Both the Tory view of a 'great man' history, and the liberal pieties of Whig history are undermined in the work, in the (then contemporary) style of such serious historians as Namier and Herbert Butterfield.R Samuel, Island Story (London 1999) p. 209-11 With its conflation of history and memory, and its deconstruction of "standard" historical narrative lines, the book can also be seen as an early post-modernist text.1066
