There is a well-worn saying, 'History is written by the victors.' A dozen witnesses to an accident will give a dozen different accounts. If students are asked for all the facts about the room in which they are sitting they will have to make a selection from an indefinitely large number of statements that can be made, as well as ponder the conundrum, 'What is a fact?'

These complexities have been known since at least the time of Thucydides. But only in recent years have we seen a whole group of so-called post-modernist or deconstructionist writers who appear to deny that there is any such thing as truth. They go on to say that there are only rival texts or stories from which we can choose at will. Traditional accounts are dismissed, for good measure, as self-serving endeavours to propagate the power of the ruling classes.

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