The Control of the Past

Written by one of the few historians employed by the British government, this important book details how successive governments have applied a selective approach to the past in order to tell or re-tell Britain's national history, with implications for the future. Providing a unique overview of the main trends of official history in Britain since the Second World War, the book details how Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979) became one of the earliest and strongest critics of what he saw as the British government's attempts to control the past through the writing of so-called, 'official histories'.