Professional historians are not normally paid to think, and over the years of intensive specialization few have accepted the commission with gratitude. Common sense and an ability to write plain English will do. Modern practitioners transcend this offensive profile, of course, in their language of ‘training’, ‘skills’ and ‘research’, but a discomfort remains among some (a minority) about the degree to which historical work need not engage with thought so long as certain professional protocols are inserted into the text. As a distinguished historian recently remarked about those who feel no discomfort, historians do not enter the profession in order to seek intellectual challenge but rather to have a happy life. Butterfield's generation certainly seemed happy in its work and often made him sound like a Jeremiah in his conviction, first announced when he was thirty and repeated like the voice of doom, that history had become victim to a form of ‘technical procedure’ that supplied its own form of ‘bias’ in accounts dependent on it. But Herbert Butterfield believed, with a force that increased rather than diminished throughout his professional life, that history had to be understood as thought, not only about the past but about the nature and limits of historical thinking, if it were to be worth anything at all. Having emerged in the public eye as an historical critic in The Whig Interpretation of History in 1931, he retained the ambition of showing that ‘professional’ history frequently rested on misunderstanding and that its self-confidence as a force for objectivity could not survive serious introspection.