Shoddy History
We tend to assume it is AI that will corrupt our sense of historical processes and contingencies. The fear is not unfounded. But shoddy, biased scholarship also has much to answer for. I am shaken to read, in a single issue of the TLS, the accounts of two serious historians (Robert Tombs and Felipe Fernández-Armesto) denouncing the work of their colleagues as well below par, ‘so self-indulgent, so partisan, so ignorant, so poorly written and so carelessly checked’. Tombs analyses a rough-shod ride over historical truths determinedly pursued by the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Church Commission; Fernández-Armesto reviews with exasperation (‘I opened the book expecting instruction and entertainment, I closed it in despair’) ‘A New History of the New World’. The latter remarks: ‘We should be wary of wallowing in self-righteous judgements of the past: they will be visited on us in return.’
