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Zinn was also saying explicitly something I had been thinking but never had the confidence to say: “My work, like everyone else’s, is subjective”. He wasn’t afraid to admit it. At university we were taught to revere the great historians who provided the “truthful” account of the past. But, said Zinn, everything was and is subjective, and not benignly subjective either. History had since its inception been skewed in the service of power, status and money. This was explicit in the days of the court historians, paid by the Crown to write their hagiographies, but it continues to this days with elite universities such as Harvard giving their most prestigious history chairs to people such as Niall Ferguson, who has put his mind in the service of entrenched power since the start of his career, while spurning the excavators of real truth such as Zinn

The former Chancellor of West Germany, Willy Brandt, probably came close to defining how such structures often come to be judged by history when he coined the phrase “the Wall of Shame” to describe the Berlin wall. Not all walls are shameful but they do run a heavy risk of being considered a crude solution at best, even by those who erect them.

Current political debate is suffering from the lack of nuances introduced, the desire for a sound bite and a quick fix, the laxity of believing that now is not a good time to debate, even amongst friends. Every point has to be debated in detail instead of an over-reliance on shady historical metaphors. Sometimes it seems we hear and read the same things over and again. Debate is all we have to move forward

British historian David Starkey recently said that history has been “feminized”, but this shows a misunderstanding of the effect the new army of female historians has had