Postmodern history, because it is a literary as much as an empirical project, recognises it cannot escape its authorship. In other words, the past is not just re-interpreted according to new evidence but also through self-conscious acts of re-writing as well. Thus it is that history and the past cannot coincide to the extent that the former, whether we like it or not, is principally a narrative about the latter. Arguably there are no original centres of meaning to be found outside the narrative-linguistic. Data in and of itself does not have given meaning. Though empirical and analytical, postmodern history deliberately draws our attention to the conditions under which we create knowledge, in the case of history its nature as a series of forms, or turns perhaps, of a realist literature? In a very real sense the postmodern challenge forces us to face up to the highly complex question of how we know things about the past and what we, as moral beings, do as a result.