After winning the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2019, I was asked to write an essay for the 2020 Edinburgh Book Festival. The Problem with Great Men is an examination of how we are ‘doing history wrong’ in the public sphere. History has a ‘brand identity’ problem in modern Britain – not only are we fighting about who owns it and who can tell it, but we don’t even have a clear definition of what it is. Social History is the answer. Read on…