I think I can show that his whole conception and defence of history takes place within a familiar, traditional paradigm of which he remains unaware. Most contemporary critical theory arrives by passing through a single gate, recognition of the distance or gap or non-coincidence between reality and representation. In Defence of History admits that texts are texts and reality is reality. But it is not aware of this as a general problem - only as a specific one which affects historians in a particular way, and one they can deal with easily if they are scrupulous and attentive. He would be, I guess, be deeply disconcerted to learn that this classic empiricist assumption would be disputed by almost ever major philosopher who has written this century.
Reality is still there but at a slight remove.
The gap between reality and representation, including historical reality, historical representation, far from being radical and irremediable, consists only of readily discernible degrees of directness and indirectness. In Defence of History - rather, the dominant paradigm of the English empiricist tradition wrote it for him, because he made no critical attempt to interfere with its passage through him onto the page. In Defence of History was well received by some London reviewers on grounds that it saw off the invading hordes of postmodernist. It is depressing to think that this uninformed yet totally self-confident work of naive provincialism should come from close to the heartlands of English culture.