The first academic casualty of the Boston College-Jean McConville furore has been a parallel project which was to involve a London-based historian and an ex-RUC officer as well as retired members of the Garda Siochana in the Irish Republic, all with long records in fighting terrorism.
Art historian Claudia Kinmonth points out that the boy "listening attentively in the centre wears green, a colour symbolic of Fenianism".
The late British historian Tony Judt once delivered an emphatic case for making the railways a moral example for British society.
Dr Stuart Doran is an independent historian and author of the forthcoming book Kingdom, power, glory: Mugabe, Zanu and the quest for supremacy, 1960 87.
"There are no legal grounds for the return of the marbles," averred Harry Tzalas, a historian who first advised Melina Mercouri on the issue.
"It was terrible," he says, and adds that, on his first essay, an "eminent Oxford historian had written, 'This is a dog's dinner.' There were two ways to go after that, either give up or… " He went on to do a second history degree at Swansea before securing the Bectu job.
MI5 and their official historian and judge Professor Christopher Andrew offered expert advice for all Project Petra's on-screen challenges that were based on historical operations of real life officers.
And she read art historian Aby Warburg's lecture on the frescoes: "He completely understood that that moment where opposites meet is the most fertile of points for the mind, for the soul and for the arts".
A long-lost avant garde painting has returned to Hungary after nine decades thanks to a sharp-eyed art historian, who spotted it being used as a prop in the Hollywood film Stuart Little.
"It was the best Christmas present for an art historian," he said.
Tim Newburn Head of the department of social policy at the London School of Economics, Tim is an adviser to the Home Office and an official historian of criminal justice.
