In his brilliantly written and thought-provoking book The History Men, first published in 1983, the seventeenth-century English history specialist and regular reviewer for the Observer Sunday newspaper, John Kenyon, told the story of the development of the historical profession in Britain since the early modern period. He focused above all on the many British historians, especially those based in Oxford or Cambridge, who had contributed to building up the teaching and writing of History over the past few centuries, delivering sharp and acute critical judgments on a number of them as he went along. The core of History teaching and research in England was, and should be, Kenyon thought, English history, and particularly English political and constitutional history. Raising his gaze momentarily from Cambridge (from where he had himself gone into exile to Hull some years before, but where his spiritual home evidently remained), he cast a jaundiced eye across to the new universities that had been established in the 1960s and found, to his disapproval, that many of them included extra-European History on their curricula. He roundly dismissed this as faddish and ephemeral: ‘hastily cobbled-up courses on Indochina or West Africa faded away as soon as these areas ceased to be of immediate current concern’. Kenyon thought that British historians had made no notable contribution to this particular field. ‘Nor’, he went on, ‘did the contribution of British historians to European History constitute an important or influential corpus of work.’ So he ignored this too.