He himself thought that he peaked at fifty. The three books of October 1949, appearing coincidentally with his wonderful term at Princeton, projected his reputation as an historical thinker beyond the audience established by the Whig Interpretation and The Englishman and His History. The former entered a new lease of life with the Butler Education Act of 1944 and the spread of the grammar school ethos, which demanded ‘think books’ for the school curriculum, especially when scholarship papers for university entrance came round in a young person's progress. Continually in print in the postwar years, the Whig Interpretation eventually shook hands with E. H. Carr's What is History? (1961) – more enthusiastically than Butterfield would have done with its author – to become a staple of preparation for higher studies. When the new generation recalled reading it, therefore, schooldays usually floated back in the memory, and it is a safe bet that many readers of this biography have made the same journey in retrospect. The Englishman had a briefer afterlife but Sir Keith Thomas, for one, read it as a schoolboy and remembers, six decades later, thinking well of it. Indeed, Butterfield seems to have made a disproportionate impact on the young in the postwar years. John Vincent (later Professor J. R. Vincent of the University of Bristol) was still at school at Bedales when the lectures on Christianity, Diplomacy and War appeared in 1952.