Not to beat about the bush: I am talking about the current influence of that dominant group of French historians called the Annales school and especially about its Latter Day Saint, Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie. However, this is not another tedious attack on the use of the social sciences by historians. Quite enough evidence and arguments have by now accumulated around the virtues and limitations of quantification, model-building, anthropological analogies and all the rest: Requiescant, sed non in pace. I willingly add my mite to the lip service paid to those early Annalistes who persuaded so many scholars to forsake their storytelling and dive into the analysis of tax registers, shipping registers, parish registers and so forth. It would seem to be true that by the 1920s French historical writing had got stuck in a stultifying preoccupation with political, military and diplomatic history, all of it treated with relentless rigour and impressive absence of imagination; and though a historiographical tradition which from William Camden to William Hoskins had shown much concern with questions of economic and social import did not really need to cross the Channel for inspiration, English historians have unquestionably drawn some benefit from their love for all things French. Nor has that recourse stopped. At present a good many are showing a disquieting inclination to throw themselves into the deep morass of the Annalistes latest fashion, the history of mentalite, and no more than the French do they look likely to escape the death by a thousand words of meaningless verbiage which that morass promises. Still, we should all of us like to know about‘climates of opinion’ and such-like things.