Professor Elliott begins by considering the general trends in 20th-century historical writing and, in particular, the contribution of Fernand Braudel and the French Annales school. He goes on to examine recent reactions to a historiography heavily influenced by economic and structural interpretations, and looks in particular at the current vogue for the history of mentalites and the new revisionism. Both these modern trends, while they have revitalized historical writing, run the risk of atomizing and trivializing the past. In the light of this Professor Elliott goes on to consider possible ways forward for historians, and especially British historians, in the 1990s and beyond, bearing in mind particularly the closer integration of the European Community and the Columbus quincentennial of 1992.