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There is no truth in history

Throughout history, the likes of George Orwell and Michel Foucault have argued, truth has been nothing more than the fragile result of the struggles between competing groups, with the winners able to use their political power to suppress their enemies' point of view.

As Napoleon once said, "History is a set of lies agreed upon." Some historians deny there is such a thing as historical truth at all and argue that history tells us more about the people who write it than about the past they purport to describe.

Others counter that, however much eye-witness accounts might differ, historians have elaborated a whole battery of sophisticated methods of checking the evidence and dealing with the gaps and partialities of their sources. They say that history deals with facts, not fiction.