"More perhaps than any Briton this century, he exemplified the virtues of the empiricist school of history. Not for Elton the fashionable theory of his continental contemporaries or the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist posturing of left-wing historians in this country. In his 1967 primer The Practice of History, he argued that laborious work with documents must remain the bedrock of all research into the past. Without this foundation, no analysis or theorising could be taken seriously. National history, he warned, was too important to sacrifice on the altar of intellectual vogue. The survival of traditionalist history in British schools and universities owes much to his reason."