Forum

There used to be a time when the study of history justified itself. An Oxford scholarship committee once asked me why I wanted to read modern history. My answer, 'because it is interesting', seemed well received. That was in 1959. I am not a master of the art of equivocation, as my colleagues will confirm, but on that occasion a franker response would have been, 'because I am studying it at 'A'-level, it seems closer to today's world than Classics, and it is fuzzier and more socially acceptable to my peers than Science'. But we are not all like John Stuart Mill, learning Latin and Greek at an age when my own son is concentrating on domino rallies. How does one shape one's future at the age of seventeen?