E. H. Carr's What is History? played a central role in the historiographical revolution in Britain in the 1960s.

As an
undergraduate I devoured its witty and cogent attacks on the kind of history I had been taught at school - dominated by high
politics and diplomacy, bereft of theory, and entirely innocent of any consciousness that it might be serving some kind of
ideological or political purpose. It rudely knocked the sacred texts of the historical profession, such as the New Cambridge
Modern History, off their pedestals, to the general applause of all of us who were forced to plough our way through them. Not
the least of its pleasures was the fact that it made fun of so many icons of the Cold War - purveyors of 'Western' values such
as Sir Karl Popper and Sir Isaiah Berlin, at a time when these values seemed to be leading to neocolonialist oppression of
the kind carried out by the American armed forces in the Vietnam War.
When it came to actual works of history, the most exciting being produced at the time were exciting precisely because they
admitted their own ideological thrust, but at the same time seemed to combine it with deep scholarship and learning that
defied easy reputation. These were the books of the English Marxist historians, who began to publish widely in the 1960s,
after most of them had left the Communist Party in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary and devoted themselves to
building up the intellectual foundations of the 'New Left'. Historians such as Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Eric Hobsbawm,
George Rud and Edward Thompson did far more to undermine historical orthodoxy in the eyes of the student generation of
1968 - my generation - than did the Godlike figure of Sir Lewis Namier, whose work we were supposed to admire as the
ultimate in historical scholarship. Namier's scholarship did indeed grind exceedingly small, but it also seemed bereft of ideas,
and to us that seemed the cardinal sin of the British historical tradition against which people like Hobsbawm and Thompson
were rebelling.