Zoe’s Reviews > Is History Fiction? > Status Update

“But for the historian, for whom the past is dead and irreproachable, the past is feminine. He loves it as a mistress of whom he never tired and whom he never expects to talk sense.” (Michael Oakeshott, 1955)

The past is like a sexy, stupid, dead woman? No, I don’t think that’s true.

“Through this remarkable flurry of metaphors, Butterfield’s text reveals a curious hatred of the past; there is a frustration and despair that the historian may ever know the truth about it.”