"Gossip with footnotes" ....a conversation with the historian Peter Hennesy

I have to admit to never reading any of the books of Peter Hennesy.

He was a name in the background but despite being aware of some of his 23 books, most are just titles I nearly bought in a bookshop.

So I was fascinated to hear him on Desert Island Discs, talk about his days as a journalist and later as an eminent historian.*

"He was born just two years before me, and much of what he said chimed in with own experiences of growing up in post war Britain and the debt all of us "baby boomers" owe to the creation of the Welfare State as much as to the endeavours of our parents and grandparents who strive to make for us a better world than the one they had known

Leaving me just to comment on that throw away comment about contemporary history which Mr. Hennessy described as "gossip with footnotes" and which he has used to masterly effect when matched with his use of archives and skill at writing about the past.

Professor Peter Hennessy is one of the UK’s leading contemporary historians. He has written acclaimed and important books about politics, the civil service, the intelligence agencies and the British constitution on which he is an expert.

Peter was born in London in 1947 and read history at St John’s College, Cambridge. He started writing for the Times in the mid-1970s, covering the inner workings of Whitehall whose activities at that time were shrouded in secrecy. Peter says he approached his journalism like an amateur anthropologist trying to discover more about an unknown culture. His reports were viewed with suspicion by some members of the civil service and Harold Wilson, the then prime minister, issued an edit banning them from talking to him.

In 1986 Peter co-founded the Institute of Contemporary British History, and in 1992 he moved from journalism to academia at Queen Mary, University of London where he is Attlee professor of contemporary British history. He is a fellow of the British Academy and was made a crossbench life peer in 2010. During the COVID-19 pandemic he started keeping a diary which he describes as an “aid to humility” with the aim of assessing post-world war history as BC (Before Covid) or AC (After Covid).

Peter lives in London with his wife Enid.

Presenter Lauren Laverne

Producer Paula McGinley"

*Professor Peter Hennessy, historian, Desert Island Discs, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001lr3k