...I believe that one of the great contributions of British historians of the 20th century to history and the historical profession has been their wi… - John Elliott

I think one of the things that it is most important for historians to do is to deconstruct myths, and that when you get nationalist historiography, as in Serbia for instance, casting people in the role of permanent victims, and creating a very narrow focus, that’s really dangerous. It seems to me that our role is constantly to question the orthodoxy of the day.

...The whole trend towards rather nit-picking revisionism. The old big picture often presented by Marxist or marxisant historians began to be eroded by a new generation, and I think the result all too often has been a narrowing of focus, a fragmenting of the discipline. And my whole life I’ve been trying to save the big picture and promote its virtues and its importance.
I think at this moment we may be seeing a shift back to something rather larger, as against microhistory, and revisionist mini-history. There has been a growing realisation of the importance of a wider framework, and that framework may be pan-European, it may be Atlantic history, or increasingly, global history.

In the second half of the 17th century, the Catalans saw that the relationship with Spain had failed, and so they rebelled against Philip V; then they realized that the French were no different. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Catalans began to see the opportunities that being in Spain presented. I think that, like the Scots, they took advantage of those opportunities. But historians are not prophets, and it now looks as though our two countries could break up.