The History of the World Is a Biography of Great Men

brandon o'neil: In relation to the question of kings, i think the the element of cross purposes here is that in the 16 forties, you would have been on the side of charles the first. And i wanted to ask you about, not about carlyle himself, if listeners don't know, carlyle was a scottish victorian writer and essayist who wrote a great deal about politics. His argument, as you kind of summarized there, was that, baically, the history of the world is a biography of great men. So heroes are important in history. But isn't history an act not only of heroic figures, though they are very