Robert Gott

Well, I would just say that even as an historical novelist myself, I would say that people should be very, very wary of getting their history from historical fiction.

I mean, maybe you could argue in a postmodern sense that people should be wary of getting their history from historians as well.

But I know that I'm constantly a little conflicted about when I use actual sources inside my fiction and I want to use them to make a strong point about something actually having happened.

How does a reader know that that bit of historical evidence is actually real or a part of the general fictional narrative?

And I do the unsatisfactory thing of at the end of the novel indicating that this newspaper article and that quote from the publicist, for example, are real.

Now, I know that's unsatisfactory, but I just can't let it sit there without alerting people to the fact that that bit of my fictional narrative is not fiction.

And I think it's a problem that all historical novelists have.

It could become real, couldn't it?

If you repeat that story at a dinner party and then someone else repeats that story, suddenly that piece of fiction becomes a part of history.

And it's made up.

It's what you leave out rather than what you put in that actually matters.

That if it's too crowded with research, it's unreadable.

It's awful.

And I think Hilary Mantel is the person to go to to learn how not to do that.

She leaves so much space for the reader to simply make up his or her own mind to fill all of the gaps.

She's not obsessed with costume and furniture and architecture.

But we're totally there in the Tudor world without that having to be insisted upon.

And it was great, wasn't it?

Yeah, brilliant.

Because it actually showed us really that the great world of the court was actually in quite small rooms.