Historical holes

Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain is a triumph of telling history through a journalistic lens: anecdotes, events, gossip, and rear-view mirror vision. Entertaining and educational, but also troubling with the instant realisation that this general viewer (i.e. me) actually knows little about the recent past, let alone much else.

It seems Britain was on the brink of revolution several times before the Great War; there were various politicians I'd never come across; the real reason for Gallipolli, etc.

These may be my particular lacunae, but everyone will have their own. The past is a movable entity as ever more secrets get declassified, changing our prejudices and assumptions. And general amnesia makes it inevitable that archetypes re-emerge and history repeats itself ...