His most recent novel, Mothering Sunday, became an international bestseller and won The. As this compulsion reveals, practicing history is not enough, because the writing and teaching of history does not explicitly answer those nagging questions – what can we know about the past? what do we need to know about the past, and what is the value of our knowing? – whose unsuccessful resolution can put a lifetime of historical endeavour in doubt. Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of ten novels, two collections of short stories, including the highly acclaimed England and Other Stories, and of Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. But it is easy to see through this academic padding to the naked desire of the author to explain and justify a lifetime devoted to unravelling the secrets of the past. The studies which emerge from this new passion are invariably clothed in the full panoply of scholarship. Many historians, usually at the peak of a career during which they have written books of great elegance and erudition, have sought to justify prudent scholarship by speculative inquiry into the nature and meaning of writing history. Like so many serious complaints, it usually strikes in late middle age. Ruminating on the nature of history is one of the occupational diseases of the historian.
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