The past inside the present

Time’s Witness: History in the Age of Romanticism

by Rosemary Hill

Allen Lane, 416 pages, £25

“The history we have,” Rosemary Hill writes in her preface to “is the history we want. It is the picture we choose to see in the clouds.” Hill’s book accordingly recreates, in magnificent detail, the cloud pictures conjured into being by the historians, writers, architects,