Should we both warp and strictly adhere to Collingwood’s concept of what history is, we could argue that Bedfordshire was the stopover point of a Grandmaster smuggling ring during the cold war. With strict adherence to Collingwood, the claim is unchallengeable and irrefutable if and only if intentionality lies at the very heart of discourse thus of history too.
Ok so I have no evidence of the above claim concerning a smuggling ring in operation and neither has anyone else but that’s not the point. It’s unfactual but history, for Collingwood, is about establishing why people wanted the things they did, in particular what they had in mind. Since the governments played with their cards close to their chests always to resort to ‘the facts’ as Ranke would is rather pointless as you can never unearth them all anyway. A pertinent point is if we warp into the equation a dose of drunken deductive reasoning we could argue pre-conceived notions of my country’s strength in yesteryear doubled up as pretext for positional play left without discourse until now. Again its factuality or lack thereof remains inconsequential but also partially explaining why no Soviet or American Grandmaster showed their face in the Bedfordshire league despite its ‘locality’. Whether what found counts as identity-conferring is, perhaps, rather fanciful if not overtly playful academia. (Note to self@ Mark, if you recall you wrote an essay about Collingwood’s devotee Dray during your MA, and there was nothing fanciful or playful about that if you remember those long April days.)
Is it 2.30am already? Hmmm, abandon academic musing and conjecture for a game of blitz on-line then bed methinks… .
Olcmarcus
McCreadyandChess 
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