Perhaps it should be pointed out that not only memory is treacherous and selective, but even archival sources are not always fully reliable. In my work on the papers of Roy Harrod I have found examples of self-selection of documents to be preserved for posterity. Already aged 30 he annotated some documents as witnessing his position on some university matters, at 32 he preserved his own side of the correspondence he entertained with some politicians apparently because he deemed it important to keep a trace of it (he normally never kept copies of his outgoing correspondence, almost all handwritten); at 45 he started going through his own archives, annotating some correspondence for the benefit of "future historians of thought". At some (probably later) point in life he organized his own archives for the benefit of future readers, and he is likely to have manipulated some contents (besides rearranging the correspondence: ennoyingly, the archivists undid some of Harrod's work and moved some papers to different folders …). It is in fact very strange that one who preserved taylor's bills and bus tickets had kept no documents relating to his activities with the New Fabian Research Bureau in the early 1930s: he didn't keep any of the memoranda he wrote (two at least survive in the NFRB's archives) nor the correspondence he received about it (but the outgoing letters are in the recipients' archives), except for a letter from James Meade dealing with theoretical matters and mentioning the NFRB in a postscriptum --perhaps (I am speculating here) Sir Roy turned conservative was embarrassed of the leftwing tendencies of his younger self.

This, of course, does not mean that our job is useless, as witnessed by the fact that I could reconstruct, by means of cross-references, some at least of these episodes. It only means that our job is difficult and should be done with great care, as nothing can be taken at face value.

Daniele Besomi