History is not what it was. Professor Patrick O'Brien's engagement with postmodern history certainly signals that particular fact. Professor O'Brien has written a lucid, cogent and skillful defence of history conceived as a particular kind of discipline. In the process he has struck a generous and open-minded note - something which is all too often missing in these kinds of exchanges. It is my intention also to be fair minded and, I hope, equally polite. But a brief prefatory comment. It serves no particularly useful purpose to argue about Professor O'Brien's description of Jenkins, Southgate and myself as postmodernists. I shall not presume to answer for Southgate and Jenkins as to whether they would accept the description. For myself I would prefer a designation that does not signify what is often regarded as representing subversive (defined in a destructive sense) thinking about history. Like the journal for which I am the UK editor (Rethinking History published by Routledge), I would prefer to be regarded as a historian - perhaps no different in this respect to all historians - who rethinks the nature of history in a manner that is productive but which, above all, extends the form and content boundaries and arrangements of the discipline of the-past-as-history.