The new Director of the Institute of Historical Research marches through his domains with obvious relish. `The best job in Britain any historian could ever want or have,' David Cannadine recalls Asa Briggs once telling him, as he finds his way, through the inter-war marble grandeur of London University's Senate House, through one of the best history libraries in the country, to his lofty but as yet somewhat bare office. Near the door is a pile of boxes. `Oh, that's Andrew Mellon,' Cannadine says with a characteristic raising of his eyes to the heavens. `I do not intend in my time as Director to stop writing history,' he announced at a reception to mark his arrival at the IHR; `I would not know how to do that, and have no intention of finding out'. Cannadine is one of that small band of historians whose writings, while highly regarded by his academic peers, have also found a wide, popular audience. His work on the decline of the British aristocracy became something of a cause celebre among both admirers and critics, while his review essays have long been required reading on both sides of the Atlantic. It may be said of Cannadine, as he himself wrote of G.M. Trevelyan, that his aim has been `to reconcile the
evidential rigour of the professional historian with the broad appeal and educative function of the literary historian'.

Cannadine was born (1950) and brought up in Birmingham, a grammar school lad who went on to become the first member of his family to go to
university. Was history a schoolboy interest? Cannadine recalls that he was pretty good at a number of subjects, among them maths, geography and divinity (`who knows -- I might have become a bishop!'), but acknowledges the influence of an inspiring history teacher named Graham Butler. After his A-Levels, Cannadine read History at Cambridge, did his graduate work at Oxford (a DPhil under Peter Mathias) with a year at Princeton (where the most important influence was Lawrence Stone). Still in his mid-twenties, he
returned to Cambridge where, after a two-year sojourn at St John's, he was appointed a Lecturer in History and Fellow of Christ's. At Christ's College, the presiding genius, and Cannadine's principal patron, was J.H. Plumb, Britain's premier historian of the eighteenth century. A man of immense energy and enthusiasm, Plumb was a riveting performer in the lecture room and a prolific writer, pouring out a stream of zestful, restless
prose on a wide variety of topics. Like his own master Trevelyan, Jack Plumb felt that a good historian should communicate not just to his professional peers but also to a wide public -- a message he has passed on to his own proteges, a list that includes John Brewer, Roy Porter, Simon Schama, Linda Colley, Niall Ferguson, David Reynolds, Geoffrey Parker -- and David Cannadine.
A year or two after Cannadine joined Christ's, Linda Colley arrived as the first woman Fellow of the college. Academic lore has it that Plumb acted as a marriage broker between Cannadine and Colley, a splendid story that Cannadine only half deflates, acknowledging that `when Jack told me that Linda was going to arrive, he said to me: "You never know, you might end up
marrying her!"' A few years later, Colley (by now Mrs Cannadine) was appointed to a post at Yale and, after a period of strenuous transatlantic commuting, her husband followed her to the States with a chair at Columbia. For a decade, history's most celebrated couple merely had to travel between New York and New Haven to see each other, while summers were spent back in the UK at their retreat in Norfolk. These were productive years for both, Cannadine's published opus including his book on the decline and fall of the
British aristocracy, his assessment of Trevelyan and a volume of Churchill's speeches which he edited and introduced, as well as publication of an anthology of his review essays and a further book about `aspects of
aristocracy'.

How did a boy from lower-middle-class Birmingham become preoccupied with the modern history of the British aristocracy and monarchy, with class and ritual, and with figures of such aristocratic lineage as Trevelyan and Churchill? Cannadine's first book, on aristocracy and the towns, arose from his DPhil thesis. It was in essence a study of the Calthorpe family of Birmingham, and more broadly the changes in Birmingham society in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries -- a way, perhaps, of helping Cannadine understand his own background. This research led to Cannadine's magnum opus on the decline and fall of the British aristocracy,
a book vaster in its range and sweep, and one, moreover, that takes its tale forwards almost to our own times. In the prologue to the book, Cannadine outlines three principles that guided him -- or, rather, three things he says he was keen to eschew. First, he is
writing in dissent from what he calls the `present craze for national heritage', the tendency to sentimentalise the aristocracy and their country houses. This kindly man can become quite fierce against what in one of his essays he dismisses as the `Ruritanian theme park' approach to British history, a `contrived fantasy of hype and heritage ... (and) ... a deluded pageant of self
indulgent historical backwardness'. Cannadine's aim is to treat the aristocracy seriously rather than sentimentally, to `rescue the British upper classes from the endless (and mindless) veneration of posterity'. If Cannadine's lance was bound to ruffle some upperclass plumage, his
second and third principles reveal him tilting at academic colleagues. The book `is written in protest against the current fashion in British history writing that stresses continuity at the expense of change'. Was Cannadine wishing to reinstate the emphasis on conflict and discontinuity so popular in the historiography of the radical 1960s? Maybe his Decline and Fall of the
British Aristocracy was a kind of homage, or complement, to E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. The statement of intent was certainly taken by some as a provocation. As was Cannadine's third principle -- that he was not writing `tunnel' history, the kind that can lead an investigator to know more and more about less and less (`a weakness to which the study of the recent British past is particularly prone'). He, on the contrary, lays claim to `panoramic ambitions', and
asserts that he has sought `to poke my head above the many specialist molehills'.
So: realistic rather than sentimental history, an emphasis on change (in particular, decline) -- and, for all the detail, a constant awareness of what would nowadays be called the `big picture'. Cannadine enjoys quoting the
distinction between those historians who are `parachutists' and those who are `truffle hunters'. While his own writing is packed with evocative detail and apposite quotation, he is unquestionably of the parachutist persuasion.

He talks with pride about the way his book on the decline of the aristocracy was a largescale, epic work covering a broad sweep of history. Most books on modern British history, he says, trying not to sound sniffy, have tended to be specifically political or social or economic monographs on particular people, ministries, institutions or events. And he should know, for it seems there is nothing by his peers he has not read. Over the years, indeed, Cannadine has built up a reputation as a
formidable reviewer, an eloquent essayist in the grand style capable of introducing, explaining, assessing, comparing and consigning the works of others with magisterial ease and authority. A master of paradox, metaphor and alliterative word-play, Cannadine will coax and cajole, tease and taunt, laud and lament. Like Plumb, Cannadine positively bursts with exuberant wit
even (especially?) when at his most withering. Prince Albert, he opines, discovered `the impotence of being earnest', while to Kitty Kelley's claim that her book on the Windsors takes an `unblinking look' at its subject,
Cannadine remarks dryly that that `might, of course, mean that her eyes are permanently open or permanently closed'. But, as befits one in the
succession of Macaulay, Trevelyan and Plumb, he also calls upon his literary dexterity in defense of those he admires. In an entertaining review of Peter Gay's The Bourgeois Experience, much enlivened by stimulating
verbal foreplay, Cannadine argues that in writing on sex `it is probably better to be Whiggish than priggish'; and of the peripatetic, industrious. As a Briggs he says that `in one guise he is a supersonic G.M. Trevelyan' and in
another `the thinking man's Mountbatten'. This autumn sees a further collection of his essays (`my last') and a study of the idea of class in British history. Both contain the usual Cannadine wit and erudition and display his infectious enjoyment of the achievements, foibles
and failures of grandees of the recent past. History for Our Time includes trenchant reviews of books on the royals and of lives of people like Beaverbrook, Boothby, Buchan, Churchill, Macmillan and Mosley. We also
encounter the acute historiographical antennae with which Cannadine senses shifts in the writing of history itself. One of his reviews (of The Cambridge Social History of Britain, edited by a predecessor as IHR
Director, F.M.L. Thompson), begins with a masterly survey of changing approaches to social history from Trevelyan and Plumb, through the avowedly class-based, Marxist interpretations of Edward Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm and the subsequent `experience rather than analysis' school of social history, to what Cannadine regards as the postmodernist uncertainties and little hegemonies that characterise much of today's
writing. Though disavowing the simplistic Marxism of some earlier writing, he argues that social history is nothing if it does not take account of that British obsession -- class. What is needed, he says, is `a comprehensive study of social structure and social attitudes over the last three centuries for Britain as a whole.' A daunting task. `Who, if anyone, is willing to try?' The answer, of course, is Cannadine himself, in his other new book, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain. In some ways, the rise and fall of class is a kissing cousin of the decline and tail of the aristocracy, chronicling aspects
of social status and hierarchy over time against a background of increasing social equality. But this book is not about class as an objective fact or structure in British history, but about shifting perceptions -- class, that is,
seen subjectively. He outlines three basic ways in which the British have seen their own society: a seamless hierarchy with everyone having, and knowing, his or her place; a three-way split between tipper, middle and
lower; and a more adversarial dichotomy between `us' and `them' With this schema as background, Cannadine traces perceptions of class from the eighteenth century to the present. More than any of his other works, this is a book about interpretations of the past. In its pages, Cannadine assesses, and often takes issue with, the
conclusions of many of his most illustrious predecessors -- not just the historians, but the novelists, politicians and polemicists whose images of British society have been influential. This is, perhaps, Cannadine staking out his territory -- an anti-Marxist big enough to be interested in class, a working-class boy capable of under standing social hierarchy, a man of letters able to develop a theoretical framework and sustain it through three
centuries of history, a crystalline intelligence arguing that other people's interpretations over-simplify, above all a man who relishes past grandeur yet (like Gibbon) is at his most eloquent chronicling its decline. Is there something elegiac about his subject-matter and his ways of dealing
with it? If so, this is perhaps appropriate to a fin-de-siecle historian, a product of the once-proud Welfare State and a man raised in the fading shadow of an eroding empire. Cannadine does not regret the passing of the
old order; indeed, he is capable, when appropriate, of having a lot of fun at its expense. But he is profoundly taken with Trevelyan's view of history, that its poetry, `lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that (race, on this earth, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now
all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow'.

Is Cannadine now a different kind of British historian for having spent a decade in the USA? He feels able to regard British institutions and attitudes with a detachment that can only come from living abroad for a while. Thus, the book on class concludes that, if anyone is serious about wanting to make British society more egalitarian (which he doubts), they could learn from America -- for example, by abolishing the sense of hierarchy associated with hereditary peerage and titles of honour (not to mention the monarchy), and undertaking root-and-branch educational reform. He is in the early stages of research for his first American subject: a
biography of the financier, art collector and political figure Andrew Mellon. Mellon, a Pittsburgh millionaire and businessman as taciturn as his political master Calvin Coolidge, was a banker who financed many major business enterprises, Secretary to the Treasury in the 1920s, US ambassador to London and principal benefactor of the National Gallery in Washington DC.
Mellon's life, says Cannadine, touches everything; he is the largest figure of his generation still awaiting a serious biography. Meanwhile, Cannadine also looks forward to getting down to his survey of Britain in the nineteenth
century for the new Penguin History series (of which he is editor) and notes that, when the nineteenth century came to an end, issues like devolution, Irish Home Rule, and House of Lords reform were high on the agenda -- as they are today. New Labour might be seen as picking up where Gladstonian Liberalism left off.

As he approaches fifty, how far will this excellent communicator allow himself to become a more public figure? Cannadine sighs, and admits that he enjoys his occasional forays into the media, especially if (like Trevelyan and Plumb) he can bring some awareness of historical perspective to a wider audience. He clearly has no desire to become a universal pundit with a ready opinion on everything he is asked, and is scornful of those who do. But lie is happy to answer questions if he feels he has something to offer. Perhaps the government should seek his views about reform of the House of Lords... I asked Cannadine whether he feels that we live in an ahistorical culture, an era of fashion-led perspectives in which history is the name we give
everything that happened before last week. The optimist in him clutches for evidence to the contrary; he cites the popularity of history that he and Linda met among undergraduates at Columbia and Yale, plus the success of books by people like Simon Schama, Roy Foster, Paul Kennedy and Orlando Figes (not to mention Linda's Britons). But he does worry, that the view of the world projected by today's media lacks temporal perspective and is excessively sensationalised, trivialised,
personalised -- and not only by the media. `The present Labour government projects an image of not being concerned with the past,' he says acerbically, `except insofar as it wants to get rid of it.' And he adds: `Even if
you want to get rid of the past you probaby ought to know a little bit more about it.' We live in a world, Cannadine senses, that is increasingly `amnesiac'. Historians, he concludes, citing Trevelyan once more, have to be public communicators. `The job of the historian is to help give people a sense of existence in time -- without which we are really not fully human.'
Daniel Snowman's most recent book (co-edited with Asa Briggs) was about ends of centuries; he is working on a study of the impact of the emigres from Hitler's Europe on subsequent British cultural history.

Snowman, Daniel David Cannadine.(life and career of David Cannadine, Director of the Institute of Historical Research, England) History Today v48, n10 (Oct, 1998):24 (3 pages).

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