I have the greatest respect for Sir Keith, but is this actually the case?
Sir Keith Thomas avers:
Young historians 'are damaging academia' in their bid for stardom.
No, really, are they actually going out and 'hir[ing] agents', cutting out the footnotes and jazzing their research up to appeal to a popular market? (You don't 'hire' agents, surely - you solicit them to take you on, which they do only if they think you're going to make them a reasonable amount of commission.)
Most young (or starting out, anyway) historians I know are trying to get academic jobs and thus trying to do things like getting articles into well-reputed peer reviewed journals, their theses turned into books published by reputable academic presses, all that kind of stuff which will help on the job market. (Okay, will concede that subjects addressed by younger historians of my acquaintance include general paralysis of the insane and infanticide - not in the same thesis, btw - which are perhaps not the stuff of bestsellers.) I suspect that putting out a flash bit of pop history is not necessarily going to assist in that aim.
In fact I wonder if it is more mid-career historians who note that certain of their colleagues have succeeded in the crossover (or have at least managed to hit on a breakout subject) and assume that they can do it too and that they deserve their books on a table towards the front of the local Waterstones and their day on TV. I was certainly led to believe this by historian of my acquaintance who did make a relatively successful transition to trade publishing, and also commented to me that most of the colleagues who were soliciting intros to their agent/editor were just not going to be able to hack it writing for a general readership.
I'm not entirely persuaded that the phenomenon is quite as rife as Sir Keith seems to believe.
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