This is an accessible collection of essays by a leading historian and critic. Subjects include the idea of "the national past," the historian as social critic, the claims of Cultural Studies, the nature of academic "research," the function of the literary biography, and the lives and ideas of such figures as Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Bertrand Russell, R. H. Tawney, Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart.