Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped The Past ..... today on the wireless

Now here is one of those Radio 4 programmes that anyone interested in history should listen to.

Writing and illuminating the book, 14th century

It is an adaption of the book, Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped The Past by Making History, by Richard Cohen.

"Richard Cohen examines the storytellers of the past, how they worked and how their writings still influence our ideas about history.

Who were the historians who changed the way history is written? How did their biases affect their accounts? Is there such a thing as objective history?

The series explores lives and works from the Greek historian Herodotus, through the great Roman historians Tacitus and Livy, with their great epic stories of war and plagues, all of them inventing stories to be more reader friendly, and then moving through Arab and Islamic writings, to the medieval historians like Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth – the latter famous for his economy with the truth, in other words, making it all up.

The great Italian Niccolo Machiavelli became a historian by accident, Voltaire and Edward Gibbon changed the way history was written, breaking away from a God centred universe. Then there's the Red historians from Marx (always in debt and crippled by boils on his skin) to Eric Hobsbawm, the emergence of female historians, and false accounts of history.

Episode 1

Detail from the Bayeux Tapestry, 1070s

The lives and works of the earliest historians, the Greek Herodotus in 450 BC , indulging his curiosity about the habits of his neighbours (for example, descriptions of the sexual habits of the Egyptians) and his successor Thucydides, who shaped his material to enthral his readers. The great Romans Tacitus and Livy, with their epics of plagues and wars, embellishing the truth whenever it took their fancy. Livy was the tabloid journalist of his day.

Author: Richard Cohen, Abridger: Libby Spurrier, Reader: Alex Jennings, Producer: Celia de Wolff, A Pier production for BBC Radio 4"

Picture; Roman de la Rose, The Roman de la Rose manuscript contains one of the most popular romantic French poems of its time, 14th century, Illumination on parchment, National Library of Wales  Blue pencil.svg wikidata:Q666063, References, MS NLW 5016D. This image is available from the National Library of Wales. You can view this image in its original context on the NLW Catalogue. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.  And, detail from the Bayeux Tapestry, from the Bayeux Tapestry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayeux_Tapestry

*Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped The Past, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00159rh