Truth Quote by Peter Conrad

Conrad’s line skewers the historian’s vanity with a scalpel: the urge to make the past look smarter than it was. “Aggrandize” is doing heavy lifting here. It frames history-writing not as neutral record-keeping but as a status project, where the craft quietly inflates its own importance by inflating events. The past, in this view, isn’t discovered; it’s upgraded.

The key maneuver is the conversion of contingency into destiny. “Accident to inevitability” names a common narrative cheat: once we know the outcome, we retroactively arrange causes to look like a straight road rather than a mess of detours. It’s not just hindsight bias; it’s a literary instinct. Readers crave coherence, and historians, especially in popular forms, are rewarded for delivering arcs, foreshadowing, and satisfying causal chains. Conrad is calling out how easily explanation becomes enchantment.

“Innocuous circumstance to portent” sharpens the critique. Portent is the language of prophecy and drama, not archives. It points to the temptation to treat minor details as “signs” because they make the story feel inevitable and profound. A stray remark becomes a “warning.” A policy memo becomes a “turning point.” The subtext is less “historians are liars” than “historians are narrators,” and narration has a gravitational pull toward meaning.

Contextually, the quote lands in a late-20th-century skepticism about grand narratives: postwar historiography, postmodern doubt, the rise of cultural history and meta-history. Conrad isn’t abolishing history; he’s warning that its most elegant sentences can also be its most distorting.