About Me

Christopher Knowles is a 58 year old, part-time PhD student at the Centre for Contemporary British History at Kings College, London, working on the British occupation of Germany after the Second World War.

“Before you study the history study the historian” as E H Carr said in his classic work “What is History.” (Macmillan 1961)

“When we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts which it contains, but with the historian who wrote it.”

I read history from 1971-4 as an undergraduate at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Now, over 30 years later, towards the end of a career in publishing, the electronic dissemination of information and computer software, I have gone back to studying history.

I completed the MA in Contemporary British History in October 2007 and enrolled on the PhD course, so I could continue to look at the same themes in greater depth, over a slightly longer period.

History is a process of discovery, and in this weblog I intend to record my thoughts, ideas, and, I hope, some insights and discoveries as I work my way through the course.

The name of the blog comes from the famous nineteenth century German historian, Leopold von Ranke, who wrote, as a young man, in his first historical work, that the role of history is simply to show how it really was – “Wie es eigentlich gewesen.”