The great novelist Hilary Mantel died last week. She was best known for historical novels, notably the Wolf Hall trilogy. I am reminded of this wonderful passage of her thoughts from her first Reith Lecture, reminding us that the truth is not always what is written or what we are taught. Let us learn from this and be humble and curious as we seek the truth in order to form our opinions and make decisions:
Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. 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. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.
Gosh, what a beautiful writer she was, what a loss. if you wish to dive in, here is a list of her top ten books.
As to the truth in history, I encourage those in the UK and particularly those who have relied on what they were taught in school, to listen to the podcast series “Empire“. Whilst it plans to explore, over time, many of the empires that have existed, the initial focus, born from the expertise of the two hosts, is on the British in India. Suffice to say there is so much in there that is not taught in schools, so much to learn.