The Control of the Past

Written by one of the few historians employed by the British government, this important book details how successive governments have applied a selective approach to the past in order to tell or re-tell Britain’s national history, with implications for the future. Providing a unique overview of the main trends of official history in Britain since the Second World War, the book details how Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) became one of the earliest and strongest critics of what he saw as the British government’s attempts to control the past through the writing of so-called, ‘official histories’.