Mark Goldie

AM: So, it's a great pleasure at last I will talk to Mark Goldie about his life and work. Mark, always start by asking where and when you were born.

MG: I was born in South London and was brought up in the suburb of Streatham, about which there's very little to be said. It has an ice rink, that is about the only thing it's known for. It was a commuter suburb of South London and I found it terribly dull. At least once I was old enough to realise what dullness was. I found it extremely dull.

AM: And when?

MG: I was born in 1952. I'm a post-war welfare state boy and in fact there is a memoir by somebody who was also brought up in Streatham. The woman who wrote a book Landscape for a Good Woman is the name of it. I don't know if it reminds you of anything. She, Carolyn Steadman, went on to be a historian at Warwick University and she gives a very nice evocation of life in Streatham at that time. In her case, working class, but went to grammar school and describes going to the same clinic that I did to get our welfare state orange juice and that ghastly stuff cod liver oil which I really loathed.

AM: So tell me something about your antecedent ancestors. People often go back to their grandparents so tell me about what you knew about them.

MG: I can go back much further. In fact one of the things I'm doing in my retirement, as so often people do, is to explore their ancestry. But I'm trying to do it wearing my historian's hat. It was a Roman Catholic family and of a deeply conservative hue. To many non-Catholics that would seem a tautology, that to be Catholic and to be conservative would be the same thing. But part of my thesis is that if you look at Catholicism in England in the 18th century, it in fact aligned itself with the Enlightenment and took sides with English non-conformists because they all had a cause in common of seeking toleration and admission to the civic community. And if you go back to my great-great-great-grandfather, he was a physician in York, very well integrated with the intelligentsia of York, of every religion, and particularly the non-conformists. It was the next generation, the high Victorian generation, that took on a profoundly conservative hue. The physician's son was an architect and covered the land in heavy Gothic churches, dark places, very much part of the Gothic revival, persuaded by the great Pugin to convert to Gothicism. And I tend to think belonged to a kind of Catholicism that thought the Enlightenment was a very bad idea and wanted to roll it back. He married into French aristocracy, which itself had an interesting career in trying to roll back the French Revolution, restore the French monarchy, and so on. And I'm afraid the story comes to a rather bad end because by the time you reach my grandfather's generation, you do indeed end up with fascist Catholics. It's become quite fashionable now to have a fascist in the family, and I can confess to that as well. My grandfather, George Goldie, was, he struggled to make a career as a writer and failed. He spent most of his time teaching English to French and German students who lived upstairs in the house, had great pretensions to be of the middle class intelligentsia, but not the wherewithal to do it. And the story of most of my family since the heyday of the 19th century is of people desperately trying to prove to themselves that they're middle class, but never quite having the means to do so. And he ended up in effect supporting the Nazi party from afar, from in England. He shared the notion that the Bolsheviks were the enemies of Christianity and that somehow the European fascists were going to hold back the wave of atheism, and a vague sense of medievalism, that the medieval world was a good thing. He wrote a couple of bad novels, which idealised in a kind of Chesterton-Belloc sort of way, Chesterton and Belloc were great heroes, tried to utopianise a kind of medieval Catholic central hierarchy in which all would be well and in which the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment never happened. My uncle, Adrian, who was killed in the Second World War, ironically, was in fact a, I'm told a black shirt who marched about at the age of 17 in London following Mosley. Mercifully, my father, although socially deeply conservative, didn't inherit that politics. So I was unaware of this background until a much greater age. One of the things I slightly resent my father for was that on the one hand, he was incredibly precious about the hierarchies of family. You must always call your uncles and aunts, uncle so and so and aunt so and so, and show respect. You could never be equal friends with them. And yet he seemed to know nothing about the history of his ancestors, whether as architects or indeed the social attitudes of his ancestors. So I'm trying to explore that ancestry as a way of telling partly the history of English Catholicism in the last couple of hundred years, and partly the history of Victorian Catholic architecture.

AM: Interesting. Well, that's your father's side, Goldie's. What about your mother's?

MG: Well, it sounds terribly patriarchal to say so, but most of what I know and I'm interested in is on the father's side, simply because of the information that's available and the patriarchal assumptions that were handed down. So the portraits and the papers.

AM: So your maternal grandmother?

MG: My maternal grandmother was in service. And her husband, my maternal grandfather, was a builder. And my mother married into the middle class and was a lifelong working class Tory. Again, even more than my father, desperate to prove that she was middle class. One of the great ironies of the time was that having escaped, as she thought, the skivvying that her mother had had to do, she herself ends up as a skivvy, because she was a 1950s mother and housewife, looking after four children and keeping house clean. And of course, not having a job, since it would have been unthinkable in suburban Catholic 1950s for a married woman to have a job.

AM: So what did your father do?

MG: My father was a local authority worker. He worked for the Inner London Education Authority, doing rather unexciting things behind a desk. He was an autodidact, very widely read, there were a lot of books in the house. He could easily have benefited from higher education, but he could never have afforded it in the era before grants became available. And I've always resisted those who say that expansion of universities is a bad thing, because it means lots of people who don't benefit go to it. Because I'm conscious of people like my father, and his whole generation would really have benefited from university, but nobody in my family had ever been to university.

AM: Interesting. What about their characters? How far do you think your mother or father influenced you? Or in what ways, rather?

MG: Well my father influenced me more. I ended up reacting profoundly against almost everything he stood for. He was politically a lifelong Liberal voter, and his broad political attitudes were indeed liberal capital L and small l, but deeply socially conservative, profoundly traditional in his Catholic beliefs. Couldn't ever face the fact that his own sister was a lesbian, couldn't face the fact that one of his brothers-in-laws was an atheist, and lived a profoundly devout world. He should have been a priest, actually. I don't think he was cut out to be married and to be a father. He would have made a very good priest. He, the end of his life, proudly had on his wall his certificate from the Pope. He had the equivalent of the MBE from the Pope, the Benemerenti, for his lifelong work as secretary or chairman of the Catholic Guild of London County Hall. So Catholicism was absolutely his life, and the family was kind of an aside, really, though he had four children.

AM: And your mother's character?

MG: My mother, I never understood. She, I think, was not a happy woman. Late in life she attempted suicide more than once, and may indeed have died by suicide, but there was an open verdict at the coroner.

AM: How old were you when she died?

MG: This was only ten years ago, so it was relatively recently. And I never understood the source of her unhappiness. She had a breakdown when I was in my twenties. Being the kind of family they were, it wasn't something you talked about, so I knew little about it. Their view was that it was no business of children to know the inner lives of their parents, so there was a great, great gulf. And I never fell out with my parents in a kind of noisy, quarrelsome, never going to speak to you again way. The polite externalities remained, but after the age of eighteen I had nothing in common with them. I left home, as that generation did, left home never to return, except for Christmas as it were, and abandoned the religion that I was brought up with.

AM: Well, I was going to ask you about that. Usually religion comes in later, but since it's featured so much so far, that religious background, what effect does it have on your religious beliefs?

MG: Well, I was an extremely devout young man.

AM: When you say young, how young?

MG: Well, from whenever I reached consciousness I was required to be, expected to be, and successfully was, turned into a Roman Catholic. My father was deeply upset when he learnt that I had left the religion behind, and I think blamed Sussex University for that, and the modern world in general. I lived in an extraordinary secluded world. It's hard to believe that in 1960s England you could live in a world in which you almost never met a Protestant. I went to a Catholic school, all our friends and family were all Catholic, virtually all, and I simply didn't meet Protestants in a Protestant country until I was eighteen. It was a very monastic world, and that brings me to my school, if I may say something about that.

AM: Yes, do.

MG: I went to a grammar school in South London, taught by the De La Salle Brothers, otherwise known as the Brothers of the Christian School. Very good academically, in fact going through a phase in the 60s of pretending to be a minor public school, very good academically. Indeed, it's an extraordinary fact that that school in that era produced no less than two Cambridge professors of intellectual history, because Stefan Collini was there. He was head boy when I was three or four years behind, and as you know the age gaps there meant much more, so he and I have always had this kind of slightly queasy, jokey relationship in which whenever we bump into each other he says, well dear boy, have you done your homework? He was the great paragon of the school, he was the brightest kid, and head of rugby, and head of cricket, and head of everything, and off to Cambridge. Our paths have overlapped over the years, he went to Cambridge, I went to Sussex, then he took a job at Sussex, and I took a job at Cambridge. He eventually came back to Cambridge. So our backgrounds and the values we were brought up with are very similar indeed. So I was taught by monks, but also by some laymen, but they were all devout Catholics. again very secluded, very tight-knit and monastic. It's a school which gave me a lot academically, but also there were monks there who, typical of what we know about Catholic education in the 50s and 60s, monks who would be in jail now, were they still alive. Brother Solomon, undoubtedly.

AM: You weren't going to mention names.

MG: I'm going to mention the name because he's dead. He's dead and he has a notoriety which I think is probably on record. One of my friends now dead was abused, seriously abused by him, and if you read between the lines of this friend's published poetry, you can see it there. So I have no qualms about naming Brother Solomon.

AM: What about yourself, asking a personal question?

MG: I was not. I was most certainly not harmed. Paul, my friend, was a border there, so I think they were the ones who got it. I was certainly aware of and subject to minor fiddlings and fondlings...

AM: Harassments.

MG:... but nothing to traumatise. It was just a taken for granted of that kind of era and that kind of atmosphere.

AM: Were there any particularly good teachers who influenced you?

MG: Yes, yes, yes. I'll come in a second to the two wonderful history teachers, but I'll mention just a couple of others. One was a marvellous English teacher, a layman who then had what was called a late vocation and went off to be a priest late in life after teaching us, but he introduced me to all sorts of reading I wouldn't otherwise have done, particularly George Orwell. He got me reading George Orwell and I'm very glad he did that. And then I must mention Mr Radovicz, not because of what he taught me, but what he spent his lessons talking about instead of teaching me geography, because he was a Polish man who had been in the Polish Embassy in Berlin in the 1930s and got beaten up by the Nazi youth and was in the Polish Allied Army fighting his way up Italy in the 1940s. And so he told us wonderful tales of his life. And I must say for that school in South London, although it was almost entirely white, it was nonetheless very cosmopolitan across Europe. And I think that, although I've said Catholicism is very narrowing, in one sense it was cosmopolitan because it was full of Poles, Irish and Italians. So it was the European mix of people of Catholic descent. But I had two wonderful history teachers who seemed to fulfil the caricatures of Oxford and Cambridge, or at least as we suppose they were. Brother Paul had been to Cambridge and was ascetic and solemn and serious. And his approach to history was Hegelian. He looked for deep structures and veered off towards philosophy. On the other hand, Peter Duskin, Mr Duskin, a layman who's still alive and I see occasionally and taught Stefan Collini as well, he was an Oxford man. He was rotund, a bon viveur and taught history in hilarious anecdotes. And so his philosophy, insofar as he had one, was that the wild contingency of everything in life and history, it was one accident followed upon another. And these were a wonderful contrast and gave one quite different insights. For Peter Duskin, history veered towards literature, a good yarn, a good story. It was a roaring narrative of the accidents of the past. For brother Paul, he was, as I say, reducing history to philosophy, turning his into philosophy to find the deep structures. I'm not sure he found them, but anyway, he got us thinking about them.

AM: They sound really good. Just to go backwards, because we've got nearly to Sussex already, but one question I ask, which is taking you right back to the beginning, what was your first concrete memory?

MG: My first concrete memory, there are two or three because I can't work out which was the first, but I remember very little from my childhood, early childhood. But one is of my sister's birth, when I must be when I was four. In those days, nobody was allowed, even the husband, into the maternity wards. And so I remember standing on a pavement, looking up to the first floor where my mother clutching a little bundle waved from the window to announce my new sister. The other thing I remember, which tells you a lot about, if you like, the technologies of the 1950s, the lack of cars, it's on my father's bicycle, those little seats that are on the front bar. So I must have been three or four because older than that you couldn't go on the front crossbar. And he would cycle me from Streatham to Dulwich to see my grandmother. And I can't remember any cars. This was the South Circular Road in the mid 1950s. And we regularly cycled the three or four miles to Dulwich and back. And I loved whizzing along on the bicycle. I think those are my earliest.

AM: Excellent. The other thing around between the age of about five, when you start remembering and seven, eight, nine, did you have any passionate hobbies or interests?

MG: I was always embarrassed as a child when asked what my hobbies were, because I couldn't think that I had any. I was always very much a swot.

AM: Reading.

MG: Reading. I read a lot and in a very miscellaneous way. And I think the problem was that my father as an autodidact without a degree, had lots of books and interests, but all pretty ill-focused. He was very fond of encyclopedias and would constantly give me for Christmas reference books. And that's rubbed off, I fear, too much in terms of a tendency to a certain kind of fact gathering empiricism at times, despite my interest in theory, in political theory. But one thing I should say about the bookishness, he had an attic at the top of the house full of books because briefly he'd been a secondhand book dealer in the late 40s, but that hadn't worked out. So I think he just had the stock that was left over. And it was frozen in time in about 1947. And they were books of the 30s and 40s. And it conveyed to me a world in which everybody has an ideology because they were quite a serious books. There's hardly any novels in it at all. It was books with titles like A Beginner's Guide to Communism or Why I Fell for Catholicism or A Monk's Life or whatever. It wasn't just Catholic. It was every ideology, political particularly. There were fascist handbooks. There were communist handbooks. There were lots and lots of theology and religion. But it gave me the impression that everybody has a set of dogmas. Of course, mine were Catholic. That's what I was brought up with and a very doctrinal notion of what religion was, extremely doctrinal. Creeds. And out there was a world of other creeds, all false, of course, but like a good Thomist, one must understand what the false creeds were in order to refute them. So it was a world of creeds, but one that froze in about 1947.

AM: How fascinating. Right, well, coming back to the religion question, you said that you formally shocked your parents and left Catholicism at Sussex. Had you had earlier questionings?

MG: Yes, I had. I guess my school, like a lot of good Catholic schools, is very good at teaching you how to think and then gets rather alarmed when you do. And I can remember battles in the sixth form over permissions for the school debating society about what we're allowed to debate. It was all heavily censored and there were always compromises to be drawn and what you would be permitted to debate. For many people of my generation, the one event that made a huge difference to our Catholicism was Pope Paul VI's encyclical called Humanae Vitae in 1967, I think. And it reasserted the Catholic Church's traditional ban on all forms of contraception except the so-called rhythm method. And the great irony of this, of course, is that it had a purely intellectual impact. I wasn't at that age, in this slightest interested in sex. And for my whole generation, and I know this from many others besides, that it had an intellectual impact, quite irrespective of its practical importance in terms of sexuality. Because I read this document and discovered I couldn't possibly believe in the infallibility of the Pope because it was so manifestly wrong in all sorts of ways. And I even sat down and wrote a little sort of long essay on why I thought it was simply implausible. It seemed to me that the notion of permitting the natural method just undermined the rest of the argument in any case. And it just made no sense intellectually. And that opened up a can of worms. I was intellectually rescued for Catholicism for a while by falling for an intellectual called Teilhard de Chardin. Now you will know that name from his Chinese anthropological or archaeological interests. But Teilhard de Chardin was a very fashionable Catholic theologian back then in the 50s and 60s, and occasionally has cropped up since then. I think he's almost entirely forgotten now. But he managed to, in his books, combine a kind of scientific vision, rationalist vision, with a kind of mystical Christian Catholic vision in a way that was intellectually satisfying to those who are, to put it crudely, trying to marry their Catholic creed with the Enlightenment. It worked for a couple of years, but then that too fell apart. But I even went as far as joining a Teilhard de Chardin reading group. He was very fashionable among liberal Catholics for that period.

AM: Interesting. So after you gave it up, so to speak, at Sussex, what i your religious view now?

MG: I've been an atheist ever since, quite categorically so. I'm pretty anti-clerical. I loathe 'Thought for the Day' on Radio 4 for its platitudes and banalities. I'm in a quiet way angry at particularly the Church of England all the time for its absurdity and the way it gets off scot-free. Well, all the churches get off scot-free. They now, liberal Christians now, as you know, are liberal on sexuality, on marriage and so on, completely forgetting the 180 degree turn that they have committed in the last generation. They're just as dogmatic about the new liberalism as they were about the old orthodoxy. And then they insist that, well, there can't be morality without the basis of Christianity, which is manifest nonsense, but not least nonsense because they've turned their morality 180 degrees. In a way, liberal Christianity annoys me most of all for those reasons. And I have a sneaking respect for deeply conservative Catholic or Christian moralists because at least they're upholding the ancient teachings of the Church. And I do find it astonishing now that my father's views, which I profoundly disagree with on homosexuality, for example, are ones which very few modern Christians, unless they're fundamentalists, would accept any more. So I find that rather extraordinary. But one profound and continuing effect, of course, of my Christian upbringing is an interest in Christianity as history. And I probably know more about Christianity than many people who call themselves Christians because I was brought up with creeds and because I knew quite a bit of church history. And one way in which I think my work differs from the Cambridge School, whatever that is, is that it has tended to be very secularist in its assumptions. It belongs, I think, to a mid-20th century moment in which it was supposed that religion was going to simply die away and be wholly irrelevant. And the post-secular turn, as it's sometimes called, has rather put paid to that view. So whether one's a believer or not, one simply has to take religion seriously. And in my historical work, I've spent a lot of time interested in ecclesiology, toleration, and a whole lot of things like that which we could talk about, but takes us away from my upbringing. But just one other thought that I find quite disturbing now and I don't know how to handle is that a lot of post-secularists now, it's fashionable to say that religion isn't about creed, that creed is something that was invented by the Western European Christian tradition, particularly from the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation onwards. And that Islam, for example, is a way of life and Hinduism is a way of life. It's a set of mores, it's a part of ethnicity rather than a set of creeds. And one of the things that disturbs me is it's now very hard to criticise religion. I'm quite sure that in my own lifetime it's become harder to be publicly negative about religion because religion has brilliantly turned itself into ethnicity. To criticise Islam or Christianity or Judaism is now automatically seen as racist in effect, whereas what I think I'm doing is criticising a set of propositions. But then the retort now is, but you're wrong, religion isn't about propositions anyway. But I was brought up to assume that religions, of all religions, are a set of creeds which any rational person should be able to sit down and defend or refute. But that I think has become difficult to do now.

AM: Very interesting. Sadly we must whiz on to Sussex.

MG: Yes.

AM: Why did you go to Sussex and what did you find there?

MG: In 1970 when I went to university, Sussex had a huge reputation, a very positive reputation. It was the golden campus of the seven campuses created in the 1960s. I caricatured Oxbridge as so many still do, that it would be more of the same as my old school minus the Catholicism and it would be terribly reactionary, as we used the word we all used then. And I didn't want to go there. And I simply made a list of all the, what were then the new universities, Warwick, Lancaster, East Anglia, Kent, Sussex. That was just my application list. And Sussex admitted me and I was absolutely delighted to be there. I have a huge nostalgia for it. It had more effect on me there. I wanted to go somewhere that would change me because I was absolutely fed up of suburban London, parents, family, Catholicism, et cetera. And incidentally, I've never taken the idea that universities are ivory towers. I escaped the ivory tower. The ivory tower was suburban Streatham and my background. Universities always seemed to me to be tremendously cosmopolitan places by comparison. Sussex was an extraordinarily exciting place. I didn't realise how much it would impact me and I had a pretty exhilarating but terrible time in my first year because everything I was was deconstructed, almost deliberately so, by people around me and by teachers. They made it their business to deconstruct whatever it was you happened to believe. So it was extremely tough and I had pretty low moments in my first year. But at the same time, I found it intellectually and humanly absolutely exhilarating. Its curriculum was very different from traditional universities. It had quite a lot of Oxbridge or Oxford roots in the stress on tutorials rather than lectures. But on the other hand, it had an American-style liberal arts format in which you majored in history. But my history degree is only about 50% history, but 50% almost anything else I cared to choose from among the humanities. So I was able to dip my toe into a whole range of other disciplines, a term at a time, a bit of psychology, a bit of philosophy, a bit of politics, even a course on architecture. The most narcissistic course I think in the universities at the time, it was called ‘The Architecture of the New Universities’. And it helped create an interest in architectural history that I've had had ever ever since. So I'm very glad I dipped my toes in all those disciplines. And it was a very good basis for becoming an interdisciplinary historian in political theory, as I am. It's a curriculum that I would defend among its enemies, but criticize among its friends. I mean, certainly it led to a kind of superficiality, dipping your toe for a term in a discipline. And when I came to Cambridge to do my PhD, I certainly wasn't as trained as I would have been compared with the historians starting out on their PhDs. But on the other hand, as I say, I spent a term on doing political theory, i.e. Marx, 1970, a term doing psychology, i.e. Freud, 1970, a term doing literature, i.e. D.H. Lawrence, in 1970. And there were some very exciting teachers there. One dropped into lectures and it was in the way that undergraduates are easily awestruck. It was extraordinary the different, if you like, bits of the 20th century one could drop in on. So I went to an occasional lecture by a man called Draper, an international lawyer who'd been at the Nuremberg trials, he had prosecuted Nuremberg. So there in the lecture room with you was the Nuremberg trials. I went to Quentin Bell's lectures on art history. So there was the Bloomsbury group before your very eyes in the lecture room. There was István Mészáros, who had fled Hungary in 1956 and he was the sort of pet real communist on campus. And he talked completely incomprehensibly about Marxist theory of alienation. And so we all lapped that up. There was Cora Kaplan advancing second wave feminism. There was a whole series of people who were, I'll add one more, John Rosselli, whose father in Italy had been beaten up by Mussolini's thugs. So it was just wonderful to step into all of these. Teachers in history, first of all John Burrow. Sussex of course had a great reputation in intellectual history. It's almost defunct sadly now. But it had there John Burrow, Donald Winch, Peter Burke, later Stefan Collini. It was a wonderful tradition. I didn't in fact do the degree in intellectual history, but in history, but I was taught in my first term by John Burrow, who was a very zestful influence. And that was a course that was borrowed from Oxford where you had to pick one history book and spend a whole term using that book as a way into historiography and the nature of the historical profession. I almost chose Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, which was one of the choices, but ended up choosing Burkhardt's Civilization and Renaissance in Italy and did that with John Burrow. I doubt if I was a very interesting student to him. I was too tongue-tied and awestruck. And he bounced around in one of those very low slung 1960s chairs with no arms. Everyone thought he was going to fall on the floor at any moment. And he just performed, which is not really what a tutorial was meant to be like, but that's all he was able to do and all I was able to give as it were. In the third year, I came back to an adolescent interest in the 17th century and was very influenced particularly by William Lamont. And I think besides Quentin Skinner later at Cambridge, William Lamont was easily the most influential historian. A quick aside, if I may, back to school, just why I became a historian. I don't know why I became a historian, I just know that in early adolescence, I was already fascinated by the 17th century. But I can remember two or three of the books on my father's shelf that got me there. One was a little Selections from Clarendon. And I don't think I grasped at the time that I was reading 17th century prose. But these were Clarendon's wonderful pen portraits of the Royalists of the Civil War, selected from that vast history of the rebellion that Clarendon wrote shortly after the Civil War. So there was that. And then there was Dame Veronica Wedgwood's books. And she was spurned by professionals. She was an amateur historian at a time when the divide between academic and non-academic historians was far too rigid. But she wrote wonderful narratives, The King's War, The King's Peace, The King's Trial. And finally, another important book for me that I found on my father's bookshelf was Greene's History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which again, I... Yes, 1870s. Again, as an adolescent, I didn't quite appreciate that it rather mattered when a book was written. And that in a way, Greene was not, you don't read him now for his history, you read him as an example of Victorian intellectual attitudes. But that was a very demotic, anti-elite book about... It was a social history of England. It's of course a myth that social history is invented in the 1960s. It was invented by some Victorians. It was that mixed with what I now know to be a Tacitean fantasy about the Saxon liberties. So it was a kind of late Chartist book to write English social history as if it were the struggles of Saxon freemen against their evil Norman oppressors all the way down the ages. So those got me into the 17th century and I came back to it in my third year as an undergraduate. And I'll give you two instances of Willy Lamont's work, well three. One is that he published a lot. And I have to say a lot of my teachers at Sussex, wonderful teachers that they were, published very little. This was the 1960s before the research assessment exercises, which have done as much harm as good, but nonetheless did ensure that a lot of teachers actually wrote. And there were a lot of people at Sussex who had got jobs before they'd even finished their PhDs, never got round to finishing their PhDs, and had a very easy life, but were often wonderful scholars and teachers, but didn't publish much. Willy published. And there was a notice on his door on Thursdays, you couldn't go to see him, ‘Thursday is my research day’. It was a very simple thing, but it just brought home to me, most undergraduates at least at Sussex had no notion that academics did research. I think we just thought the books appeared, the articles appeared somehow. So it was an insight into someone actually setting aside time to do research. But the other thing, I went to a lecture of his. Of all things it was on the different editions of Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae, which is the great 17th century Puritan, Richard Baxter's autobiography. And it's gone through several editions, each redacted in different ways. And he explored the way in which each editor brought their own assumptions to the task of editing this text. It was first edited just after Baxter died in the 1690s. It was edited by a Victorian, it was then edited in the 20th century. And this gave me as a third year undergraduate, the first sense of how much our materials from the past are filtered through the eyes and the editorial interceptions of those who transmit materials to us. So it was a sense of the redactions and of the layers of materials that are handed down to us. And that was quite a revelation to me, just that one lecture I remember. He wanted me to stay on as a PhD student, but encouraged me to go to Oxbridge or London because he thought it'd be better for my career. But I would have loved to have stayed at Sussex. But I didn't in fact do a lot of academic work at Sussex until my third year. Nobody talked about degree classes, that was ‘bourgeois’ and ‘elitist’. Nobody talked about jobs or careers because that was bourgeois or elitist. It was a quite different world. People were either being hippies and renouncing the world or they were Marxist revolutionaries about to bomb the world. So there were multiple factions of Marxist on campus, Communist Party, Trotskyite, Maoist, etc., all competing in their usual factional ways. And there were lots of dropout hippies who were following Maharishi yogis, smoking pot and growing their hair, and lounging about being free spirits. And I was actually a student journalist for most of my first two years. I did a lot of work on student newspapers, particularly student television. The campus was wonderful because it had a closed circuit television system for the whole campus. And the people running it, it was there for teaching purposes, allowed the students one morning a week to take over the place. And we put on a half-hour news programme across the campus. I don't suppose hardly anybody watched it, but that wasn't the point. It was a great training ground for those who want to be journalists. And lots of my contemporaries went off to be journalists, particularly broadcast journalists. One of my friends who I'm still in touch with had a career in radio and other kinds of broadcast. So I was a news presenter, journalist and presenter on a campus-wide television service. That's what I spent a lot of my first two years doing, and a little bit of student politics on the side. I was nearly taken to court for misuse of student funds by a man who then later became a Tory MP. He was the sole Tory on campus. I think he went there deliberately in order to make a career for himself. A very brave man, though I don't care for his politics - Tony Baldry, ended up as a junior minister. But he took a court case against the student union, which still is binding on all student unions, which ruled that if you used government money, government allocations for student unions, you had to do it, spend it on student purposes. You couldn't fund the revolution or give it to striking miners or whatever. But if you use the profits of your student bar on encouraging revolution wherever, then that was fine, so long as it was your own profits of your own activities. That's a ruling that still applies. It was only because the test cases that he picked happened not to be ones that I was responsible for. I forget which revolutionary cause I had allocated money to, but he happened not to pick that one. So I escaped the courtroom.

AM: Well that's so fascinating. But we must speed on to Cambridge. Don't need to say much about it except about Quentin and his influence.

MG: Yeah. Well I'll come to Quentin in a minute, but when I came to Cambridge I felt I was stepping back 50 years. And I didn't much like Cambridge at first. I went to Corpus Christi College. It was very comfortable materially for research students, but deeply, deeply conservative. It hadn't yet admitted women. It was sherry on Sunday afternoons and it seemed to me full of caricature, horribly full of students who had been at rather nice cathedral choir schools. And I felt it terribly stuffy and stifling. As I say, like stepping back 50 years. And it did seem to me like what I feared, the reasons I'd gone to Sussex in the first place. Also the atmosphere in the history faculty I did not like at all. At that stage intellectual history was extremely marginal. It was something that Quentin, as a still young man himself, only 10 years older than me, 12 years older, was pioneering with people like John Dunn of course. But they were still quite young men and the faculty was dominated by two barons, Elton and Plumb. And they sparred with each other and loathed each other. They had their own baronial clans. And Elton in particular was a deep Philistine who hated the notion of intellectual history. For him, history was about elite politics. It was what you could find in the Public Record Office as it then was. And anything else was, as Marxists would say, epiphenomenal. So reading tracts or pamphlets or sermons in the 17th century he thought was a complete waste of time. There were also figures like Maurice Cowling in the faculty who loathed the politics of people like Quentin Skinner. And so he prowled around and growled around and that wasn't helpful either. And also at that stage there was really no training for postgraduates. I think the greatest thing that's happened in my career in Cambridge is the invention of the master's courses. I think it's transformed postgraduate education. But when I arrived it was not far short of people saying, well there's the university library, come back in three years with a thesis without any guidance on how to do it. So there were really rather few people who were inspirational amid all that and two of them were Quentin and Peter Laslett. Quentin was of course the most important influence on the way I do history and think about history. I have to say he was someone that one wouldn't go to cry on the shoulder of. You were expected to be a functioning intellectual at all times. And I'm sure it was my fault that I didn't interact enough with some of the contemporaries who were there. I knew Richard Tuck a little bit, but there are other contemporaries of mine like Martin Dzelzainis who I scarcely knew at the time but now wish I had because we're good friends now and work on very similar things. So it was fairly isolating and isolated. And although Quentin did have occasional parties there was something about the postgraduate scene that I found rather isolating. And also I think it was partly my fault in the sense or at least my upbringing that I never felt I had if you like the cultural capital as it's now called. I didn't have the chutzpah that a lot of people did. There was a very fashionable circle that I as it were looked up to, slightly older than me, but they dazzled. They were all buddies of each other. Simon Scharma, Linda Colley, Lisa Jardine, John Brewer. They were the dazzling research students at the time, two or three years older than me and I was sort of trailing along in their shadow at the time. I also rather regret I didn't make more of some of the exciting things happening in Cambridge, particularly in the King's College, this college, in social history. Laslett gave me some connection with that. But intellectual history, and I think this is something I would kind of blame the Cambridge school, Quentin's school, for, is that it didn't connect up enough with the new social history. I occasionally went to the famous seminar in King's which people like Keith Wrightson and Tony Judt were leading, which was producing...

AM: Did you come to the even more famous one which Martin Ingram and I...

MG: I may have done, I can't remember.

AM: Elton came to that.

MG: Good grief.

AM: And he really participated and was never anti it. And it went on for three years in King's and we had, I mean it was absolutely groundbreaking.

MG: Interesting. It's not the Elton I remember because he deplored sociology.

AM: It was 1972-3 for three years, held in my room in King's.

MG: Right, right. I can't remember whether I did.

AM: Keith Wrightson came and Richard Smith and all these.
MG: I should have gone to more of that. Joanna Innes was another student at the time who I wished I'd interacted more with because I admire her work greatly. But she was of that social history circle. Many, many years later I wrote a little article which is now, dare I say it, cited probably more than anything else to my surprise that I've written, called ‘The Unacknowledged Republic’, which is about office holding in early modern England. And I got a little paragraph at the beginning saying that intellectual history ought to talk more to social historians. And I suspect if I were a social historian I would be cross that Goldie gets cited so much because the article really only says what is obvious to any early modern social historian about the huge importance of office holding in village communities in England. That it's anachronistic to go and look for the franchise and who could elect to parliament. Nobody was much interested in that frankly. What gave you citizenship was the holding of office. It's a Ciceronian concept, De Officiis, that holding office is what makes you a citizen. And very ordinary illiterate people, as you of course will know, are constables and church wardens in village communities. And all the article did was say that. It was a synoptic piece but it seems to have caught on and gets quoted. And I wish there were more of that bringing together of intellectual history and social history.

AM: Peter Laslett, just say a word about Peter.

MG: Peter was a fascinating figure and a great fun and seemed unstuffy, totally unlike the Eltons and Plumbs. He was infuriating in many ways of course, desperately opinionated. And I could see why he was the bane of the faculty. I don't think he lifted a finger in terms of administration. He was one of those academics who prided themselves on being anti-establishment but that was always a wonderful way, self-deceiving of course but it was a wonderful way of exempting yourself from doing anything that the establishment did behind a desk or by way of running things. But he was intellectually exciting and I liked the way in which he had moved and was moving at that time from intellectual history, from doing that enormously important edition of John Locke and previously of Filmer, Locke's antagonist, and then was moving into converting himself into a social historian, demographic historian in a quite remarkable way. And I did drop in occasionally on the Cambridge Group for Population Studies and what I liked about it was that it was collaborative history in a way that was almost unheard of in history. I've complained already about the isolation. I went to the Rare Books Room and sat for hours after hours. I fell in love with the University Library, loved the Rare Books Room but I had a yearning for the kind of solidarities that were found in history only in the Cambridge Group. Laslett was very good at that, he was like a Pied Piper. He would pick on people that seemed interesting to him and then invite them to things and then hold forth. He wasn't actually terribly interested in what you said but he would hold forth and call you ‘dear boy’ and ‘so that's true isn't it, dear boy.’ He was a great radical influence of course. In the 1960s he was proposing that we get rid of undergraduates altogether and become a postgraduate university, typical of reform schemes that were quite impossible to enact but one could see the point of what he was saying.

MG: So moving on, well you're starting with your PhD but why did you get so interested in Locke? Talk more about your own work now, we've got about 10 minutes.

MG: My earliest interests were in the Civil War. Quentin had said everybody's done the Civil War so move on to the end of the century. I said I've never studied the end of the century, he said oh you can pick it up, so I did, and I did a thesis on Tory political thought in the generation after the revolution of 1688. And you've just remarked on Locke. I didn't study Locke at that stage at all. I studied Locke's enemies, the opposites of Locke and I only came later to study Locke and would have deplored the study of Locke at the time much as I admired John Dunn's then new seminal book on Locke, because I thought it mattered to study the mainstream of intellectual history, not the works of the great philosophers who by almost by definition are out of kilter with the mainstream. And I think it's one of the ironies of the Cambridge School that at that stage it preached against canonicity. It wanted to widen the canon, it wanted even in some moments to dethrone the canon but if you look at Quentin's lifetime work it's been preoccupied with Hobbes and Machiavelli with the canon, and so the canon has its lure and in later decades I myself have succumbed to that in the case of Locke. But for a long, long time I worked on a kind of intellectual history which would in other circles be called mentalité perhaps, that's to say not great philosophical breakthroughs but what the common stream of educated literate thinking was as revealed in tracts, pamphlets, polemics, sermons, trials etc. I was quite interested from early on in the history of the book and I'm glad that's a new sub-discipline that has grown enormously in recent decades. So I'm interested in the interaction between intellectual worlds and the publishing world in which it exists, the world of public polemic if you like. And I was interested in a kind of counter-history of who the enemies of Locke and the Whigs were rather like those who studied the Loyalists of the American Revolution, who were on the defeated side, and not because I was a Jacobite or a Tory, far from it, but because I was interested in cul-de-sacs if you like, in the history of ideas and also as I say in the mainstream - Toryism, Royalism, Divine Right Theory, High Anglicanism were bedrocks of 17th, late 17th century thought and survived into the 18th century. So that's what I explored. I made the big mistake of not publishing my thesis. I always tell my PhD students to do as I do and not as I say and I should have published it but didn't. I moved back to the Restoration and didn't finish a book on the Restoration so my life has been one of not writing large books which I should do but publishing lots and lots of essays in books, collections of essays and in journals of which there are now approaching 80. So I've been a natural essayist and editor and I've edited a lot of things as well and I have a strong belief in the importance of editing texts. Since you mentioned Locke I'll just say why I came to Locke eventually. It's I suppose got two motives almost aside from the intrinsic intellectual interest of Locke himself who's such an extraordinarily broad intellect. One is the archive. There's no getting around the fact that you've got a fantastic archive for Locke. You know not many living people before 1700 of whom there are three and a half thousand surviving letters. That's almost unheard of. Leibniz and one or two others that's true of. It's just a fantastic amount of surviving material. You can document his life to the day virtually. So you know vast amounts about him. He kept every scrap of paper like you. The other thing is audience. If you write about 17th century Tories not many people are interested precisely because they're a kind of cul-de-sac historically. But people are interested in Locke. There are 8000 published books and articles on Locke in that marvellous online bibliography that's updated. And people in half a dozen disciplines are interested. Theology, economics, philosophy, political science, history, education, economics. There's an audience out there. There's three articles a week published on Locke. There are two, three books a year published on Locke. So there are a lot of people going to take notice if you write on Locke. And both of those simple facts about archive and audience are quite seductive it has to be said.

AM:: So tell me a little bit, ...you edited, I mean I as you know I have had a lifelong interest in diaries and I edited a 17th century clergyman's diary, Ralph Josselin, and I've written quite a bit about diaries. But I was surprised that I hadn't heard, I don't think, of a huge diary which you've edited in a number of volumes. I've even forgotten the name of...

MG: Roger Morrice.

AM: Roger Morrice. Yes, that's right. Tell me something about that.

MG: Yes, Roger Morrice is, ...at the time I called him, this is the ‘Not the Samuel Pepys project’ because everyone's heard of Pepys, the greatest of all the 17th century diarists. Morrice is a very different figure, very close contemporary of Pepys' and Pepys crosses the pages occasionally. But Morrice wrote the longest surviving narrative of English politics in the late 70s, 1680s and early 1690s and is an extraordinarily rich source. He was eyes and ears in London, a Puritan turned Whig and in effect a journalist. He was a dissenting clergyman who'd been kicked out of the church at the Restoration, and now worked as the kind of gopher political advisor to a series of leading Whig, Puritan Whig politicians. So he was their eyes and ears in London. An extraordinary document in Dr. Williams' library in London, which claims to be the premier research library for the history of nonconformity. In fact, it's the only library for the history of nonconformity. And I had a wonderful team, s wonderful because it cohered so well of colleagues in Restoration history who each took a volume, volume each. I sort of orchestrated the whole thing, but they each took a volume. And I got a grant from the AHRC to do it and we published it within a few years and got a book and a collection of essays. I got, the introduction is a book, book length, which is a standalone book. And it was a wonderful project to do. I've always had a foot in my teaching and research as much in what some would call mainstream history, politics and religion in the 17th century as in intellectual history. And probably the only reason I ever got a lectureship in Cambridge was that I managed to tick two boxes. I could teach the history of political thought from Plato to Marx, but I could also teach the Civil War and the 17th century. So I was, I could be acceptable to kinds of historians who didn't think much of intellectual history. People like John Morrill and Christine Carpenter and even Geoffrey Elton. But I could also hold my head up amongst the intellectual historians as well.

AM: We're just coming to the last couple of minutes. Is there anything I should have asked you that's particularly central? Some people want to talk about their families. Some people want to talk about something. Some people say, no, that's enough.

MG: Well, there are, you warned me at the beginning that you would focus quite naturally on origins and prompts, early prompts as it were. So there's much more that could be said about the career. I don't mean the CV, but just spend a couple of moments on intellectual shifts that have occurred in my career. I've already touched on one, the extraordinary resurgence of interest across the human sciences in religion since about the year 2000. And a figure, a more local figure that always interests me is Figgis, who got going with intellectual history in Cambridge in the early 20th century, but was also an Anglican minister and someone who was very interested in conciliarism and the history of medieval ecclesiology and its influence in the early modern world. And I often feel that a lot of Quentin's work is, if he would but admit it, is a rerun of quite a lot of Figgis's themes. But the notion of political theology, as you will know, is very much back on the cards among sociologists, social scientists, and so on. So that's a big shift. The collapse of high politics in my lifetime is extraordinary. When I was a PhD student, droves of people were studying the history of Parliament, what politicians said to each other, whether it's the 17th, 18th, or 19th or 20th century, whether it was Cowling or whether it was the Civil War. But now, it would be wrong to say nobody is studying it, but it's collapsed completely. People who study politics are studying political culture, the word cultural, cultural history has become ubiquitous. When I last looked at the list of the staff at Sussex University, I think three quarters of them called themselves cultural historians of some variety or other. So high politics, what MPs do, elite politics has collapsed in extraordinary ways. One final example of what feminism has done when it meets religion. When I began in research, no one would have been seen dead studying nuns, early modern nuns. If anybody studied them, it would have been nuns themselves, probably, obscure reactionary Catholics. Now, of course, it's all the rage to study nuns. And it's feminism that has done that, plus the religious turn. And I just find those shifts in assumptions. When I went to Sussex University, everybody was studying the Chartists and the history of trade unions. Today, there are archives full of trade union papers that nobody studies anymore, because trade unions are male and working class, and nobody studies those anymore.

AM: Perfect, perfect. 10 seconds to go. Thank you very much, Mark, for a fascinating talk.