Experience counts

Not just a historian, but the heaven-sent (by way of Texas) dream of the lonely octogenarian. Young Cambridge historian Bryan Rigg, whose research on German Jews found an original and effective hiding place under Nazism by serving in the Wehrmacht was revealed this week, passes bus and train journeys by positively seeking out the aged and asking them to recount their life stories. He told the Daily Telegraph that such encounters, initially by chance and more recently by design, had furnished much of the material for his path-breaking work.