AS A LITERARY FORM, THE HISTORICAL novel has enjoyed an uncertain reputation in the English-speaking world. The works of Walter Scott — once universally admired, not least by Goethe, Europe’s greatest writer of the age — gather dust, as do most of his innumerable heirs over the past two centuries.
Perhaps only with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy has the genre recovered popular, if still only grudging critical, acclaim. Even then, it is the TV series rather than the novels that have enabled Thomas Cromwell to effect a kind of posthumous apotheosis, even temporarily supplanting his distant relative Oliver in the public consciousness.
That the value of Mantel’s fictions as literature is even more questionable than their historical verisimilitude does not detract from their commercial success. Thus far, however, no other author has come close to emulating her appeal to a mass readership starved of new fiction that is both contemporaneous and readable.
Enter the imposing but improbable figure of the Rt Hon Jesse Norman, Minister of State for Decarbonisation and Technology, Member of Parliament for Hereford and South Herefordshire, author of well-received biographies of Edmund Burke and Adam
