Short answers, pulled from the story.
Geoffrey Elton (born Gottfried Rudolf Otto Ehrenberg on the 17th of August 1921) was a German-born British historian who specialised in the Tudor period. He is best known for his 1953 book The Tudor Revolution in Government, which argued that Thomas Cromwell created modern bureaucratic government in England during the 1530s.
Elton argued that Cromwell, Henry VIII's chief minister from 1532 to 1540, was the principal architect of a planned administrative revolution. He contended that Cromwell separated the king's household from the state, created new government offices, and translated royal supremacy into parliamentary terms, replacing medieval household-based administration with a modern bureaucratic system.
Elton taught at Clare College, Cambridge, and served as the Regius Professor of Modern History there from 1983 to 1988. He was also president of the Royal Historical Society from 1972 to 1976 and publication secretary of the British Academy from 1981 to 1990. He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 1986 New Year Honours.
The Carr-Elton debate was a methodological dispute over the nature of historical inquiry. E. H. Carr's 1961 book What is History? questioned whether historians could achieve objective truth. Elton responded with his 1967 book The Practice of History, defending the empirical, scientific tradition associated with Leopold von Ranke.
Elton was born in Tubingen, Germany, and his family moved to Prague in 1929. As persecution intensified, the family fled to Britain in February 1939. He enrolled at Rydal School in Wales and within two years was teaching there as an assistant master. He naturalised as a British subject in September 1947.
Yes. Geoffrey Elton was the brother of education researcher Lewis Elton, making him the uncle of comedian and writer Ben Elton. Geoffrey Elton died on the 4th of December 1994 at his home in Cambridge.