John Vincent (historian)

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John Russell Vincent (born 20 December, 1937) is a British historian and a former Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was Professor of Modern History, and later History, at the University of Bristol from 1970 until his retirement when he became Visiting Professor at the University of East Anglia. In the 1980s he was a columnist for The Times and The Sun newspapers for four years, until violent socialist worker disruption of some of his lectures at his university forced him to take two terms unpaid leave, but he continued his journalism and has also written for many other publications, including book reviews and articles for New Society, the Listener, The Spectator, The London Review of Books, the Observer, the Sunday Times, and the Guardian.^[1]

In 1995 Oxford University Press refused at the last minute to publish a book on history by Vincent, having commissioned and overseen much of its writing.^[2]

In his book on historiography, An Intelligent Person's Guide to History, Vincent notes that if we went solely by the documentary standards most prized by modern historians nothing would be more historically certain than that there were witches in the Middle Ages, given that we have a large volume of solemnly sworn testimony in original documents.

He also observes that "History is horrible", and writes movingly on the Holocaust.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Publications

John Vincent, The Formation of the Liberal Party, 1857-68 (Constable, 1966; second edition, 1980).
John Vincent, Pollbooks: How Victorians Voted (Cambridge University Press, 1967).
John Vincent and A. B. Cooke (eds.), Lord Carlingford's Journal (Oxford University Press, 1971).
John Vincent and M. Stenton (eds.), McCalmont's Parliamentary Poll Book 1832-1918 (Harvester, 1971).
Alistair Basil Cooke and John Vincent, Governing Passion: Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain, 1885-86 (Harvester, 1974).
John Vincent (ed.), Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party: The Political Journals of Lord Stanley 1849-69 (Harvester, 1978).
John Vincent, Gladstone and Ireland (Raleigh Lecture) (British Academy, 1979).
John Vincent (ed.), The Crawford Papers: The Journals of David Lindsay, Twenty-Seventh Earl of Crawford and Tenth Earl of Balcarres during the years 1892 to 1940 (1984).
John Vincent, 'The Thatcher Governments, 1979-1987' in Peter Hennessy and Anthony Seldon (eds.), Ruling Performance: British Government from Attlee to Thatcher (Blackwell, 1987).
John Vincent, Disraeli (Oxford Paperbacks, 1990).
John Vincent, An Intelligent Person's Guide to History (Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, 1995, 2005).
John Vincent (ed.), The Derby Diaries 1869-1878 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
John Vincent, '1874-1880' in Anthony Seldon (ed.), How Tory Governments Fall (Fontana Press, 1996), pp. 159-187.
John Vincent (ed.), The Derby Diaries 1878-1893 (Leopard's Head Press, 2003).