The past of the future: from the foreign to the undiscovered country

Historians should disdain manifestos: they are contradictions in terms. To issue proclamations and thunder denunciations (from the Italian manifestare) is the duty of prelates and politicos. Historians who thunder risk Disraeli’s taunt: manifesto writers are ‘monotonous rumbling terrors’.1 Our calling is not to moralise or preach but to discern and reveal – to make manifest what deserves being evident.