Abstract
A meditation on the interrelationships of history, fiction, narrative, representation, and time. In passing, reviews Herbert Butterfield, Origins of History; R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace‑Hadrill, eds., The Writing of History in the Middle Ages; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Mind and Method of the Historian; and Lawrence Stone, The Past and the Present. "History works, when it works, through ideas which have the resonance of tropes . . . . the best historians achieve in their writing that sense of conviction and reverberation of good art, of fiction. The overlap of the two is just so subtle and so great." (115‑116) "All historians know that history is no longer the discipline busily fulfilling its positivistic promise to tell it all as it really happened." (117) (am)