64 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022
Dickens, Tolstoy, Toni Morrison, and Hil-
ary Mantel. He writes about journalists;
television documentarians (he thinks Ken
Burns’s “most effective documentaries
rank with many of the best works of writ-
ten history from the last fifty years”); and
popular historians, like Winston Chur-
chill, whose history of the Second World
War made him millions, even though it
was researched and partially written by
persons other than Winston Churchill.
Cohen is English, and was the direc-
tor of two London publishing houses,
biographical facts that, to apply his own
test, might account for (a) his willing-
ness to treat journalism, historical fiction,
and television documentaries on a par
with the work of professional scholars,
since, as a publisher, he is interested in
work that has an audience and an influ-
ence, and (b) the Anglocentrism of his
choices. American readers may feel that
writers from the United Kingdom are
overrepresented, although that list does
include historians whose careers were
spent largely in American universities,
such as Simon Schama, Tony Judt, and
Niall Ferguson. But “Making History” is
a book, not an encyclopedia, and what-
ever Cohen writes about he writes about
with brio. As the song goes, “If you want
any more, you can sing it yourself.”
A
very good thing about “Making
History” is that, despite the book’s
premise, it is not reductive or debunk-
ing. Except when Cohen is discussing
writers like the national-
ist revisionists, whose bias
is blatant and who aim to
deceive, and some Islamic
historians, who he thinks
are dogmatic and intoler-
ant, he tries to present a
balanced case and allow
readers to make their own
judgments. The message
is not “They’re all un-
trustworthy.” It’s that bias
in history-making is as inevitable as
point of view. You cannot not have it.
One area where Cohen may not have
achieved an ideal degree of detachment
is Marxism, which he handles with bris-
tly animosity and whose principles he
misrepresents by confusing Marxism
with Stalinism. He accuses Marx of fail-
ing to foresee the rise of fascism and
the welfare state, which is ridiculous.
Who did foresee those things in 1848?
There is a cost to this animus, since
Marxist thought played a big role in the
work of twentieth-century historians,
particularly in the United Kingdom.
Still, even here, Cohen tries to be cath-
olic. He plainly feels affection for the
British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who
joined the Communist Party in 1936
(bad enough) and remained a member
for fifty-five years (surreal).
“Making History” is a loaf with plenty
of raisins. We learn (or I learned, any-
way) that Vladimir Putin’s grandfather
was Lenin’s and Stalin’s cook, that Na-
poleon was about average in height, that
Ken Burns is a descendant of the poet
Robert Burns, and that when the Marx-
ist critic György Lukács was arrested
following the outbreak of the Hungar-
ian Revolution and was asked if he was
carrying a weapon, he handed over his
pen. (That anecdote is a little neat. I
had to take it with a grain of salt—but
I took it.)
He is not sloppy, exactly, but he can
be a bit breezy. Cornel West was not
the director of the African and African
American Studies program at Harvard,
and Jill Lepore does not come from “a
privileged family.” And there are (inev-
itably) assertions one could quarrel with.
Cohen thinks, for example, that “oral
history is no more prone to making
things up or changing the past to suit
the present than is written history.” This
has not been my experience. You always
have to fact-check what peo-
ple say, not because they lie
deliberately (although Andy
Warhol lied in pretty much
every interview he ever gave)
but simply because we don’t
remember things accurately.
It’s like when you’re search-
ing for a picture in your
photo library: “I was sure it
was in 2008 that we visited
the Grand Canyon!” But it
was in 2009. Mistaken recollections of
this sort are common in oral histories
and interviews because people gener-
ally have no stake in getting dates right.
Historians do, though.
Cohen likes journalistic histories,
books written by reporters who were wit-
nesses to some of the events they de-
scribe. (One omission here is William
Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the ThirdReich,” which, with its Gibbonesque title,
won a National Book Award and sold a
million hardcover copies.) He thinks that
journalists, if they aspire to be objective,
can get “pretty close to the truth.” But,
he adds, “what one needs is time to judge
that truth in the cold cast of thought.”
This is the traditional “first draft of
history” definition of journalism, and
part of the belief that our understand-
ing of the past improves with time. I
wonder if this is really true, though.
Maybe we’re just smoothing the rough
edges, losing some bits of what actually
happened in order to get the story the
way we want it. As history’s first re-
sponders, journalists may be more reli-
able because they are not usually work-
ing under the spell of a theory (though
Shirer had one). They are describing
what happened. Like any other histo-
rian, they are trying to produce a coher-
ent narrative, but they don’t need to sub-
sume every fact under a thesis. They also
have a better sense of something that
no subsequent student of the past can
really know and that gets harder and
harder to reconstruct: what it felt like.I
t’s striking how often this concept—
“what it felt like”—turns up in “Mak-
ing History” as the true goal of histor-
ical reconstruction. “The historian will
tell you what happened,” E. L. Doc-
torow said. “The novelist will tell you
what it felt like.” Cohen quotes Hilary
Mantel: “If we want added value—to
imagine not just how the past was, but
what it felt like, from the inside—we
pick up a novel.”
We expect novelists to make this
claim. They can describe what is going
on in characters’ heads and what char-
acters are feeling, which historians
mostly cannot, or should not, do. But
historians want to capture what it felt
like, too. For what they are doing is not
all that different from what novelists are
doing: they are trying to bring a van-
ished world to life on the page. Novel-
ists are allowed to invent, and histori-
ans have to work with verifiable facts.
They can’t make stuff up; that’s the one
rule of the game. But they want to give
readers a sense of what it was like to be
alive at a certain time and place. That
sense is not a fact, but it is what gives
the facts meaning.
This is what G. R. Elton, the histo-