I think that we never know the truth by being told it. We have to experience it in some way. That is the abiding grace of history. It is the theatre in which we experience truth. But we have to work at it, because the truth is always clothed in some way by story.
History is always parable to the truth.
The truth is always there but in some other form than we might expect. Of course, it is only the romantic and the totalitarian who believes that the theatre of their histories drives a reader to the one truth and the one meaning they want to display. Reading and interpreting is much more roguish. Some years ago, the Commonwealth Government tired to educate the Australian public to the dangers of AIDS by creating some theatre in a television clip. Death, the Grim Reaper, was shown as a figure playing ten-pin blowling.