I would not like my previous comments to sound like English historiography bashing. I love the work of a great number of UK historians, though less so their work on the French rev., I have to admit. I think that there are certain common negative traits that frequently appear in a particular tradition of history writing, and a classist condescending tone,especially towards the foreign subjects of history, together with a certain self-referentiality is the one that seems to be quite frequent among certain English historians. This does not mean that other historiographic traditions do not suffer from the same of other problems. For example, until very recently, the French historians tended to see as somehow positive or justifiable anything they defined as a popular action or movement, as if "the People", whatever it means, could never be wrong. And I can think about other defects as purposefully incomprehensible language and lack of common sense :-) But I insist again, there is no genetic predisposiion towards certain way of history writing and there are examples of many different attitudes towards history-writing everywhere, of course. Sib.