SOURCE: “Castles in the Air,” in New Statesman, June 6, 1997, p. 45.

In the following review, Russell offers a tempered analysis of Virtual History.

Historians are less impressive at handling conceptual questions than at assembling empirical data. Like bad builders, we erect edifices of factual bricks on soft, sandy soil. When, sapped by a generation of further research, they fall down, another historian rejects some bricks, makes a few new ones and erects an edifice with a different design, but on an equally sandy soil.

Perhaps this is not a particular weakness of historians. The conceptual eccentricities of Plato or Marx, to name only two, suggest that the weakness of the human being on conceptual questions is a general one. Perhaps the peculiarity of historians is not our conceptual weakness but the intractability of our factual bricks which forces us, more than most disciplines, to try and face up to...