The historian’s method of making the past accessible isn’t all that different, then, from the means by which the individual makes the past bearable: there’s much that we suppress, whether consciously or unconsciously, just as there’s much else that we choose, quite deliberately, to emphasize. Winston Churchill, who so effectively combined the making and writing of history, understood this point well: “History will treat me kindly,” he once quipped, “because I propose to write it.”
