Editorial

The 2020 volume of Rethinking History concludes with this double issue. This pandemic year has been strange and stressful for us all, and the strain it has placed on the editors in their working and personal lives, as well as disruptions to some of the journal’s editorial processes, have impacted its operations. For these reasons, some submissions have remained in the review process for much longer than we would have liked, for which we apologise. Similarly, the journal’s publication schedule for individual issues proved difficult to maintain. Hence, we are concluding this volume with a bumper double issue which will allow us to reset the schedule for 2021. We hope and expect that more normal service will thereby be restored!

Amidst the usual rich and varied diet of research articles, this double issue also provides us with an opportunity to honour Professor Alun Munslow, the leader of the team which founded the journal. At the time of writing, it is just over a year since Alun’s shocking and untimely death on 1 October 2019. We asked members of the journal Editorial Board and other close collaborators and friends to pen short personal tributes to Alun, which are here collated. These are intended as personal reminiscences rather than analyses of Alun’s intellectual contribution (though the latter should also be forthcoming in due course). Collectively, they underline what a unique, warm and supportive individual he was.

It is with great sadness that we also recall the death of Dr Peter Icke on 9 September 2020. Peter undertook and completed a PhD under the supervision of Keith Jenkins at the University of Chichester, his slightly revised thesis being subsequently published by Routledge as Frank Ankersmit’s Lost Historical Cause: A Journey from Language to Experience (2012), a text which received much critical appraisal. Peter came late to academia, having spent the whole of his working life as an airline pilot with British Airways, and his book was published when he was 70. But age was no handicap for him, and with energy and great enthusiasm he embraced the world of philosophy and theory of history. He gave papers at various conferences and seminars, wrote for Rethinking History and was a keen blogger for the Centre for the Philosophy of History at St Mary’s University, London. He became a permanent fixture at the Institute of Historical Research’s philosophy of history seminar in London where I (Kalle) got to know him well over the last ten years, and where I was always conscious of being with a multi-talented man of great intellectual power – a remarkable man in love with life and so cruelly taken from us.