Art & Creativity Quote by Lord Acton

Acton’s line reads like polite Victorian advice, but it’s really a warning shot aimed at the lazy habits of certainty. “Be not content with the best book” doesn’t deny expertise; it distrusts the seduction of a single, authoritative narrative. The phrase “best book” is doing double duty: it nods to canon-making while quietly pointing out how canon can become a crutch. Once you crown a definitive text, you stop reading and start repeating.

“Sidelights” is the key word: Acton wants illumination from oblique angles, not the frontal glare of one supposedly complete account. For a historian, sidelights mean marginalia, dissenting pamphlets, letters, economic records, propaganda - the messy secondary evidence that exposes motive, bias, and blind spots. It’s an argument for triangulation before that term existed, and it assumes something many readers prefer not to: that truth in history is rarely housed in a single volume, however “best” it may be.

“Have no favourites” lands as moral discipline, not bibliographic advice. Acton is policing the emotional economy of reading: favourites become identity badges, and identity badges turn scholarship into loyalty. In the late 19th century, with nationalism surging and histories being weaponized as civic scripture, that counsel matters. Acton is asking for intellectual celibacy of a sort: resist attachment, resist the comfort of “my historian,” keep your mind promiscuous enough to catch what any one beloved author must miss.