The discipline of history depends on evidence, which element is protean, and seeks for relevance, which changes with passing generations. Therefore conclusions are in the long run unstable. So runs the main tenet of Banner’s argument for historicism. ‘Only by writing for their own times and in response to questions of their day can historians make the past comprehensible to those who wish to learn of it. … What to one person and one age is orthodoxy to another is revision, and vice versa’ (p. 269). Banner commences with the contrast between Herodotus, who valued informal culture and mindsets, and Thucydides, who preferred tangible deeds and recorded public affairs. Put another way, whether the discipline’s purpose is to advance moral understanding or be objective (Ranke’s as it actually happened) is an important source of competing perspective. Revisions may also stem from method, which prompt different queries. After a tour of such revisionists – really pioneering practitioners – as the 4th-century theologian Eusebius and Marx, the author establishes himself as a postmodern fellow traveler. The premise of deconstruction is admitted; objectivity is ‘masculine’; historical propositions usually cannot be falsified; the would-be neutrality (positivism) of psychology is smuggled into historical practice to demonstrate the impossibility of conclusion. Yet Banner is pleased to defend the mandarinate’s expertise: ‘Whatever modern and postmodern doubts about the objectivity ideal have arisen since the nineteenth century, it is impossible to imagine that the inborn human thirst for dependable historical understanding will suffer significantly among professional historians and members of the general public because of these uncertainties’ (p. 262)! And: ‘Such prudent relativism in historical thought has never come close to being so unhinged and radical as to threaten historians’ commitment to truth and accuracy’ (p.265). The usual (circa 2021) progressive platitudes are frequently aired. Lacking any boundary between ‘revisionism’ and nihilism, Banner tacitly encourages postmodern attacks on the heritage of Western society. The matter of historicism is treated by recognizing it is not the answers but the great recurring questions that establish transcendence.