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The great 19th century historian Thomas Macaulay

wrote that history was caught between two hostile powers, the reason and the

imagination. I'm joined by two renowned historians of today to discuss whether the practitioners of history

in the 20th century have resolved this dilemma or is history still caught between reason

and the imagination.

Simon Sharma, University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, is currently filming a 16-part series for BBC television telling the story of the history of Britain.

He's been compared to A.J. Taylor and Macaulay himself. He's the author of best-selling books including citizens, memory and

landscape and more controversially a fictional account of two historical

deaths called dead certainties. Antonio Fraser is one of Britain's best known historian.

She's written nearly a dozen history books including her acclaimed biographies of Mary Queen of Scots,

Cromwell and Charles II, two books of women's history, the Weaker Vessel and The Warrior Queen, and her most recent

book The Gunpowder Plot. That quotation from Thomas Macaulis, Amicham, was written almost exactly 170

years ago. History wrote's under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers.

Instead of being equally shared between its two rulers, the reason and the imagination,

it falls alternately under the sole and absolute dominion of each.

It's sometimes fiction and sometimes theory. Do you think

that that still obtains today? I think it does actually and another point he talked

about history being necessarily a compound of poetry and philosophy.

You need both, I think, actually, to do the job,

and Macaulay was often in despair that he sometimes as befitted a member of parliament was extremely good at debate

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