This unprecedented book, by one of Britain's leading intellectual historians, describes the intellectual impact that the study and consideration of the past has had in the western world over the past 2500 years, treating the practise of history not as an isolated pursuit but as an aspect of human society and an essential part of the cultural history of Europe and America.It magnificently brings to life the work of historians from the Greeks to the present, including Livy, Tacitus, Bede, Froissart, Clarendon, Gibbon, Macaulay, Michelet, Prescott and Parkman, explaining their distinctive qualities and allowing the modern reader to appreciate and enjoy them. But is also examines subjects as diverse as the new perspectives brought about by the rise of Rome, the interests of medieval chroniclers, the introduction into historical narratives of what the eighteenth century called 'sentiment', the effects of Romanticism and the emergence towards the end of the nineteenth century of an historical profession.It sets out to be not the history of an academic discipline, but a history of choice: the choice of pasts, and the ways they have been demarcated, investigated, presented and even sometimes learned from as they have changed according to political, religious, cultural and (often most importantly) patriotic circumstances.

This book also aims to change our perceptions of the main turning points in the history of history. It dispels persistent myths, such as that the ancient historians wrote only contemporary history and had a purely cyclical view of time, that the eighteenth century lacked understanding of the past and that the critical study of sources began only with Ranke in the nineteenth century. The ideas that historians have had about both their own times and their civilization emerge freshly and often unexpectedly. Burrow argues that looking at the history of history is one of the most interesting ways we can try to understand the past. Nothing on the scale of or with the ambition of his book has yet been attempted in English.

Sunday Telegraph

'This book is magnificent: a daunting combination of vast range, profound learning and high literary art.'

The Times

'John Burrow's A History of Histories is itself an exemplar of how history should be written. Witty, scholarly and above all fair.'

Guardian

'a triumphant success ... a highly enjoyable book, based on a vast amount of reading, written with attractive simplicity'

Evening Standard

'if historians have a Valhalla, a hall of heroes, he has earned his place with this book.'

length: (cm)23.6 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)15.4

约翰·布罗（John Burrow，1935-2009），英国重要的思想史家。1981-1995年，担任萨塞克斯大学思想史教授，1995-2000年，担任牛津大学欧洲思想教授。他是英国人文社会科学院院士、牛津大学贝里尔学院名誉院士，2008年被麻省威廉斯学院聘为杰出访问学人。

布罗早期的作品包括《进化与社会：维多利亚时代的社会理论研究》（Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory, 1966）、《自由派的传承：维多利亚时代的史家与英国的过去》（A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historian and the English Past, 1981）、《吉本》（Gibbon, 1984）与《理性的危机：欧洲思想1848-1914》（The Crisis of Reason: European Thought,1848-1914, 2000）。《自由派的传承：维多利亚时代的史家与英国的过去》一书曾赢得“沃夫森历史奖”（Wolfson Prize for History）。