At age 82, he [J. H. Elliott] has now composed a memoir, History in the Making, tracking his own intellectual development as well as the challenges that any historian faces when it comes to understanding, and reconstructing, the past. . . . He became what he calls a "Hispanicist"--a foreigner who devotes a career to understanding Spain and who possesses thereby, or so it is hoped, a perspective less ideologically partisan or personally engaged than native scholars and intellectuals. Over time, Mr. Elliott notes, the effort to understand another culture can make the outsider begin to feel like an insider, as if picking up a second identity. This process, of course, affects any historian working to engage another time and place. It enabled Mr. Elliott to do important scholarship on Spain while explaining its history to foreign audiences in a compelling way. . . . By studying the "people, commodities, ideas and cultural practices around and across the Atlantic," he writes, we can often see "unsuspected connections." Discovering such connections is perhaps the essence of the historian's task, one that Mr. Elliott has performed, like his great predecessors [Gibbon, Macaulay, Hugh Trevor-Roper, A. J. P. Taylor, Richard Cobb, et al.], with remarkable skill and erudition over many decades.