I HAVE NEVER been very good at history. The Battle of Stamford Bridge, Bloody Mary, the Crimean War. Since school I’d always found historical facts, stories, ideas, and arguments hard both to store and retrieve. As a result, I got little if any joy from the subject. I felt the way many people feel about mathematics, that they simply didn't understand the language in which it was written. But whereas there are people in the arts who wear their inability to understand quadratic equations or imaginary numbers as a badge of pride, I have always been quietly ashamed of my inability to process and retain stories for no other reason than that they happened in the past.

I used to blame Mr. Wakefield, who taught us history at Spratton Hall School in the very loosest sense of both taught and history. We were ten, eleven, twelve years- old at the time and it went like this: we would read a chapter in the textbook and he would then test us on the dates of the events described: the murder of Thomas à Becket; the Peasant's Revolt. They could have been phone numbers, frankly. I’m convinced he knew no history himself, not least because he kept the textbook propped up and poorly concealed inside the brown leather briefcase which always sat open on his desk. He was deathly pale, morbidly obese, mopped copious sweat from his brow in summer and berated us for vandalizing the box radiators which had buckled under his own seated weight during the winter. Infamously, he once threw a board rubber—the old kind, a small wooden brick with a strip of powder- choked felt on the underside—and struck the forehead of boy in the back row who was failing to pay attention.

When I was given the opportunity to study biology instead of history I embraced it gladly and continued to avoid the subject from then on through a chain of similar options. I would, I think, have chosen Needlework over the Field of the Cloth of Gold and the Princes in the Tower.

Other children might have picked up their history knowledge indirectly by reading Cue for Treason and The Eagle of the Ninth at home, but we were not a bookish family.