From Russia With Love
Historians often envisage a gulf between family history and other engagements with the past, but they can easily overlap.
I have been thinking about Sir Ronald Syme (1903-89). He was one of the great historians of ancient Rome and an outstanding practitioner of prosopography: the collective study of multiple lives in order to explain the structures of politics and society. It appeals to me as a historical method, but this is not why I’ve been thinking about Syme. I’ve been thinking about him because he was a friend of my grandmother.
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