Invention of Tradition? Absolutely. And to The Leveller's list of great historians I would have to add EP Thompson and Keith Thomas.

When I was at university, students were encouraged to take optional units outside their own department, so I signed up for the History Department's Introduction to Economic History. Very good unit, very good lecturer but far too right wing for my tastes. When he talked us through the reading list, he warned us about uncritically accepting the writings of Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill.

No there was nothing wrong with their scholarship, and their various tomes were eminently readable. But they were both Marxists and therefore we had to take what they said with a measure of scepticism.

How, I wonder, were we to approach all the right wing historians who he'd put down on his reading list?