Contemporary History - Now or Never

Historians notoriously have their eyes fixed much more intently on the far or middle distance than on the period closest to themselves. The two main reasons for their long- sightedness are the feeling that a clear perspective cannot be gained on recent events, and the fact that documentary evidence; the sine qua non of traditional writing, cannot be obtained until the release of Government papers, most of which in Britain become available to the public only after thirty years have passed.

The result is that 'serious' historians do not dabble in contemporary history, by which we might mean the history of the previous twenty-five to thirty years. This state of affairs might strike an uninformed outsider as anomalous; the very period for which accurate historical writing would be most valuable, i.e. the contemporary – from which the most important and relevant lessons could be learned – is the one period on which the historian's magnifying glass is not focused.