What Is History? - E.H. Carr

I suppose that if you're only going to read one historiographical book in your life then this would be it. I've never seriously thought about the nature of history as an academic discipline before, so at the very least this opened me up to some ideas that I've never considered before. Some of them were insightful, some lost me a bit and the bit where Carr claims that history is a science is just plain wrong.

I should say that the writing is very fine, and in particular the choice of metaphor is invariably enlightening and often rather amusing.