JUST OVER A year ago, Niall Ferguson went to Alan Bennett's hit play The History Boys, the movie version of which hit cinemas in Britain last month. It was an appropriate night out for the person many believe is the world's leading History Man. Yet Ferguson had an ulterior motive for seeing Bennett's drama about English schoolboys cramming for Oxbridge entrance exams.
'I had read an article saying the play had - or was - an attack on me,' he says in an appealing Scottish drawl. 'I said to my wife, 'I'm certain Alan Bennett has much better things to do with his time than make fun of me.' I mean, he's one of my heroes. So, I went along and was really rather shocked at the first half when there's a pretty direct attack on The Pity of War [Ferguson's second book, about the first world war].'
Most alarming was that Tom Irwin, Bennett's ambitious, opportunistic and distinctly snaky television historian, bore more than a passing resemblance to Ferguson. 'Irwin is a composite character, but I have to recognise that at least a third of him is based on my work. There's a particularly uncanny moment when he explains the art of writing a good essay. I felt as if one of my tutorials had been taped and supplied to him by a subversive student. It was all very close to the bone and I guess a little traumatic.'
Having received his fair share of criticism over the years, Ferguson decided to be flattered by catching Bennett's eye, however disapproving the gaze. Nevertheless, The History Boys clearly struck a nerve. 'Bennett actually mentions me as a target in the introduction to the published play,' Ferguson says. 'I'm not making this up - he clearly decided to have a go. I think it's a funny play. I don't think it says anything very profound about the writing of history - except that there's something wrong in contrarian writing that's purely striving for effect.'
It's hard to believe the poised, dapper and charming Ferguson ever feels insecure about anything, which lends this brief interlude of self-doubt a strange poignancy. Mostly, he confirms his status as academia's golden man of letters.
Quite apart from working at two of the world's finest universities (Oxford and Harvard, where he holds the Laurence A. Tisch Chair), the 42-year-old is a bona fide best-selling author and TV star to boot: Ferguson's most recent books - Empire, Colossus and The War of the World - were hits in the literary world and have been adapted into top-rated television documentaries. Little wonder that in 2004 Time included him as one of its 100 most influential people.
Ferguson's intellectual reputation is founded on the brilliant execution of one big idea: although he sometimes calls it 'contrarian', his preferred term is 'counter-factual'. Ferguson asks historical 'what ifs', then produces vivid, imaginative and occasionally controversial re-appraisals of events that appeal to academic and mass audiences alike.