Abstract
As the sites of a memory that is inevitably public memory, the historian and the archive are implicated in power, and in the production of truth. This truth can be said to involve a gift of the past to the present and therefore a responsibility for this gift. This responsibility involves practising history as a criticism of power. This is how I situate my autobiographical reflections on my formation as a historian, and on the nature of the historical work I have produced. What I discern as a certain cultural distance from large parts of British identity I relate to Irish and class identity. out of this experience of identity in mid-twentieth-century Britain, one of powerlessness, I develop a critique of the power I believe inherent in liberal notions of history, especially its perceived ethical neutrality. I consider what I call the politics of the liberal archive from the viewpoint of my sense of being an intellectual and cultural outsider (on the inside). This politics of history also concerns a living out of the hidden injuries of class, I then turn to my own work, considering how it has dwelt on themes that have been shaped by my personal formation, in particular my interest in 'the social', and in the nature and operation of power. I consider changing notions of the social and their relation to historical writing, especially social history. I look at the linguistic or cultural turn in history, especially British history, and the reasons for opposition to it, identifying a postmodernism which has the powerful mark of the secondary modern school experience upon it. I also dwell upon the pleasures of history, and the stratagems for provoking the otherness of the past into being, particualrly that of place. I relate Irish, diasporic identity that this task of provocation and conclude by dwelling upon historical writing as both witness and restitution.