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At a time when fact and historical truth are under unprecedented assault, Evans shows us why history is necessary. If Evans' procedure in dealing with texts, source material and key questions is what historians mean by scholarly humility they will be disappointed to find that it is not widely imitated outside their own discipline.

But overall this a great read, and if your history student, it will help you analyse source documents and history in general in a more academic way! For my own part, I remain optimistic that objective historical knowledge is both desirable and attainable. Rewriting the gap between reality and representation as simply the difference between direct experience (the present) and indirect or less direct experience (the past) has a neat economy. His argument is that although postmodernism can offer the historian some useful insights and techniques there is a very real danger of throwing away the baby with the bath water. Given the topic one might have expected a serious and sustained discussion of Foucault's account of history - we get a paragraph on pp.

Bernard Crick, 'The truth, the whole truth - and nothing but', The Independent Saturday Magazine, 20 September 1997, p.

Dog’, ‘kalbun’ dan ‘hund’ adalah nama berbeza di dalam bahasa berbeza namun ketiga-tiganya merujuk kepada objek yang sama. Evans is not simply assaulting postmodernism in an old fashioned attempt to keep the barbarians from the gates. Despite this, the book stands as an excellent starting point for understanding the theory of history and modern challenges to empirical fact. Historical interpretation has evolved 'through contact with the real historical world', a contact said to be 'indirect, because the real historical world has disappeared'; but hey, no worries, for the documents 'which the real world of the past has left behind . He views all historical perspectives as valuable, as long as they demonstrate intellectual honesty (primarily by not fabricating or falsifying data, and allowing the historical sources to modify or even debunk cherished presuppositions).