Arthur John Brereton Marwick FRHistS (29 February 1936 – 27 September 2006) was a British social historian, who served for many years as Professor of History at the Open University.
His research interests lay primarily in the history of Britain in the twentieth century, and the relationship between war and social change.
[4][5] Marwick was a left-wing social and cultural historian, but critical of Marxism and other approaches to history that he believed stressed the importance of metanarrative over archival research.
[9] He also distinguished between "witting" and "unwitting" testimony; that is, between the overt and intentional message of a document or source, and the unintentional evidence that it also contains.
[10] One of Marwick's most influential books, The Deluge (1965), dealt with the transformations in British society brought about by the First World War.
"[6] Jonathan Meades called him "the very picture of baba-cool, with his daringly arty shirt, negligently loose foulard and his beardy grin for which the only word is that late Sixties shocker 'mellow'".