Richard Hofstadter wrote history out of a tense, but reflective, engagement with the world of ideas, politics and people in which he lived. There was no disjunction between his working and social lives; he carried on with his friends and colleagues an almost ceaseless dialogue that was always serious but often delightfully gay. His intellectual energy was relentless; and, towards the end, his work literally helped to keep him alive. Sometimes he described himself as less a historian than a historical critic, a remark that might, from one of the most influential historians of the age, have seemed ironically self-deprecatory, but was meant as a serious comment on his own historical style.