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

Edward Gibbon

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

1000pts

2

Thucydides

Wrote the Peloponnesian War as analysis rather than storytelling and is still on strategy syllabuses.

733pts

3

Mary Beard

Cambridge classicist who has made Roman history mainstream television.

551pts

4

Herodotus

Called the father of history, and the first to treat hearsay as evidence worth weighing.

466pts

5

Fernand Braudel

Made geography and daily life the engine of history rather than kings and battles.

466pts

6

A. J. P. Taylor

Britain's first television historian, lecturing to camera without notes.

466pts

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

Barbara Tuchman

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

363pts

9

Livy

Told Rome's story from its founding across 142 books, most of them now lost.

363pts

10

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Pulitzer-winning presidential historian whose Lincoln book became a film.

363pts

11

Simon Schama

Historian of art, the Dutch republic and Britain, with the television series to match.

363pts

12

Eric Hobsbawm

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

233pts

13

Tacitus

Roman senator whose compressed, sceptical account of the early emperors set the tone for imperial history.

233pts

14

Ibn Khaldun

Fourteenth-century North African scholar who effectively invented social history.

233pts

15

Antony Beevor

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

233pts