ABSTRACT
While writing this book, the concept of ‘fake news’ had become more widespread. The concept of the adjective ‘fictitious’ summarizes the situation of the now ‘fake’ and ‘non-reality’ of the past and the tried present. The only way to conflate ‘the past’ with its presumed ‘history’ is to deploy the well-known process of ‘discovering the history of the past according to the individual historian’. However, this widespread notion deployed by historians and others makes very little sense. When engaging with the past, historians cannot avoid their ‘historical imagination’. This concept of the ‘historical imagination’ means the historian’s (or anyone else’s) interpretation through to ‘the explanation of whatever the historian wants to engage with’. To be clear, then: the past is the past and history is fictitious.
