Authors Electric

I vaguely remember a time, itself now quite a lot of years in the past, when I briefly considered the idea of taking up history as a career. It was soon after I had acquired a degree in the subject, and I couldn’t imagine taking much interest in anything else, although neither could I identify many realistic career opportunities for a history graduate. I did attempt to become a history teacher just after that, but fortunately I realised in time that trying to teach history to teenagers would involve quite a bit of crowd control and not very much actual history. So, after a few desultory attempts to get a job at the Imperial War Museum – I had specialised in modern European history – I went into computer programming instead. You could do that in those days. Even after all this time there is something that lures me back to history. This is the same siren call that makes me spend hours in a fruitless quest for ancestors who are lost in the mists of time and who, if I could ask the...