Historians of every generation, I believe, unless they are pure antiquarians, see history against the background - the controlling background - of current events. They call upon it to explain the problems of their own time, to give to those problems a philosophical context, a continuum in which they may be reduced to proportion and perhaps made intelligible.

History & imagination: essays in honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper (ed. Duckworth Publishing, 1981)