“History reveals the enormous variety and variability of human institutions and behaviour, setting clear limits on the validity and plausibility of any universalising generalisations. The problem for any would-be applied historian lies in converting this necessary corrective of over-confident social-scientific assertions or politicians’ simplistic assumptions – the historian’s reflex ‘actually, it’s rather more complicated than that’ – into anything resembling the sort of practical policy advice that politicians or civil servants will ever take seriously.”