In 1937, the young Beckett, freshly returned from Nazi Germany, conceded to Thomas MacGreevy that his friend had been right all along: the “sense of history” was precisely what he was sorely lacking. His letter affirms an absence of feeling for history, just as it summons the very phrase deployed by Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche to represent the formation of modern nations and the human spirit. It is tempting to take Beckett’s comment as a declaration of cultivated ignorance: he has frequently been portrayed as a writer severed from the political concerns shared by his contemporaries, absorbed in a peculiar internal world of his own making. Yet, increasingly, the consensus around Beckett’s apparent insensitivity to history and politics does not accord with the wealth of evidence available.