"If history is the latest new rock'n'roll (at least on TV), then what's really rocking in the discipline itself? In this engaging set of interviews with past masters, a Brazilian historian asks world-ranking figures about their careers and ideas." The Independent "Scholars are self-effacing by vocation, but Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke leads some of the world’s most influential historical thinkers into enthralling revelations. We hear Jack Goody – the greatest and most under-appreciated living British intellectual – bemoaning the obscurity of his own ideas, and Quentin Skinner self-condemned as a “local historian”. We learn what it was like for Peter Burke to face temptation in Singapore, Natalie Davis to survive McCarthyism, Keith Thomas to encounter voodoo. The interviewees engage in fascinating implied dialogues with each other. Among surprising recurrent themes – Marxism, Brazil – two lessons ring through: the need for a comparative approach to history and the value of what Peter Burke calls “soft cultural relativism”." Professor Felipe Fernándes-Armesto, Queen Mary, University of London "Professor Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke is a perceptive and well-prepared interviewer of nine prominent social and cultural historians for[this book,] which first appeared in her native Brazil." Canadian Journal of History, December 2004