subjects such as “Closing Down the Past: The Muslim view of history”, “The Accidental Historian: Niccolò Machiavelli”, and “William Shakespeare: The drama of history”. Cohen’s treatment of Shakespeare’s profoundly influential treatment of English and Roman history is one of the most engaging sections in a study that progresses chronologically up to the 19th century

The book then opens out to allow a more panoramic treatment of a theme or genre. “Once upon a Time: Novelists as past masters” offers commentary on Scott, Tolstoy, and Hilary Mantel, among others. “Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax: The Annales school” introduces the reader to a group of historians who truly broke the mould. Cohen is particularly excited by those who wrote history as they made it: “History from the Inside” takes us from Julius Caesar to Ulysses S. Grant, and “The Spinning of History” looks at Churchill and his “factory” of assistant researchers and writers.

granger/AlamyRichard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico, 1848, an illustration used in the book; by the 18th century, a newspaper was how most people got their “first draft of history”, it says. In the United States, by the 1780s, “there were hundreds of weeklies, and a decade on, their number was growing four times as fast as the population”

Film and TV are not neglected, while some of the great controversies surrounding historical writing, such as the “red historians”, from Karl Marx to Eric Hobsbawm, and “bad history”, in “Truth-Telling vs. ‘Patriotism’”, featuring David Irving, inspire some of Cohen’s most impassioned commentary.

But the lavish use of portraits as illustrations throughout Making History underlines the fact that Cohen’s main interest is in the human factor in the making of history. Much is made of the physical appearance of Voltaire and Gibbon, for example; and clashes of personality, such as that between A. J. P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper, later Lord Dacre, are gleefully recounted. “Burdened from an early age with circular spectacles to combat his nearsightedness”, Trevor-Roper briefly took up golf as a young man, “striding the links in a loud check suit with plus fours, his neatly parted hair plastered to this forehead, ending in a quiff”, we are told.

Locating itself somewhere between high-table anecdote and obituary-writing, Making History is written by an elegant former publisher and Olympic fencer, who knows everybody in the literary world and whose own editor (his wife) is willing to indulge him with plenty of excess baggage by way of documentary detail, and with long footnotes of interpolated material. It makes for a good read.

Dr Michael Wheeler is a Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton and the author of The Athenæum: More than just another London club.

Making History: The storytellers who shaped the past
Richard Cohen
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25
(978-1-4746-1577-8)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50