Nothing thrills the Londoner more than another spat involving historian Niall Ferguson. This week his duelling partner is Richard Evans, religious professor of history at Cambridge.
Evans wrote a piece in the Financial Times last week attacking Education Secretary Michael Gove’s new GCSE history curriculum plans as “a mindless regression to the patriotic myths of the Edwardian era”.
Ferguson, now a professor at Harvard, hit back in the Guardian on Friday, with a few digs at Evans as “someone living in a dreaming Oxonian spire” when it came to the failings of current history teaching and as an author of “rather dry” works on Nazi Germany. By contrast, “I have written and presented popular history,” boasted Ferguson.
Pah! says Evans in today’s letters page of the Guardian. “Being a telly don doesn’t equip you for the realities of the classroom,” he writes. “I have written works on Nazi Germany but, ‘dry’ or not, they’ve sold more than a quarter of a million copies in English and been published in many other languages. In any case, I’d rather have a ‘dry’ style than follow Ferguson in writing articles that ape the sneering populism of a Daily Mail leader.”
