I read the article by Lino Debono (February 4) who has a stack of impressions and anecdotes bearing on aspects of the last few decades, including several with a Mintoffian slant.

His familiarity with Maltese historiography seems to be rather fossilised, going back to Mgr S. Laspina’s Outlines of Maltese History, which was something to go by in colonial times. He seems to be blissfully unaware of a few more recent serious attempts at coming to grips with this subject in English and even in Maltese. Such is my own third volume of Storja ta’ Malta: is-seklu dsatax (KKM, 2005), a secondary school textbook (which, incidentally, nobody has ever criticised).

DeBono’s plea that our history needs to be properly written and taught in our schools is an ideal for which I, among others, have long pleaded.

Writing it ‘properly’ is a hugely difficult but not impossible task, as made amply clear by Debono’s rather gratuitous, impressionistic and insinuating approach, readable and partly undisputed though that may be.

This is all the more so for a reading of a history of Malta in the 20th century, which my Volume 4, time permitting, will be about.

I fully agree that, as Debono put it, one should “look into a mirror”, notice the defects and the positives and be tolerant with different points of view, which, indeed, is the closest recipe for aspiring to objectivity.

This is more difficult than it seems for there can be a hall of mirrors, real or imagined, but I feel that somebody has to bite the bullet. If truth be told, there are one or two contemporary researchers who have tried to do so fairly comprehensively with a measure of success.

With all due respect for Debono’s models, Remiġ Sacco, who had his merits, is not one of them. Edgar Mizzi’s autobiography comes closer to the mark but this is more based on a sometimes selective personal memory during one lifetime. Neither one nor the other was a historian.