Once upon a time, we used to read novels – Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy – to find out about the way we live now, in Trollope's phrase, or, rather, the way we lived then, and what it means to us now. We tend not to do that any more. We read history instead. Seeking to understand how it really was – that peculiar combination of pedantry and knight-errantry suggestive of the scholarly pursuit – we privilege the fact over the fancy, the documentary over the imaginary, the history over the poetry. We show and tell the truth – telling and retelling and retailing while there is some profit in it, as one might say. Perhaps, following Bakan, we need to make a distinction between literal truth and some deeper or higher truth: ‘There is an old tradition, going back at least to Plato, that there can be a truth in madness, dreaming, poetry, or prophecy, which is higher than literal truth.