One of the many glitteringly clever quotes circulated in the wake of Hilary Mantel’s death last week was something she said about history. The longer version is wonderful (what did she ever say that wasn’t?), but we’ll clip this bit: “Facts are not truth, though they are part of it … And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record.” Yet using these fragments – “a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth” – Mantel could transport you so completely that you felt you were breathing the air of another century, feeling the emotions of other people, moving through other times.
This has an intense value. And yet, there is a certain type of historian who concerns themself – or himself, let’s face it – very little with emotion, even though that is all anyone ordinary who was forced to live through events was feeling at the time. Anger, shock, hope, bewilderment, laughter, exhaustion, betrayal – these are the trifling human offcuts of some loftier story, largely unmentionable byproducts of the grand machinations of greater men than them.
