Writing History For - and of - The Millennium

History Today: but what about history tomorrow - or in one thousand or ten thousand years' time?

In the film Big, Tom Hanks played a little boy who, trapped inside a grown man's body, had a brilliant career as a toy designer. One of his inventions was a computer which gave children the power to write and re-write their own versions of a story under a stock strip of vivid images. History has always been like the Big machine, clicking out colliding perceptions of the same events. When I was a child, my favourite book was Pages glorieuses de l'armee frangaise because it filled familiar wars with exciting battles of which the writers of my English and Spanish books seemed never to have heard. Even within a single country or culture, the circumstances and needs of the time of writing become as much a part of the story as the episodes narrated and the people described.