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368 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published October 7, 1989
History isn’t what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We’ll have a play on the London stage within a year. A President is assassinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book or the booked film. War? Send in the novelists. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally… Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that’s what catastrophe is for.