SOURCE: Clarke, Peter. “Group Dynamics.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4424 (15 January 1988): 52.

In the following review of The New History and the Old, Clarke asserts that, while her essays are stimulating, Himmelfarb's arguments are flawed and uneven.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Macaulay hoped that his work would be remembered in the year 2000; towards the end of the twentieth, historians nourish precisely the same ambition. As history has become trendy, historians have become uneasily aware that there is nothing so outmoded as a trend whose time has gone. “Who now reads Macaulay?” Gertrude Himmelfarb demands (ironically) in one of the stimulating essays reprinted in The New History and the Old—pausing, like the good scholar she is, to recall that her rhetorical question echoes not only Edmund Burke (“Who now reads Bolingbroke?”) but also Alexander Pope (“Who now reads Cowley?”) In her struggle to defend the old history...