The 15 Greatest Historians of All Time

Ancient chroniclers, television dons and one Nobel laureate who wrote history between wars. Two and a half thousand years of people explaining the past to everybody else.

1. 1
   Edward Gibbon

   Six volumes on the decline and fall of Rome, and English prose has not recovered from the style.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Thucydides

   Wrote the Peloponnesian War as analysis rather than storytelling and is still on strategy syllabuses.
   733pts
3. 3
   Mary Beard

   Cambridge classicist who has made Roman history mainstream television.
   551pts
4. 4
   Herodotus

   Called the father of history, and the first to treat hearsay as evidence worth weighing.
   466pts
5. 5
   Fernand Braudel

   Made geography and daily life the engine of history rather than kings and battles.
   466pts
6. 6
   A. J. P. Taylor

   Britain's first television historian, lecturing to camera without notes.
   466pts
7. 7
   Winston Churchill

   Wrote a four-volume life of Marlborough and a history of the English-speaking peoples, and won the Nobel for it.
   363pts
8. 8
   Barbara Tuchman

   Won two Pulitzers without a doctorate, and wrote the book Kennedy handed to his staff.
   363pts
9. 9
   Livy

   Told Rome's story from its founding across 142 books, most of them now lost.
   363pts
10. 10
    Doris Kearns Goodwin

    Pulitzer-winning presidential historian whose Lincoln book became a film.
    363pts
11. 11
    Simon Schama

    Historian of art, the Dutch republic and Britain, with the television series to match.
    363pts
12. 12
    Eric Hobsbawm

    His four-volume sweep from 1789 to 1991 defined how a generation read the modern age.
    0pts
13. 13
    Tacitus

    Roman senator whose compressed, sceptical account of the early emperors set the tone for imperial history.
    0pts
14. 14
    Ibn Khaldun

    Fourteenth-century North African scholar who effectively invented social history.
    0pts
15. 15
    Antony Beevor

    The most widely read narrative historian of the Second World War.
    0pts

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