One of the highest praises for an historical novel is that it reproduces a past world in a believable way.

How do you get people to speak in a language that seems ‘realistic’ and at the same time convey a sense of place, period, character and so on? How do you recapture and describe experiences which are not common in our daily lives now? What processes, beliefs, customs and habits informed people’s thoughts? How do you resist making each character merely a representative type? How do you allow for individuality, difference, uniqueness and the chances and accidents of ‘real’ life? And how much ‘background’ do you describe? Too much, and you risk merely throwing up ‘gobbets’ of history; too little and you are simply writing about modern people in old –fashioned costumes. These are among the fascinating questions confronting the historical novelist. These pages set out to explore some of those issues.

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Personal thoughts on writing historical fiction

One of the greatest difficulties in writing a historical novel, it seems to me, is the most fundamental one – getting the language right. This is particularly difficult in trying to reconstruct distant periods. The whole thing is an exercise in anachronism. How are you going to recapture a defunct language and the ambient references of a long-vanished, alien world?..

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Anglo-Norman Historians

What we most often mean by ‘history’ is historiography, written histories. But the historical narratives of the Anglo-Norman period are often unreliable, partisan and fraught with interpretive hazards. To historians of that period, the differences between history and fable, sacred legend and other forms of imaginative writing are not strongly established. They are all concerned with telling memorable stories – and this, too, is the main concern of the historical novelist…

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The Holy Maid of Stockholm

Has anyone else been struck by the iconography going on around Greta Thunberg?
Her image, often presented as a facial close-up, in the style of an icon, commands attention. The photo in the Observer is a stunning reproduction of a saintly icon. A pure face devoid of worldly appetites or desires, untouched by make-up but beautified by inner strength and dedication to a cause, hands clasped prayerfully under the chin, a braid of hair escaping over the shoulder. The very image of a medieval Holy Maid.