Richard Cohen examines the storytellers of the past, how they worked and how their writings still influence our ideas about history.

Who were the historians who changed the way history is written? How did their biases affect their accounts? Is there such a thing as objective history?

The series explores lives and works from the Greek historian Herodotus, through the great Roman historians Tacitus and Livy, with their great epic stories of war and plagues, all of them inventing stories to be more reader friendly, and then moving through Arab and Islamic writings, to the medieval historians like Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth – the latter famous for his economy with the truth, in other words, making it all up.

The great Italian Niccolo Machiavelli became a historian by accident, Voltaire and Edward Gibbon changed the way history was written, breaking away from a God centred universe. Then there's the Red historians from Marx (always in debt and crippled by boils on his skin) to Eric Hobsbawm, the emergence of female historians, and false accounts of history.

Episode 2
The Muslim View of History. By the 2nd century AD city dwellers began to be interested in how their cities came into being, and so the writing of history began. The rich collected private libraries – one piled his house to the ceiling with books. The Qur’an came into being – by 730 AD Baghdad produced more narrative history than Europe. The great writers Tabari was one of many who produced accounts of conquests and civil wars as Islam grew.

Author: Richard Cohen
Abridger: Libby Spurrier
Reader: Alex Jennings
Producer: Celia de Wolff

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4 Show less