In this collection of essays, the author demonstrates that while reading the great historians of the past, such as Gibbon, de Tocqueville, Carlyle, Macaulay, Michelet, Halevy, Marx and Burckhardt, is part of a complete education, history can also be great literature. Professor Clive's assumption is that history is an art, not a science and that the great historians have usually been supremely gifted writers as well as scholars. They have also often been prophets and sages, mediating general views of the world to their readers. The author has also written "Macaulay - The Shaping of the Historian" which won the National Book Award for History.