Peter Burke

0:00:05 Parentage; father’s family from Galway; father born in Birkenhead a week after his parents arrived in England in 1904; mother’s father from Vilnius, left Russia in 1883; mother’s mother came from Lodz in Poland in 1887; on mother’s side Jewish, father’s Catholic; mother converted to Catholicism but without fervour; parents met at a German club but only ever spoke English; mother had spent year in Berlin 1930-31; father a real linguist, a professional translator, and learnt languages as a hobby; later became a bookseller and learnt Chinese and Japanese so he could sell Japanese prints

0:05:35 Have carried on the family tradition though never learnt Irish; speak romance languages – French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and a bit of Catalan; can read the Germanic languages and decipher some Slav languages; made an effort with Polish as more relevant to seventeenth century history than Russian

0:08:10 Not easy to describe influence of parents; mother more outgoing; when talking with sisters and parents used Yiddish words; father more solitary and not keen on socializing; hobby was reading; have inherited a bit of both

0:10:02 Went to St Ignatius, Stamford Hill [London]; a Jesuit grammar school, so started at eleven; at sixteen went on compulsory Jesuit retreat; just like Joyce’s ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ with hell-fire sermon; have been a sceptic for a very long time; Jesuits enjoyed arguing for the existence of God; at Oxford tried formally to leave the church; visited by a Jesuit and a secular priest; the latter, sympathetic, was Anthony Kenny, who later left the priesthood and became Master of Balliol

0:13:20 Had a history master at school, Father O’Higgens, who had ambitions for me; at seven had decided I wanted to be a professor of history; by ‘S’ Level only person in the class; he was serious about history which may have influenced me more than I thought at the time; got open scholarship at St John’s in history in 1954; nobody from my school had done this before; interviewed by Costin who was later President of St John’s and Howard Colvin, who taught me mediaeval history

0:17:23 Before going to Oxford did National Service; wanted to do Russian course and to be sent to Germany, but not possible; became a clerk after basic training at Caterick; horrible but illuminating; posted to Singapore as a pay clerk for locally enlisted personnel – Malays, Chinese, Indians; I was doing something like fieldwork without knowing; until I was twenty-one I had not come across the word ‘anthropology’; then read a book on anthropology by Evans-Pritchard and found from the description of fieldwork that I had been doing it in Singapore; had boring job that didn’t take long to do; fascinating mixture of peoples; wanted to observe and write down; real culture shock; first shock was to realize how corrupt the regiment was; officers didn’t see anything; large quantities of equipment ended up in a market in town, known unofficially as the “Thieves Market”; drivers used to siphon petrol out of the tanks of lorries; protection racket; renting out space to civilians to sleep

0:24:45 Race issues between British and the rest; questioned Malays on their customs which they seemed to enjoy; now think it was the experience of Singapore that has given an anthropological edge to my work; even thought about reading anthropology at Oxford, if so would have work among the Malay people; had very easy rapport with Malays

0:29:43 Back in Oxford, in the first week went to see the Senior Tutor and said I wanted to learn Chinese but told I would lose my scholarship; I might have had a career like Jonathan Spence or Mark Elwin; decided to read early modern history; tutored by Keith Thomas; memories of Keith Thomas; in 1958 shy and earnest, wanted everybody to work really hard; think that his tutorial style based on what he had learnt from Christopher Hill; later, when a graduate student, rather critical of the system, encouraged by Keith to write in Oxford Magazine; also organised talks about history and something; Asa Briggs did History and Sociology and Keith did History and Anthropology, later published in Past and Present; what had impressed us as undergraduates was his article on double standards in History of Ideas; mixture of conventional and unconventional; his teaching was conventional but his research unconventional; his style closer to Bloch than others;

0:38:10 Trevor-Roper my research supervisor much more flamboyant, constantly denouncing people; as Regius Professor used to interview anybody that wanted to do historical research; critical of all those I thought I’d like as supervisor and realized he wanted to be asked; saw him every term and he walked up and down delivering a lecture; never communicated with me; never finished the PhD; we stayed quite close until after I’d published an article on tacitism; my later involvement with History Workshop ended our relationship

0:41:49 Meeting Raphael Samuel was one of the great formative experiences for me; ranking of historians, Namier above Tawney; Keith above Tawney, below Namier; on intellectual power, the greatest I have met were Isaiah Berlin, Momigliano and Leszek Kolakowski

0:45:39 I had meant to do research on the Jesuits in Rome; went to Campion Hall and got a letter to the archivist; took a negative response as final although it might have been open to negotiation; decided to do research on history of historical writing; chose a Venetian anti-Jesuit, Paulo Sarpi; Trevor-Roper one of the few who would have known of Sarpi at that time as he’d read The History of the Council of Trent; historiography; introduced to Momigliano by Trevor-Roper who was working on reception of ancient historians, especially Tacitus; stayed in touch for the rest of his life; like having a continuous conversation; think he was maybe the greatest scholar that I have encountered; realized that Keith Thomas was an important historian when I reviewed his book on the radio in 1971; in the same class as Stone’s Aristocracy and Thompson’s Making of the Working Class

0:51:02 Lawrence Stone and Christopher Hill were the lecturers at Oxford for early modernists; Stone histrionic; read Edward Thompson’s books but didn’t meet him until conference where he said he was a Marxist empiricist and Ernest Gellner said it was a contradiction in terms; difficult but fascinating character; Stone was instrumental in my getting to Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton; Felix Gilbert at the Institute may have asked Stone to suggest names of younger scholars; had to get reference from Trevor-Roper who suspected the hand of Stone; I said I was applying to the Institute because I was writing a book on the Renaissance and that Ervin Panofsky was there; at Princeton shuttled between the Institute and the Firestone Library and the history department where there were tremendous graduate seminars; first week there Tom Kuhn came to talk; Edward Thompson’s was an intellectual influence; I was very interested in and sympathetic to Marx; at St Anthony’s had spent a lot of time reading Marx and Weber

0:55:05 Not only people that influence you but environments; St John’s Oxford was a great environment for relatively conventional history; not such a good idea to do research in own undergraduate college; got senior scholarship at St Anthony’s where most people were studying the twentieth century and very few people came from Britain; there had been a division in the college fellowship and James Joll had the idea that there should be a few people within the college with interests other than the twentieth century; also thought they should bring in a few Oxford graduates each year to be able to explain British and Oxford culture to the rest; this environment very important to me; my best friend was an Ecuadorian with whom I am still in touch; continental atmosphere where one could talk about philosophy over dinner, unlike other Oxford colleges; I gravitated to Mediterranean, Latin, people; joint sociology philosophy seminar on alienation with Iris Murdoch and Norman Birnbaum; found myself giving a paper on ‘The Concept of Alienation in the Context of Recent American Sociological Studies of Factory Workers’, Norman Birnbaum providing the bibliography; read a book on the man on the assembly line; interested in the long quotations from interviews; talk based on this single book and Birnbaum asked why; because it was the only one where you heard the voices of people being studied not just the sociologist.
Part 2

0:00:05 Memories of Christopher Hill; as a Marxist never as interesting as Eric Hobsbawm or Edward Thompson because they were more creative with the concepts; deeply learned in seventeenth century England; use of quotations in writing; since 1985 I have written on a computer; I constantly revise, sometimes after many years; before the computer used typewriter, scissors and paste; I like writing, especially any draft after the first; sentences come into my head when I’m walking, so I have little notepad; found writing is a good start to research, only then do I discover what I really need to know; I write in the morning and this throws up a whole lot of queries; while walking to the University Library I stop three or four times because a sentence has come; in the library I try to solve all the questions that came up in the morning; next morning, insert these passages, rewrite, go on a bit, new questions, go back to library the next afternoon; for me the ideal system with the most intense activity the writing when freshest in the morning; don’t work very much in the evening

0:07:04 The Annales school and work of Braudel; read Braudel’s book on Mediterranean as an undergraduate; Keith Thomas’s observation on Braudel; went to other people from his footnotes; Febvre and Marc Bloch; at one stage did think it would be interesting to work with Braudel, especially on the Jesuits; did meet him later and interviewed him for the BBC; such a powerful personality that there was a danger of being taken over; Trevor-Roper in the 1960’s sympathetic to Annales; learnt from Braudel to place things in the larger context; used this observation in teaching undergraduates

0:12:00 Went to Sussex University in 1962 while it was still being built; very exciting; sense that we were going to have to create tradition; I applied for the job because I’d heard Asa Briggs talk on history and sociology when he’d said that this sort of interdisciplinary work was going to happen at Sussex; challenge of having to invent new courses; so many of the staff were recent graduate or research students and we were allowed to do so; chances of collaboration with sociology, literature and philosophy were enormous; first professor of anthropology was Freddie Bailey who caught me with Malinowski and said that anthropologists did not believe in him any more; felt the anthropologists were not keen on my involvement where sociologists were happy for me to teach sociology; from the first year I taught a course in sociological theory which was how I learnt it; helped by having had a reference for the job from Birnbaum so Briggs was aware of sociological interest; wonderful to be able to spread interests over other disciplines; opposite when came to Cambridge in 1979 as one had to justify any borrowing from another discipline in the history faculty

0:16:40 With Bob Scribner set up course on historical anthropology which had to go to the faculty board; the board kept sending it back as Derek Beales opposed in principle to it; one year when he wasn’t in the chair the board approved the course but as long as there was no theory in it; we agreed and took no notice; it ran for six years and students loved it

0:18:20 Emmanuel College a culture shock after Sussex where everything was informal; tie incident; so many little customs that I started to take notes like an anthropologist; at a conference on art history in Italy in 1982, Bourdieu wanted to know how Cambridge worked; encouraged to write from the notes and published article ‘Notes towards the ethnography of a Cambridge college’ under the name of William Dell; college called St Dominics as Emmanuel on the site of the Dominican Friars; William Dell was once a fellow of Emmanuel, a radical puritan, on whom Christopher Hill has written

0:23:06 Met Raphael Samuel in Oxford in 1964 when I had a term’s leave there; he was very interested in history of religion and popular religion; started a series of graduate seminars with Gill Thomas (later Sutherland), Gareth Steadman-Jones, and Roderick Floud; I talked about Jansenism and John Walsh talked on Methodism; Raphael talked about nineteenth century; one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever met; after Edward Thompson the person who has given working class history an epic quality; kind of elder brother to me, wanting me to be more committed to the left; Ruskin conferences; childhood in history; socialist history; possibly wouldn’t have written book on popular culture without his friendship

0:26:57 Met Roy Porter in the late 1970’s when give a lecture on history of mentalities; later started to collaborate

0:28:28 Two very big problems I’ve been wrestling with all my life; one is how far there is a European history, a common culture; think of it in terms of bringing my two pairs of grandparents together; the other question is on history and theory and whether one can use concepts from other social sciences

0:31:05 On marriage to a Brazilian; always been drawn to latin cultures; excited by work on Italy and Spain even as an undergraduate; Maria Lucia invited me to lecture in Brazil, in San Paolo; tried to see Brazil as an enormous, chaotic Italy; Maria Lucia’s family as mixed as mine, Italian on one side and Spanish on the other, yet speaks Portuguese; her parents were migrants like my grandparents; in Brazil taken for granted that everyone is a migrant; thanks to Singapore and Italy adjusted to the idea that apparent rules may not be the real rules, very clearly so in Brazil.