I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.
I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.
History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmothers since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.
I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement. Towns and cities, too, which always retain the ghost of their earlier incarnations beneath today's concrete and glass.
I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.
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