The History Boys Flashcards
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
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“History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.”
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“One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.”
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“Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.”
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“Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.”
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“Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.”
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“I don’t always understand poetry!’
‘You don’t always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now and you will understand it…whenever.”
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“[talking about the Holocaust]
‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’
‘But this is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.”
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“All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.”
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“Dakin: The more you read, though, the more you’ll see that literature is actually about losers.
Scripps: No.
Dakin: It’s consolation. All literature is consolation.”
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The person I have had no experience of at all is Hector, the charismatic teacher; I only knew about teachers like that from talking to other people, and also from reading. Temperamentally I cleave to that kind of teacher and that kind of teaching – while at the same time not thinking it practical. I suppose that the three teachers came out of trying to reconcile that. I think plays do tend to come out of things that you can’t actually resolve other than by writing a play about them.
Bennett on The History Boys-Critical Views
I think, of the three teachers, Stephen Campbell Moore, who plays Irwin, has the hardest job because he doesn’t have the audience’s sympathy until two thirds of the way through the second act.
Both Hector and Mrs Lintott have the audience on their side whereas he – who is teaching and getting results, which, in the ordinary way, parents would approve of – is not thought to be sympathetic until he reveals himself as quite vulnerable. That came as a surprise to me when I saw it rehearsed. In a sense, it takes the actors to show you what you’ve written.
Bennett on The History Boys-Critical Views
In the words of Rudge in the play, “History is just one fucking thing after another,” which seems quite a brutish thing to say but was actually not said by him originally, but by Herbert Butterfield who was Professor of History at Cambridge in the ’40s, only as he put it:
“History is one bloody thing after another.” The difference between the “bloody” and the “fucking” is what has happened in public discourse in the last 50 years. The thing that struck me is that on the first night, we had a fire which set the sprinkler system off.
Bennett on The History Boys-Critical Views
I think everybody wants to have learnt poems by heart at school. They look back to an age when their parents, or maybe their grandparents, could recite verse. My mother could recite very garbled and over-dramatised bits of poetry she’d learnt at school.
And whenever she went into poetry-reciting mode, the pose she took up was exactly the one she’d taken up when she was 10 years old. But people do feel that they ought to have this ingrained knowledge of poetry and regret not having it. It seems to me, in Hector’s words, it is a kind of “insulation for the mind”.
And when you do come across people who have literature at their fingertips and can quote things off by heart, then it is very impressive and enviable.
Bennett on The History Boys-Critical Views
“Hector is not an ideal teacher and he is sloppy and quotes stuff almost at random. But the boys see that. They see the shortcomings of Hector, Irwin and Mrs Lintott. I wanted to show that the boys are the ones who know more than any of the teachers.
They will go their own way and they will carve out their own futures. They will take from each of these teachers what they want. That’s what the slightly less than idyllic last scene shows. The boys are not wholly nostalgic, nor are they wholly materialistic, and when they say what they’ve done in life, that is empiricism and experience winning through.
Bennett on The History Boys-Critical Views
