In the first place, the facts of history never come to us “pure,” since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it (Carr 24).
Carr, Edward Hallett. “The Historian and His Facts.” What is History? Knopf, 1961, pp. 3-36.