History Man, by Fred Inglis, is a biography of R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943), the distinguished Oxford philosopher, historian, and archaeologist. Collingwood remains best known for The Idea of History, published posthumously in 1945, collated from various sources by his pupil T.M. Knox. (This work contains Collingwood’s famous statement that "all history is the history of thought … and therefore all history is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind.")
Collingwood was a prolific writer who published a number of serious philosophical works; he also produced a considerable body of work as an archaeologist. Collingwood was moreover a fascinating man who, according to Inglis, "lived at full pitch", cultivating a diverse range of interests; he enjoyed, for example, painting, sailing, music and bee-keeping. Despite a certain detachment, he was a public-spirited man. History Man is an ambitious attempt to draw new meanings from Collingwood’s work by offering "the form of his thought as manifested in the shape of his life".
