GM Trevelyan: a historian in tune with his time, and ours History, Trevelyan believed, was an essential element in the public culture of any civilised nation, and he determined to uphold his family tradition by writing that history for his own day, sometimes in the form of biographies of great men (usually, but not invariably English), sometimes in the form of narrative national histories (invariably English). From the 1900s to the early 1950s, he occupied a unique and unrivalled position in English public and intellectual life. He was elected to a fellowship of Trinity College soon after graduation, but in 1903 left for London, where he thought the environment would be more sympathetic than hypercritical Cambridge, and between 1907 and 1911, he produced his trilogy on Garibaldi, which established his reputation as the outstanding literary historian of his generation. It depicted Garibaldi as a Carlylean hero - poet, patriot and man of action - whose inspired leadership had created the Italian nation, as he championed freedom, progress and tolerance, and vanquished the despotism, reaction and obscurantism of the Austrian empire and Neapolitan monarchy. The books were notable for their vivid evocation of landscape and their innovative use of oral and documentary sources, and their publication coincided with the high noon of Edwardian Liberalism. The First World War, in which Trevelyan commanded a Red Cross ambulance unit on the Italian front (his defective eyesight meant he was unfit for military service), ended the era of glad, confident Liberalism, and left him initially uncertain as to how he should continue to discharge his self-appointed tasks as public teacher and national historian. But he resolved to write a book as a celebration of, and thank-offering to, the English people, and in 1926 he produced his one-volume History of England. This work set out what he saw as the essential elements in the nation's evolution and identity: parliamentary government, the rule of law, religious toleration, freedom from Continental interference and involvement, and a global horizon of maritime supremacy and imperial expansion. The book sold exceptionally well, thereby establishing Trevelyan as the supreme historical commentator on Baldwin's England in the same way that he had earlier been on Asquith's England. Stanley Baldwin had also been educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1927 he appointed Trevelyan Regius Professor of Modern History; 13 years later, Winston Churchill in turn would appoint Trevelyan Master of Trinity. The major work of Trevelyan's professorial years was another trilogy, England Under Queen Anne, which took up the national story where Macaulay's History of England had been left incomplete. And during the Second World War, which he feared was bringing about the fall of European civilisation, Trevelyan produced his most sensationally successful book, English Social History, which was intended to complement his earlier (and mainly political) History of England. As so often in Trevelyan's career, the timing was just right. During the later stages of the Second World War and in the longer years of Attlee's austerity, he offered his readers a beguiling picture of the past life of the nation that was by turns inspiring and nostalgic. Writing in the darkest times he had known, he poured out his patriotic feelings for what seemed to him the mortally endangered fabric of English life: its landscapes and localities, its flora and fauna, its people and places. Out of his wartime sense of despair and foreboding, Trevelyan created his final work as the nation's historian laureate. In that, as in his many other works, Trevelyan not only wrote history, but made history, too. Sir David Cannadine is Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University. His most recent book, with Jenny Keating and Nicola Sheldon, is 'The Right Kind of History