'The facts are important, but the impressions are fugitive and unreal. The intimate correspondence of eminent people is still, for the most part, unpublished; and documents of incalculable importance lie in heaven alone knows what domestic archives, waiting for the day when they can be used with safety. But what an exciting day that will be, when it comes! The chief actors in the drama are, in some cases, still very much alive, and the social historian has to wait until they are no longer able to trouble him with libel suits or confound him with eye-witness accounts: then, and only then, can he make them live. Facts are not the only, nor the most important, consideration with him. Social history, like history itself, is a combination of taste, imagination, science, and scholarship; it reconciles, it balances probabilities; and at last it attains the reality of fiction, which is the highest reality of all.'
George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1935