The goal of the good historian is to find out and explain what really happened in the past. But not everyone who uses the past has such noble ambitions. What makes historians special users of the past is that they alone are concerned with making sense of the past, simply for the sake of making sense of the past. History is the study of the past in itself, for itself.

Real history is hard going: it is a methodical, sometimes lonely existence of reading, checking and double checking, of immersing yourself in the past and trying to empathise with the dead, of writing-up carefully and reaching qualified judgements scrupulously, whilst providing explicit, accurate references for everything you write.

Finally, and above all else, good history is concerned with facts about real events that actually happened. Events cannot be invented that did not happen, nor can the chronology of these events be reversed. There are real limitations to the narratives that can be told about the past and those limitations are fixed by the facts.