Can history reach out beyond academia to a wider audience, through the construction of a “usable past”? This book addresses the ongoing debate that has been reinvigorated by the recent success of television historians—what is the nature, use, and relevance of history to the contemporary world? This underlines the work currently being done by the History and Policy Project—a collaborative effort between the University of London's Centres for Contemporary British History, and History in Public Health, and members of Cambridge University—to remind contemporary policy makers and advisers of the necessity of historical knowledge and to avoid a “radical foreshortening” of the past, which can lead to disastrous conclusions of policy options and likely outcomes. The decision to intervene in Iraq in March 2003 is merely the most potent recent example.

The structure of the book is clearly developed, giving a relatively dry topic accessible form. In pointing to “uses and mis-uses of history,” Peter J. Beck asks, What is the historians’ task? The central themes of the book are the value and limitations of historical awareness, the receptivity of policy makers and administrators, the contribution of history to maintaining a collective departmental memory, and the role and of historical expertise in government. In his coverage of the gulf that exists between the theory and practice of history-policy linkage, Beck begins with Margaret Gowing's Rede Lecture of 1978, in which she launched a trenchant attack on contemporary policy makers for ignoring the role of history. Beck's analysis centers on the Treasury and the Foreign Office—and charts the attempts of a dedicated narrow cohort of civil servants to prove the role and worth of history as a tool of policy making to their skeptical colleagues, at a time when Britain's world role was constantly under discussion.

The greater part of this book covers the period from the 1957 policy initiative instituted by the cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, that the civil service should use history more systematically, to the final closure of the Treasury Historical Section in 1976. Intent on building upon the internal official wartime histories, Brook wished to “fund experience for Government use” (23–24). Brook's aim was to achieve a fundamental shift toward the functional use of history by policy makers and to persuade Whitehall of the benefits of drawing upon history in its everyday work “as an aid to current administration” (24). Of all the Whitehall departments, the Treasury proved the most dedicated to implementing Brook's policy initiative and represents a good case study for the use of history. Over this period it produced a remarkable collection of confidential departmental histories and analytic case studies. The advent of Harold Wilson as prime minister injected new high-policy interest in such exercises and was the seminal point of the adoption of the Thirty-Year Rule covering access to public records in 1967. This led to the commissioning of the first peacetime official histories and a remarkable opening up of the relatively closed British system of government, which to that point had prided itself on its defense of official secrets. But, while covering this period in considerable detail, the author fully recognizes the constraints and limitations pressing upon these dedicated few historians. Overall, therefore, despite the bold claims of the utility of this work, in reality they failed to make a significant impact. The inevitable time required in production of case studies limited their value, given the pressure for decisions, the length of the briefs themselves, as well as the press of other events upon busy civil servants and politicians. In addition, there was the issue of the regular rotation of civil service personnel within departments and the instruction to keep such classified accounts in a secure work environment. As influential backers either left the department or retired, the critical institutional backing was no longer there. Even in the Treasury there was varying willingness within departments to introduce a historical dimension to everyday work. Although the department's radical overhaul in 1962 produced renewed interest in systems and the perceived utilities, there remained ingrained resistance to seeing the Treasury's historical activities of “seeded files” and divisional notes as either useful or relevant.

In addition, the exercise of “autopsies” on past issues ran into a natural human reluctance of Whitehall mandarins, at both bureaucratic and individual level, to shine an analytic spotlight too intently on past failures. Similarly, there was an ingrained reluctance to share such “historical knowledge” within Whitehall departments, which impeded the efficacy of using history as a policy tool. Each department had its own “take” on past events, yet a detailed understanding of developments could not be considered in isolation from other Whitehall players. Therefore, efforts to ensure a shared and enduring “political-historical culture” stumbled because of a lack of wider institutional support as well as. However, in 1958, a pilot study was established, based a short list of seven recent crises and events. The Suez affair was conspicuous by its absence, underlining the political and bureaucratic sensitivities encompassed in any assessment of the very recent past. The Abadan affair was selected, under the chairmanship of Rohan Butler, in the belief that it would pose a “particularly instructive case history” (201). The extensive conclusions, published (internally) in 1962, prioritized “lessons from history” for policy makers, in terms of policy content and method. These included failings of political leadership, staff inexperience, and bureaucratic shortcomings, as well as underlining the decline in British power and prestige since 1945 in terms of both substance and image.

In highlighting this report, Beck underlines the frequently overlooked importance of the Abadan crisis of 1950–51 for later developments in the Middle East, particularly the Suez affair. Butler's report generated considerable interest and praise at the time. Despite its limited circulation, it reinvigorated thinking about past events and was circulated to overseas missions for comment. Michael Stewart (foreign secretary 1965–66) hoped it could be used as a precedent for an official history of the Suez Affair, as there was political pressure from the Labour Party in the 1960s to have a detailed autopsy. This was decidedly uncomfortable for Foreign Office officials who had no desire to highlight unwelcome revelations. (In fact, Eden had already commissioned such a study under Guy Millard in 1957.) Therefore, Butler's study failed to make such reassessments a regular part of the Foreign Office's activities. It revealed the inevitable shortcomings in such exercises: its very length (but compression would have compromised the necessary detailed analytical study), the distraction of competing crises (the Burgess-MacLean affair in 1951), as well as the limitations of taking history only from the written record.

Therefore, Beck points clearly to the gap between the intellectual case for using history to enlighten and inform policy makers and officials, compared to the reality that this advice was more frequently ignored. In practice, therefore, the argument that history is a useful road map for policy makers that can help provide “the outline of an answer” rather than the answer did not find a wide and receptive audience. In Leo Pliatzky's pithy expression, policy makers are more concerned in making history than writing or using it. It remains the active task of historians to point out the dangerous fallacies of a too blinkered approach toward the utility of history, as well as the temptations and dangers of historical analogies so beloved by politicians; Beck's book does this cause a considerable service.