Launching UnHerd’s history jury

“With so much change and turbulence in global politics it’s good to seek more than one opinion and UnHerd’s new political jury provides readers with the perspective of four big-brained political observers from both sides of the Right-Left divide.” 

So wrote UnHerd’s editor, Montie, in September. And, starting from next Monday, UnHerd will have a history jury, too, to give “the long view” on the issues of the day. Or perhaps, we might say, to give the verdict of history.

The jurists are:

• Eliot Cohen, Robert E Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC. He was a counsellor in the US State Department under Condoleezza Rice and, says Ruth Wedgwood of Yale (who surely needs no further introduction?), “is one of the few teachers in the American academy to treat military history as a serious field.”

• Paul Lay, editor of History Today the magazine founded in 1951 by Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s Minister of Information in the Second World War, with the simple aim of bringing serious history to a wide audience. Paul himself specialises – if that’s not a restricting verb – in the Early Modern period.

• Victoria Schofield, author, journalist and historian; one-time Alistair Horne Fellow at St Anthony’s College, Oxford, and President of the Oxford Union. Victoria is an expert on India and its neighbours, worked as an independent broadcaster for the BBC World Service in London and New York in the 1980s and 1990s, and is author of – among many books – Afghan Frontier: At the Crossroads of Conflict (2010).

• And, trusting that unlike the political jury there is no Right-Left divide, I shall have the pleasure of joining them.

Our answers to two opening questions will appear on Monday and Tuesday.