History is an intellectual discipline that goes back to the ancient Greeks. The first real historian, Thucydides, did a remarkable thing. He set out to distance himself from his own political system and to write a work that examined critically what happened to Greece in the Peloponnesian Wars. He not only told of his own side's virtues and victories but of its mistakes and disasters. Thucydides also distanced himself from his own culture and religion. The ability to stand outside your own political system and your own culture, to criticise your own society and to pursue the truth, is something we today take so much for granted that it is almost part of the air we breath. Without it, our idea of freedom of expression would not exist. For most of the last two thousand years, the essence of history has continued to be that it should try to discover the truth. Over this time, of course, many historians have been exposed as mistaken, opinionated, and often completely wrong, but until co...
