George Orwell begins an essay in his column ‘As I Please’ with an arresting apocryphal tale. When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he occupied himself with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent inquiries, and in spite of the fact that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the quarrel was about: whereupon, so it is said—and if the story is not true it certainly ought to be—he burned what he had written and abandoned his project. Story seems to imply that objectivity in history is unachievable. This was not Orwell’s opinion. He wrote further in the same essay that ‘a certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it’. Cynicism about historical truth, apprehension t