In deciding what to offer the Wiles Trust for their annual series of lectures in 2003, I hit on the title ‘English Historiography in the Age of Butterfield and Namier’. Traces of that concentration still exist in this published version, especially in chapters 4, 6, 7 and 8 which are revised versions of the original lectures. But what I had in mind to attempt in the series was not a simple description of what Butterfield and Namier had written, nor even an analysis of their arguments and eventual antagonism. Instead I set out to use these two historians as icons or symbols of opposed modes of thought that I recognized in the inter-war period and through into the 1950s and 1960s. One of them, epitomized for this purpose in Lewis Namier, saw the task before historians as one resting on the destruction of what had gone before, especially the so-called whig theory of history, and the substitution of an aggressive new methodology and ambition designed to make twentieth-century historiography more modern and sophisticated. The other epitome, for all his well-known criticisms of the ‘whig interpretation’, reacted against the process of modernization that Namier and others embodied and sought to reinstate an idea of history as a narrative art concerned with the lives and souls of humanity. The small scale of the Wiles series and the distinction of the invited panel that accompanies it made this focus conceivable: I was addressing an audience who knew the historical material well and had even been personally involved with the lives and work of my protagonists.