Writers are both born and made. William Cobbett was rightly convinced that any person who mastered his splendid English Grammar could become a writer of good English, but if he had not had the writing itch himself, he would never have become the Cobbett we know. Besides, one has to find out what one is good at. I have scribbled since the age of 14, but discovered as a young adult that poetry and fiction were not for me. History, which provides plenty of scope for writing, suited me. But when I began my career, shortly after the second world war, this was far from obvious.
That was a time when British academic historians would have been shocked to think of themselves as potential paperback writers - that is, writers for a broad public. Between the world wars few historians of standing did, other than GM Trevelyan. Many shied away from writing books of any kind, hoping to make their reputations with learned articles in specialist journals and savage reviews of other colleagues unwise enough to bare themselves between hard covers. For similar reasons they kept away from writing history for schools. That was left to schoolmasters, two of whom produced the classic send-up of secondary history: Sellar and Yeatman's 1066 and All That.
All this has changed. My own generation - those who shaped the new history in the 1950s and 1960s, and especially those passionate expositors and popular educators, Marxists and other radicals - wrote eagerly, both for academic specialists and the non-specialist public. Publishers soon noticed that the learning public grew spectacularly as higher secondary and university education expanded. I published my first general book, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, in 1962 in just such a new historical series. It was to become the first volume of a series of four that covered the history of the world in the last two centuries.
That is the period of history-writing to which I belong. The readers in my mind are those who want to find out about history, whether or not they pass examinations; but they neither want nor need talking down to, only for serious thought to be made more accessible. I am not part of the era of history as entertainment or as a section of the tourist industry, of celebrity dons presenting TV series of colourful visuals held together by a thin thread of argument. For me the medium is not yet the message.
On the other hand, as a writer I get pleasure from putting down words that read well, and as a lecturer I know that communication is also a form of showbiz. We are wasting everyone's time if we cannot keep the attention of an audience or reader. I try to use three techniques: communicating passion, writing that makes readers want to read on, and the right dosage of light relief.
I try out my books first as student lecture courses, because lecturing is a good way of testing whether a historian holds his audience. It also gives the writer what he or she must otherwise construct in the mind: an actual body of people to whom we address and who must understand our message. Journalism (that is, good editing) has probably taught me most about the craft of writing, not least how to write non-technically for non-specialists and how much can be fitted into a prescribed length.
In some ways my autobiography, Interesting Times, was the hardest book to write. How could I interest readers in an unspectacular academic life? I tried to aim it at two kinds of readers: those too young to have lived through much of the most extraordinary century in history, but who want to know what it was like; and those old enough to have passed through some of its passions, disillusions and dreams. And perhaps also those who want to understand how history has shaped the life of at least one of those who has tried to write it.
· Interesting Times is published by Abacus