History With the Boring Bits Put Back

Every child is naturally interested in history. You want to know what went on before you; it’s the way you know who you are and where you stand on the planet. Unfortunately, though, it can so easily get wiped out of you. As a child I used to have little picture books on Tudors or Stuarts and suchlike, and I was fascinated by the pictures and wanted to find out more. But my fascination was killed at secondary school by having to do British nineteenth-century political history for O-Level, the Reform Act and the end of the Corn Laws and everything. When we’d taken the exams I couldn’t wait to go on to something else, but when I went to my first history lesson in the sixth form they said: ‘It’s a shame not to build on what we've done’, so we did it all over again for another two years – so that was all the history I ever learned at school.