"He rejected authority in historical thinking, attaching supreme importance to inventiveness, paradox, and interpretative deviance. Personally, he was modest and tolerant, was free of arrogance, and disliked the entrenched prescriptions of the progressive intellect. He felt a deep and irrational regard for rakes whom he much preferred to the "virtuous and stiff-necked". In correspondence much more than in speech he was capable of inimitable flashes of brilliance."
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Historians from EnglandPhilosophers from EnglandUniversity of Cambridge facultyPeople from LeedsChristians from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
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Maurice Cowling, 'Herbert Butterfield, 1900–1979', Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 65 (1979), p. 608
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Herbert_Butterfield
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Herbert Butterfield
Herbert Butterfield (October 7, 1900 – July 20, 1979) was a British historian and philosopher of history who is remembered chiefly for a slim volume entitled, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931).
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