Robert Gildea

A powerful new history of the Great Strike in the miners' own voices, based on more than 140 interviews with former miners and their families. Forty years ago, Arthur Scargill led the National Union of Mineworkers on one of the largest strikes in British history. A deep sense of pride existed within Britain's mining communities who thought of themselves as...

History, suggests Robert Gildea, "is a battlefield." Questions of power, rights, identity, and nationhood always have an ancient and modern historical dimension, and countries still go to war over their interpretation of history. Yet accounts of history are just as prone to fabrication as fake news, so how can we tell good history from bad? How can history be critical,...