for whom history was the “guide to life”.

A medium-term view would light on the Regius Professorships of History in Cambridge and Oxford, founded in 1724 by George I to equip young gentlemen with the knowledge of “Modern History and … Modern Languages” they might need as diplomats, or on the late-Victorian holder of the Cambridge Regius chair, JR Seeley, who thought history was nothing less than a “school of statesmanship”.

In the 20th century, historians shaped local government, steered the course of empires and advised presidents. The Fabian historians Beatrice and Sidney Webb spearheaded the London Programme, a plan for London’s future housing, transport and water needs, using expertise they gained co-authoring a multi-volume history of English government since the middle ages. Sidney Webb also served as secretary ofstate for the colonies and as secretary of state for the dominions in Ramsay Macdonald’s second Labour government.

The mid-1960s were the high-water mark for historians in public policy. In the US, Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr became the court historian of John F Kennedy’s Camelot as a presidential adviser, and the radical historian of American foreign relations William Appleman Williams turned down the chance to steer Latin American policy for the Kennedy administration. (At least he was asked.) The last historian seconded to the White House was Eric F Goldman, a professor of American history from Princeton, who was a special adviser to Lyndon Johnson in 1963-66. In 1965, a historical section was added to Britain’s Treasury but its operations were wound up in 1976, “after its early