Not long ago, I was asked to present a paper to a group of doctoral students. I thought for a long time about what I wanted my message to be. Intuitively, I felt that I did not want to talk to them about my research as such, but rather about the process of my research and how I saw the work I had been engaged with since the time I, too, was a PhD student. I decided to talk to them about listening, about uncertainty, about the questions we ask and the answers we hear and those we do not hear. The title of my talk was ‘As if I didn't already know’; for me, these words encapsulated the place that is so often abandoned by those of us in pursuit of our projects. At the end of this talk, one student raised his hand, and very thoughtfully asked me where all of this would lead to: ‘Do you only ever arrive at more questions, or are there some answers in the work that you do?’ I have thought about this question quite a bit in writing this book. There are some answers, small answers or answers of a provisional kind, but these invariably are incomplete, always begging for further exploration. I think that the portraits of lives and times contained in these chapters are accurate depictions of particular aspects of historical moments.