The cover illustration of the 40th Anniversary edition of E. H. Carr’s What is History?3 is a close-up of an eye with fluffy white clouds against a blue iris and a dramatic black pupil in the centre. Magritte called this painting ‘The False Mirror’, an apt image for the untrustworthy nature of our perceptions of the world and, in its use here, for the uncertainties surrounding definitions of history in the past half century. Confusion has often accompanied definition since ‘history’ is a potentially ambiguous term which can be used to mean both lists of verifiable facts and the descriptions that can be made of them. This distinction was essentially the challenge to orthodoxy made by Carr in differentiating between ‘the facts of the past’ and ‘historical facts’, a distinction expressed nowadays as that between history and historiography. Neither is free from epistemological arguments, often conducted along polarised, binary lines: the objectivity of documented events versus the subjectivity of interpretation; facts versus fictions; historians as seekers after Truth as opposed to agnostic relativists. And, of course, there are the radical theorists who collapse the distinction between history and fiction, making accounts of the past into just another story. Biography, as a part of historiography, has to a large extent avoided such arguments.