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The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

I'm a historian in my own mind.

The search for the truth for truth's sake is the mark of the historian.

I feel slightly uneasy at the way historians are consulted as if history is going to repeat itself. It never does.

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.

There's a need to dig up the past and analyze it.

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.