He is strongly critical both of the relevance and of the adequacy of their arguments, seeking to show that, ultimately, they are guilty of failing to accept the logic of their own position. Evans judges the acceptability of the reasoning advanced by the postmodernists - and finds it badly wanting. While In Defence of History addresses all aspects of historical method, its key focus is on an extensive evaluation of this postmodern thinking. In this reading, there could be no objective history, merely the study of the texts themselves. Historians were being forced to face up to postmodern thinking, which argued that, because all texts were the product of biased writers who had incomplete information, none could be privileged above others. He was knighted for services to scholarship in 2012.Richard Evans wrote In Defence of History at a time when the historian's profession was coming under heavy attack as a result of the 'cultural turn' taken by the discipline during the late 1980s and the 1990s.
His books have been awarded the Wolfson History Prize and the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History. He is a frequent contributor to radio and television programmes, including Free Thinking. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the Medal for Arts and Sciences of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. His many awards and distinctions include the British Academy Leverhulme Medal and Prize, the Norton Medlicott Medal of the Historical Association, the William H. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature. His most recent books are Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (2013) and The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 (2016). His many books include The Coming of the Third Reich (2003), The Third Reich in Power (2005) and The Third Reich at War (2008), as well as a collection of essays, The Third Reich in History and Memory (2015). He has taught at the University of East Anglia, where he was Professor of European History, and Birkbeck, University of London, where he was Professor of History and Vice-Master. Evans is Regius Professor Emeritus of History at Cambridge University, and Provost of Gresham College in the City of London.
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