The past doesn’t produce itself. It is recreated — refracted — by those living in the present. And those who bother to direct so much energy into something as abstract as what no longer exists, into what has slipped through the fingers of time, are unlikely to be impartial actors, impervious to the zeitgeist of their age. Politicians, novelists and filmmakers would be the first to admit (well, the latter two at least) that the act of historical resurrection is a creative, sometimes tendentious,