I Wish I’d Been There: Twenty Historians Revisit Key Moments in History
Edited by Theodore K. Rabb and Byron Hollinshead
Macmillan £20, 456 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

Leopold von Ranke’s famous definition of what historians should strive for can be variously translated. “As it actually was” is the most common rendering of “Wie es eigentlich gewesen”; “as it essentially was” is probably more exact. The great Oxford philosopher of history, R.G. Collingwood, was more precise: “Historical knowledge is the re-enactment of a past thought.”