John Burrow was professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex
from 1981 to 1995 and Professor of European Thought at Oxford from 1995 to 2000. His earlier
books include Evolution and Society: a study in Victorian Social Theory (1966), A Liberal
Descent: four Victorian Historians (1981), which won the Wolfson Prize for History, Gibbon
(1984) and The Crisis of Reason: European Thought 1848-1914 (2000). He is a Fellow of the
British Academy, an Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and in 2008 will be
Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Williams College, Massachusetts. His latest book is A History
of Histories (2007).
