Past Masters: The Best of History Today

In the inaugural issue of History Today in January 1951, editors Peter Quennell and Alan Hodge compared themselves to open-cast miners hoping to bring into daylight some of the historical riches that lay all around. They had some powerful support: ‘History, to-day, has a very large popular audience,’ noted G.M. Trevelyan, the grand old man of English history, in his introductory message. Like Quennell and Hodge, he was committed to what a later editor called ‘the marriage of elegant prose with incisive scholarship’.