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Thank you so much. It is a terrific honour to participate in this lecture series, which brings together

two of our foremost cultural and intellectual institutions, theund Review of Books and the British Museum.

So thank you so much for the invitation. And thank you all for coming on this freezing day

to listen. Well done. My concern this evening will not be to discuss history's broad value as a discipline

so much as to advance a more specific set of claims, namely that paying attention to certain

aspects and processes of the past can improve how we approach and deal with some of the

challenges facing us in the present. In particular, I shall argue, history can help us towards a more

considered understanding of how change has happened and enhance how we assess

and respond to it now. I want to touch on these points first in general terms and then move on to

some of the changes that are confronting us in the UK today.

At one level, and as has already been pointed out, all of us are saturated with information

on change. There is 24-hour news, Twitter, Facebook and other online services

transmit the latest high-profile occurrences across the globe on a second-by-second basis.

Those of as old-fashioned enough still to want newspapers can scan them on screen at any time.

Yet this blizzard of material easily produces a sense of overload, I think, even powerlessness,

a feeling that simultaneously we are being told too much,

yet we are able to grasp too little.

So one vital respect in which history helps is by making us look away from the blitz of ever-shifting news stories

...