AustLit

'Inga Clendinnen, an outstanding and imaginative historian, recently confessed that when she asked a class of new history graduates which historians they read for pleasure, they laughed! ‘I knew why they laughed’, she explained sadly. It’s because so many scholars compromise communication with pompous posturing; they are too busy staking out intellectual territory and warding others off it; they are too busy digging in their fields isolating ‘stone-hard, stone-cold facts’ to bother looking up or around; they are so furiously in pursuit of ‘objectivity’ that they delete themselves from their scripts and employ a weird, passionless prose. Clendinnen says that she enjoys reading great historians, like E.P. Thompson, for the same reason she enjoys reading great novelists—they offer an entrée into richly imagined worlds. But, she confesses, there is a difference. For her, when reading non-fiction, the bliss is tempered and intensified by a critical alertness and an undertow of moral implication not present in what she calls ‘the limpid realms of fiction’.' (Introduction)