Historian

"The good historian is not for any time or any country: while he loves his fatherland, he never flatters it in anything."

"The choice of narrative is an important way of making the facts speak. But this was rarely recognised by nineteenth-century historians, many of whom were oblivious to the nature and consequences of th…"

"What really happens is that the author discards the human persona but replaces it by an 'objective¿ one; the authorial subject is as evident as ever, but it has become an objective subject … At the le…"

"Take one of Voltaire's swift shining shafts of wit: "History is after all only a pack of tricks we play on the dead." Ah, yes, how true it is, we say; and we are astonished that Voltaire could have be…"

"Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul."

"In a certain sense all men are historians."

"History presents an historian with the task of producing a dialogue between the past and the present. But as these temporal co-ordinates cannot be fixed, history becomes a continuous interaction betwe…"

"Historians are really great at predicting the past. But the future is for prophets, and the track records of most prophets is dismal."