Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I feel slightly uneasy at the way historians are consulted as if history is going to repeat itself. It never does.
Even of if a certain backlash is unavoidable, we must make the most of the momentous chance with which history has presented us so swiftly and so unexpectedly.
We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.
If significant amounts of time go by without suspenseful action - which is often most powerfully motivated by backstory - the story loses momentum, and readers lose interest.
Events are moving so fast and what in one moment seems impossible, the next is happening. I'm sure historians will, in time, provide theories and analysis, but for now I think most of us simply want the tide stemmed.
If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside.
As much as I love historical fiction, my problem with historical fiction is that you always know what's going to happen.
The novelist wants to know how things will turn out; the historian already knows how things turned out, but wants to know why they turned out the way they did.
Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
The people who read the history books tend to have a natural zeal and are alarmingly well-read.
No opposing quotes found.