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I would point out that Dr Starkey looks like a cross owl
in the pictures on his own books.’ It’s an old story.
As Ginger Rogers once said of Fred Astaire ‘I did
everything he did, only backwards and in heels’.
The debate will, I am sure, rage on. Indeed very
recently Oxford
Professor Sir Keith Thomas, at the
presentation of the prestigious Wolfson History Prize
referred to the damage done to “diligent” scholarship
by “eye-catching academics”. He meant of course the
showy telly types. Perhaps academia hasn’t changed
its attitudes a great deal since the staff room mutterings
that cost AJP Taylor a good job back in the 1950s.
In the old days, of course, it was the winners what
wrote the history. Hence Good Queen Bess and Bloody
Mary. In more recent times history has been written in
Backwards & In Heels
Schama is still the highest paid and most successful
historian on TV. But still they come. From the wild
haired and bare-kneed Scotsman Neil Oliver to his
fellow countryman and Harvard rake Niall Ferguson.
Bettany Hughes, currently presenting
Britain’s
Secret Treasures
with Michael Buerk, has the
obligatory Oxford history degree plus a research
fellowship with Kings and as a patron of the Iris
Project promotes the teaching of Latin and Greek
in state schools. Dr Lucy Worsley is another Oxford
historian and since 2004, has been Chief Curator
at
Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity
which runs Kensington Palace State Apartments,
Hampton Court Palace, the Tower of London, Kew
Palace at Kew Gardens and the Banqueting House
in Whitehall. Dr. Worsley’s most recent telly outing
was
Harlots, Housewives and Heroines.
Both women are representative of a new generation
of not just female television historians but also of
the current fashion for social history. They are more
interested in how we lived than in who was in
charge. Dr Rude has cast acid aspersions on the
new trends for female historians and social history.
Ignoring their academic achievements he thinks the
historians have been chosen for being pretty and he
calls their work “historical Mills and Boon”.
Dr Worsley responded thus: ‘If it wasn’t insulting
and degrading to judge historians by their looks,