War and Peace and The Lord of the Rings are both unusually long, but have you ever stopped to wonder what else they have in common? A huge fan of Tolstoy and Tolkien for most of my life, I set out to discover why their masterpieces and a third massive, but very different, narrative, E. P. Thompson’s path-breaking historical study The Making of the English Working Class, ticked the same box in my mind. En route I realized that Thompson’s underrated, but remarkably prescient, satirical fantasy The Sykaos Papers also belonged in the story. The outcome is my book Epics of Disaffection.

I have degrees in Modern History from Oxford, Russian history from Cornell and Canadian history from Toronto. My doctoral thesis was a study of Charles Fothergill, a figure of minor importance but great interest as a politician, journalist and naturalist in early 19th-century Upper Canada (Ontario). I fully covered his life in Britain before he emigrated to Canada, and so I was able to publish his diary of two walking tours in Yorkshire (his native county) in 1805.

My wife and I defended our doctoral theses on the same day, but she already had a job at Johns Hopkins University. Baltimore is not ground zero for Canadian history, and so, apart from a three-year stint at the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, a division of Johns Hopkins, I’ve conducted my scholarly career as an independent scholar. During those years, a combination of chance and opportunity led me to focus mainly on legal and constitutional history, but Getting It Wrong, my magnum opus in the field, was the fruit of insights gained during my doctoral research nearly two decades earlier.

Before taking up Canadian history, I devoted years to the study of British (then called “English”) and Russian history. It is knowledge of these other areas that mainly underpins Epics of Disaffection, which discusses the writing of two Englishmen and a Russian. Oddly enough, though, Fothergill helped here too. Certain notes in his published writing and correspondence led me to discover Sentimentalism, a world-view extensively satirized in War and Peace. The Sublime, which informs my discussion of “the numinous” as an aspect of the epic, came to my notice via Fothergill’s analysis of why Niagara Falls was not.

The historical expertise that underpins Epics of Disaffection is not mainly a matter of factual knowledge anyway. More important is an analytical approach that is sensitive to chronology and to complexity in the relationship of cause and effect.

More than most historians, I base my practice on the close and subtle reading of texts. This has enabled me to advance my field, not just by discovering new data on this, that, or the other topic or by importing ideas from other fields, but by challenging established views on matters of central importance. In Getting It Wrong, a more penetrating analysis of known texts formed the basis of a reinterpretation of Canadian history that revealed the dominant English-Canadian narrative as a nationalist myth. In Epics of Disaffection, a similar approach yields fresh perspectives on three great writers: Tolkien, Tolstoy, and E. P. Thompson.

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