But if they are verses from a bible, it's Stephen Crane's own revisionist bible of scepticism.
The revisionist doc attempted to set the record straight about a period of film-making once dismissed at home as nothing more than crummy Hollywood knockoffs.
But although, in those days, both Kinnock and Foot were crudely described as "on the left", Whitehead became a convinced "revisionist" in the tradition of Hugh Gaitskell and Tony Crosland and, from the beginning, he was a staunch supporter of Britain's place at the centre of the Common Market, which became the European Union.
There is actually more continuity to Mandelson's revisionist stance in 2012 than Radio 4 listeners might have grasped unless they ploughed through those memoirs, The Third Man.
According to BTTF's slightly revisionist history, Marty McFly invented skateboarding in 1955 when he vandalised a child's homemade scooter in order to evade some thugs.
On the other hand, the whole point of this remake – and others, such as Maleficent, that are part of the same revisionist live-action project – is to reorient ancient name-brand Disney material for the Katy Perry generation, and Branagh turns out to be exactly the man for that job.
And as for the baffling, witless, revisionist American civil war drama Point of Honor?
Yet as one of Japan's most powerful lobby groups it has a shopping list of nationalist, indeed blatantly revisionist, causes: applaud Japan's wartime "liberation" of East Asia from Western colonialism; rebuild the armed forces; inculcate patriotism among students brainwashed by left-wing teachers; and revere the emperor as he was worshipped in the good old days before the war.
As Carl Bildt, a former Swedish foreign minister and longtime Russia watcher, puts it, Mr Putin now has an explicitly revisionist agenda under which he is seeking to change the post-cold-war settlement of Europe through an information war and, if need be, by military force.
But one revisionist politician, Sanae Takaichi, said, shortly before she joined the cabinet in September, that if there were to be a hate-speech law, it should be used to stop those annoying people (invariably well-behaved and often elderly) demonstrating against the government outside the Diet: lawmakers, she added, needed to work "without any fear of criticism".
In the worst case the old nationalist energies would return, just as they metastasised in the century after 1806.But there is a revisionist view.
