History Challenge

Bamber Gascoigne tells how he overcame his aversion to history and took on the whole world as his subject

I hated history at school. It was delivered to us like slices of pemmican, iron rations of compressed information. Three pages of the history book were the standard portion to be digested before each lesson. They were more than enough. Half the words seemed to begin with capital letters, and most of the rest were dates. So I gave the subject up as soon as possible, at fifteen, finding a haven in modern languages and then Eng. Lit. at Cambridge.

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