"The dominant figure in contemporary English historiography is (I need hardly say it) the Polish Jew Lewis Bernstein Namier. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, but, as a militant Zionist, he remained outside British intellectual society until the publication of his book The Structure of English Politics at the Accession of George III (1929) gave him almost at once a unique position of authority, and transformed him, to his own surprise perhaps, into the model for the younger generation of English historians. In substance Namier applied to English history continental sociological methods of examining the ruling class, and he added to this a special knowledge of the situation in modern and contemporary Central Europe – which he was to show even more clearly in subsequent essays and research. Yet in his extraordinary ability as a minute and rigorous researcher and in the simplicity of his guiding principles he satisfied his English readers steeped in a historiographic tradition that had been formed under the influence of the first German historicism. Namier has instigated the most complex collective undertaking of contemporary English historians, the history of the English Parliament: and his example has influenced historians as different as J. A. Neale [sic]...and A. J. P. Taylor... It is impossible to separate from Namier's work R. Syme's studies in Roman history (The Roman Revolution, 1939)... Namier has been criticised by H. Butterfield in an attempt to re-establish a religious perspective which is Methodist in origin (Christianity and History, 1949 etc.); but if the credit for the reawakening of interest in the history of historiography is due to Butterfield, his specific criticism of Namier's books has not found favour."