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Sat 02 Feb 2007A meditation on the nature of historyFiction:The late Thomas Flanagan, author of The Year of the French (1979), claimed that "when we hold to our ears the convoluted shell of the past, what we hear are our own voices". But, he added, there is a dialectic between shell and voice that emboldens the writer of historical fiction.  Because the voices the novelist hears are inflected by a complex mixture of what we know, feel and imagine about the past, they make possible "imaginary opposites, imaginary others. Historical fiction licenses these imaginings in ways that history itself, history proper, does not".