Disenchantment is the usual destination for professional historians. Not that they come to lose the love of their subject or sense of its importance or confidence in its rigour. They do not normally, or at least inevitably, lose heart. The word is meant more literally: they lose the past as a place of magic and charm. Their past becomes the object of a forensic enquiry, a place constructed as much as discovered through the sophisticated methods and tools that their education and training has lent them. Times gone by no longer seem romantic in the way that historical novels and docudramas seek to make them. For some professionals the past retains the quality of reality which makes their books and articles accounts of incontestable events, firm in their fixity, nailed by scientific method. For some sceptics that image needs refinement and limitation. All agree that, no matter how one conceives the past, it must not appear embroidered or roseate; it must never at their hands appear ‘quaint’. Butterfield himself made his first steps along this familiar road.