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A pencil flashlight on the past
Shining a pencil flashlight into an enormous dark barn. That's how I once heard searching the internet described. It's also how I feel when I think about historical blog posts for this website. The past is vast and poorly illuminated, and writing about bits and pieces of it - chosen near-randomly - makes me feel like I'm just flashing a pencil torch into the darkness, hoping to see something interesting to describe. Author L.P. Hartley famously observed in the 1953 book, The Go-Between, that "the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there". And…
