‘We need a Faith’: E. H. Carr, 1892-1982

Born and educated in an age of certainty, he matured and died in an age of doubt. This bleak contrast in circumstance proved to be the catalyst which later made E.H. Carr, the promising young scholar and diplomat, into one of the most extraordinary and controversial historians of our time. The collapse of the world he knew and loved in 1914, and its remnants in 1929, caused him to look elsewhere for the belief in progress that had so characterised the Victorian era to which he belonged. Under Lenin and his successors, the Soviet regime lifted the Victorian spirit from the rotting corpse of Imperial Britain and implanted it into the alien but receptive frame of Russia resurgent.