Quotations from Tosh #3: Richard Cobb

"I have never understood history other than in terms of human relationships; and I have attempted to judge individuals in their own terms and from what they say about themselves, in their own language. Most interesting of all, to me, is the individual unrelated to any group, the man, the girl, or the old woman alone in the city, the person who eats alone, though in company, who lives in a furnished room, who receives no mail, who has no visible occupation, and who spends much time wandering the streets. For, apart from everlasting problem of violence, the principal one that faces a historian like myself is that of loneliness, especially loneliness in the urban context." -- Richard Cobb, "Experiences of an Anglo-French Historian," A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 39.

"In history, intellectual debate can so often be a cover for over-simplification, lack of experience, insufficient culture, lack of involvement and of sympathy, and the impetus to compare and to generalize in cases where comparisons and generalizations are either irrelevant or positively misleading. Why, one wonders, when reading certain sections of Past and Present, why do historians spend so much time arguing, imposing definitions, proposing 'models', when they could be getting on with their research?" -- Richard Cobb, "Experiences of an Anglo-French Historian," A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 40.

"To speak and to write in French is to acquire a second personality and to express oneself not only in another gear, but in a manner other than in one's first. I do not say the same things in French as I do in English, because I am not the same person. For nine years I dispensed with my initial nationality almost entirely, and without any great feeling of deprivation." -- Richard Cobb, "Experiences of an Anglo-French Historian," A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 40.

"I can only speak from experience; and history is experience. One becomes a certain sort of historian because one is a certain sort of person." -- Richard Cobb, "Experiences of an Anglo-French Historian," A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 42.

"The historian should, above all, be endlessly inquisitive and prying, constantly attempting to force the privacy of others, and to cross the frontiers of class, nationality, generation, period, and sex. His principal aim is to make the dead live." -- Richard Cobb, "Experiences of an Anglo-French Historian," A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 44.