New Book from Adrian Goldsworthy: How Rome Fell

[Jona Lendering]

There are no ‘self-taught historians’.

I couldn't agree with you more (although I am willing to make an exception for Edward Gibbon). Historian is a job like any other job. There are no self-taught surgeons or self-taught judges; and even the owner of the pub around my corner has to have a certificate that he knows the basic rules about hygiene. But people like Tom Holland pretend that they can be historians, even though they are unable to define what a fact or an explanation is. Typically, they only use the hermeneutical approach, and make all possible mistakes. I am not saying professional historians never make these mistakes, but at least they have had courses of theory, and have at least once heard that -for example- the hermeneutical approach is very tricky.