In history, nothing fabulous can be agreeable. - Luciano Pavarotti

The effort only shifted me from the frying-pan into the fire.

I now make the only true statement you are to expect – that I am a liar. This confession is, I consider, a full defence against all imputations. My subject is, then, what I have neither seen, experienced, nor been told, what neither exists nor could conceivably do so. I humbly solicit my readers' incredulity.

The historian's one task is to tell the thing as it happened.