J D Davies - Historian and Author

The website and blog of naval historian and bestselling author J D Davies

Historical fiction

Authentic Headless Women Revisited, Now With Extra Tortured Cats

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The middle of August, so lots going on, almost none of it seriously work-related – lawns to mow, places to visit, etc. As an ex-teacher of many years’ drudgery service, I still have the mindset that August is pretty sacrosanct, even though that imperative doesn’t really work for writers. Even so, I suspect that many readers of this blog will already be ensconced on beaches or at poolsides, and my ramblings about naval history or the seventeenth century are, quite rightly, unlikely to be high on their list of priorities. Which is all a roundabout way of saying that this week, I’m reblogging a post from the very early days of this blog, albeit one that explains my throwaway remark in last week’s post about ‘headless women’ on book covers. Now, given that we seem to live in an age when many people believe that references to ‘cats’ eyes’ being removed mean – wait for it – that real cats are being tortured, with the result that one council has decided to rename them ‘road studs’ rather than telling the poor little snowflakes in question to grow up and get over it, I suppose it’s incumbent on me to clarify that I didn’t mean that book covers show graphic images of real decapitated women. 

(Oh God, that I’ve lived to have to type that sentence…)

So let’s return to those innocent days in September 2012…

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I spent last weekend at the Historical Novel Society conference in London. This was a marvellous, invigorating occasion, with lots of great networking; it was particularly good to meet my fellow panellists in the ‘Ships Ahoy’ forum on nautical fiction, namely Linda Collison, Helen Hollick, Margaret Muir and Rick Spilman. The fact that the majority of speakers – and attendees – were women speaks volumes for the extent to which the genre has been transformed in recent years. Our five mini-talks covered a variety of issues; mine was on the vexed question of accuracy (see below) and about the need to show respect in one’s writing for the sea and those who sailed on it, a theme that others echoed. We received some stimulating questions, notably of the ‘where do I find information about…’ variety, and also had plenty of opportunity to bounce ideas around among ourselves. In a way, though, we thought that nautical historical fiction was a little bit on the margins of the conference; but then, pretty much everybody who isn’t writing about the Romans or the Tudors was saying pretty much exactly the same thing.

I don’t propose to go through who said what in each session. Instead, I thought I’d highlight just one or two of the main themes that emerged, and perhaps the biggest of them was the perennial debate about accuracy and authenticity in writing historical fiction. In a nutshell – to what extent should a historical novelist aim for accuracy? Is it possible not to be entirely accurate but to remain ‘authentic’ to a period? Can accuracy and authenticity actually be counter-productive if taken too far, and besides, how do we define them? After all, Wolf Hall has been praised to the heights for its ‘authenticity’ – but a generation is now growing up that thinks Thomas Cromwell was a nice guy. I liked Ian Mortimer’s concept called ‘Celia Brayfield’s Barbed Wire’: she was reviewing a Catherine Cookson book in which the principal characters had to negotiate a barbed wire fence in 1896, couldn’t believe it was in use at the time, and by the time she’d checked and found that it was, the spell had been broken. As Ian says, ‘in historical fiction, accuracy and authenticity are not necessarily desirable’. Several of the speakers also adopted this line, which agrees with my own thinking, namely that altering facts to fit a narrative is fine; after all, in Gentleman Captain I moved the date of Easter 1662  and wasn’t subsequently inundated by protest letters from outraged theologians and chronologists. (As I said in my talk, though, I draw the line at altering the sequence of events during real battles, although obviously I’ll insert Matthew Quinton and a fictional ship in place of a real one; those who fought, suffered and died in those battles deserve that respect.) As several panellists said, historians can be sniffy about historical novelists’ willingness to change things around, but as a historian myself, I think this ‘holier than thou’ attitude rests on very weak foundations. Historians interpret the past and ‘change things’ by deciding to include or omit particular facts from their accounts; the idea that they are objective, detached analysts of the past is frankly risible, as historians usually have their own personal or political agendas. If anything, historical novelists are simply much more up front about what they do: as Emma Darwin put it, ‘We make things up. Get over it’.

There was also much discussion of the stunning lack of imagination in cover designs for historical fiction. This can be summed up pretty succinctly: if it’s for a male audience, stick a sword on it; if it’s for a female audience, give it a headless woman in a nice dress. Now I don’t know a lot about art, and I know even less about marketing, but it seems to me that the acronym ‘USP’ is rendered pretty meaningless if every book ends up looking pretty much the same as every other one. (I’m just glad that my own publishers have been much more imaginative with the covers of the Quinton series, which has always been intended for both male and female readers.) Having said that, I suppose nautical fiction falls into the same trap to some extent. After all, when was the last time you saw a naval historical novel without a ship on the cover?

Anyway, the net effect of my attendance at the conference is that I’m now brimming with ideas for future books galore: I particularly like the potential of a plot that involves teenage wizards battling teenage vampires before engaging in torrid bondage sex with the gladiators who guard the Holy Grail. (Still working on that one – 2017 ed.) Before I move on to develop that, though, I need to start the detailed plot construction for ‘Quinton 5’, provisionally titled The Battle of All the Ages and based around the remarkable Four Days’ Battle of 1666. This means that next week, I’ll be going through my usual process at the outset of a new book, namely locking myself away in a cottage for a week so that I don’t drive Wendy nuts as I bounce ideas (and, possibly, myself) off the walls. So I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to blog next Monday – much will depend on whether or not I have a mobile broadband signal, on whether I have any time to spare from ‘blue skies thinking’ if I do, and on whether or not my brain will have been fried by spending too much time in May and June 1666. In case I don’t make it, though, you can find another helping of me on the wonderful Hoyden and Firebrands blog, where I’m this week’s guest blogger!

The Real Gentlemen Captains, Redux, Part I

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In the lead-up to my appearance on 13 March at Weymouth Leviathan, Britain’s first maritime literary festival, I thought I’d reblog some of my very earliest posts on this site, from November 2011, about some of the characters who will be making appearances during my talk. Here’s the first of them!

People often ask me to what extent the characters in the Quinton Journals, especially Matthew himself, are based on real people. I thought I’d use my next few blog posts to introduce some of the real-life individuals whose careers in Charles II’s navy provided the inspiration for Matthew and some of his adventures; and yes, occasionally the lives of these officers provide a few clues to some of the story lines in future books of the series! In future blogs I’ll also go on to detail some of the ‘tarpaulin’ officers who provided the inspiration for the character and career of Kit Farrell.

Captain Francis Digby – Probably born in about 1645, he was the second son of George Digby, second Earl of Bristol, one of Charles I’s most important (if catastrophic) advisors during the Civil War. He went to sea just after the Restoration, aged about fifteen, and fought at the Battle of Lowestoft in 1665 as a volunteer with Sir John Lawson, vice-admiral of the Red Squadron. In March 1666 he became lieutenant of the flagship Royal Charles, and his good service in that role during the Four Days Battle at the beginning of June led to his promotion to captain of the Fourth Rate frigate Jersey. His bravery is indicated by the fact that when the Jersey went in for repair after the St James’s day fight, Digby asked permission to go back to sea on another ship as a volunteer (a request rejected by the admiral, the grumpy old Duke of Albemarle). In 1667 he commanded the frigate Greenwich, which seems to have been given to him by King Charles II principally as a means of trying to restore the Digby family fortune, which had been ruined by the civil war. In 1668-9 he commanded the Third Rate Mountague in the Mediterranean. Digby’s manuscript journal for these commands, preserved at the British Library, reveals that despite his aristocratic background, he gradually became a highly competent seaman; on one occasion only his quick thinking prevented the fleet being wrecked on the North African coast.

Digby spent March and April 1672 in France, ‘fine tuning’ the naval agreement by which a combined Anglo-French fleet would attack the Dutch to fulfil the terms of the secret Treaty of Dover (1670). Digby met Louis XIV at Versailles on 1 March and during the next few days had several meetings with the king’s chief minister, Colbert. Not surprisingly the French rejected out of hand Digby’s suggestion that their captains and ships should have English commissions and colours, on the grounds that ‘his Christian Majesty never could suffer his captains to take commissions but from himself’. Despite this and some other disagreements, Digby’s negotiations were complete by 12 March. After leaving Paris he undertook a tour of inspection to Brest and La Rochelle before returning to England to take command of the Second Rate Henry. Digby was apparently somewhat disappointed by this, believing that he was already qualified to be a flag officer; indeed, if he had lived there is little doubt that he would have been an admiral before the end of the third Anglo-Dutch war, as several men junior to him were promoted to such rank during it. But on 28 May 1672 the Dutch under Michiel De Ruyter launched a surprise pre-emptive attack on the Anglo-French fleet as it lay in Solebay. The Henry was in the admiral’s division of the Blue Squadron, which bore the brunt of the fighting; the flagship Royal James was burned by a fireship and her admiral, the Earl of Sandwich, killed. The Henry had the next highest number of casualties in the squadron, with 49 killed. Francis Digby was one of them. He was buried at Chenies in Buckinghamshire, the mausoleum of the Russell family, Earls and later Dukes of Bedford; his mother was a daughter of the fourth Earl.

Digby was one of the many suitors of Frances Stuart, the model for the original image of ‘Britannia’ and later the Duchess of Richmond. Digby’s pursuit of her, like King Charles’s own, proved to be hopeless. He was said to have been driven to distraction by her ‘cruelty’, and after his death at Solebay Dryden wrote ‘Farewell, Fair Armida’, a poignant epitaph to unrequited love:

Farewell, fair Armida, my joy and my grief!
In vain I have loved you, and hope no relief;
Undone by your virtue, too strict and severe,
Your eyes gave me love, and you gave me despair:
Now called by my honour, I seek with content
The fate which in pity you would not prevent:
To languish in love were to find, by delay,
A death that’s more welcome the speediest way.
On seas and in battles, in bullets and fire,
The danger is less than in hopeless desire;
My death’s wound you give me, though far off I bear
My fall from your sight—not to cost you a tear:
But if the kind flood on a wave should convey,
And under your window my body should lay,
The wound on my breast when you happen to see,
You’ll say with a sigh—it was given by me.

The Moniker of the Rose

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A relatively short blog this week. When it’s published, I’ll be in Venice – and by complete coincidence (naturally!) we’re staying next to the great Venetian dockyard, the Arsenale, and the naval museum. Does this mean that a future Quinton story might be set in Venice? I couldn’t possibly comment…but hopefully next week’s post will contain some of my impressions of La Serenissima. 

Meanwhile, I’ve just finished reading Merivel, Rose Tremain’s excellent sequel to Restoration, and quite close to the end, she extricates herself beautifully from one of those awkward little problems that authors sometimes create for themselves. Having created in the first book a fictional character named John Pearse, the hero’s best friend, Tremain must have approached the final illness of King Charles II with the mounting realisation that she’d need to include one particular real historical character, the King’s surgeon in ordinary…one James Pearse. She digs herself out of this hole with the dexterity one would expect of such an accomplished author, but it does illustrate the minefield that the choice of  names can present for a writer of fiction. I learned that lesson not long after Gentleman Captain was first published, when I received a slightly puzzled email from the mother of an eight year old in Manchester named, yes, Matthew Quinton. Fortunately his life is probably less likely to be affected by this coincidence than the impact that their fictional alter-egos will have had on the real-life James Bonds and Harry Potters, although one does sometimes wonder about those who coincidentally bear the names chosen by authors for their most evil and psychotic villains. Somewhere out there, for instance, must be some real Jim Moriartys and far more Patrick Batemans…

Indeed, this whole area of the choice of names for fictional characters is a potential minefield, especially as one goes further and further back in history. The undeniable fact is that the ‘name pool’ was much smaller in the Middle Ages, and even in the Early Modern period, so an author craving ‘authenticity’ is likely to run up against the hard truth that to be really true to the time, one would have to have several characters called John or Thomas, Elizabeth or Mary, with all the confusion that can potentially cause. Hilary Mantel, the well deserved winner of a second Booker Prize, must have encountered this problem countless times when writing Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies – too many Thomases, too many Annes and Catherines – but again gets round it ingeniously. My particular favourite is Thomas Wriothesley; rather than having Thomas Cromwell call him Thomas, potentially leading to echoes of Monty Python’s ‘Bruce’ sketch, she has Cromwell bestow on him the nickname ‘Call-Me’, from ‘Call Me Risley’, thus also having a neat dig at some of the more absurd pronunciation/spelling dysfunctions prevalent among the British aristocracy. (Cue more Monty Python, namely the ‘Luxury Yacht’ sketch – and if anyone, particularly anyone under the age of about 40, thinks I’ve gone stark staring mad this week, google ‘Monty Python’ and the name of the sketch to see what I’m talking about.)

In practice, this problem impacts on the names I’ve used in the Quinton series. In the Stuart period, there were inevitably a lot of Charleses and Jameses, named in honour of the kings, and despite the potential for confusion (because he would have to interact a great deal with his namesake, Charles II), I knew that the elder brother of Matthew, as the heir to an earldom born in the late 1620s, would almost certainly have been named Charles. But otherwise, I’ve tried to vary characters’ Christian names as much as possible, drawing on my two main sources for names – gravestones and thirty years’ worth of student mark books. At least the Puritans provide much-needed variety – hence the real Praisegod Barebone and my invented character in Gentleman Captain, Godsgift Judge. I recently tweeted a few favourites from some local gravestones – the splendid Original Jackson (did he have a sister called Plagiarism, or a brother called Unique?), the simply astonishing Nimrod Folbigg (now that should be the name of a Bond villain) and the hilarious but intriguing Gotobed East; just what set of circumstances led to a child being inflicted with that, and just how tough a time of it would he have had growing up, even in the eighteenth century? Just to prove I’m not making these up, I’ve included photos of the memorials to the last two gentlemen, in the churchyard of Cockayne Hatley, Bedfordshire, and in Ely Cathedral respectively.

Finally, though, I have a feeling that I might be about to run up against my own version of the Rose Tremain moment. I’m working on an idea for a novel based on a real character whose life story provides a very unusual take on one of the most intriguing periods in British history. I want to use his real name and the few known facts about his life as the basis for the plot. Unfortunately, his real name is Matthew, too…

The Rise of Historyism

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It was a very bad week for politicians and History. Or, to be exact, it was a bad week for History because of politicians’ inability to stop distorting it to serve their own ends. Take David Cameron’s big speech to the Conservative conference, for example. ‘This is the country that … defeated the Nazis…and fought off every invader for a thousand years.’ Great for getting delegates to their feet, but risible as historical analysis. Fought off every invader for a thousand years? As I tweeted shortly afterwards, tell that to Richard III and James II. ‘Defeated the Nazis’? Umm…I think the Russians might have something to say about that, Dave. But when it comes to rewriting History, the PM isn’t in the same league as his great rival, Boris Johnson. ‘Not since 1789 has there been such tyranny in France!’ thundered the mop-topped Mayor of London about the policies of President Hollande, thus simultaneously ignoring the fact that there wasn’t really a ‘tyranny’ in France in 1789 (The Terror, which is presumably what you had in mind, Boris, started in 1793) and the entirety of the German occupation during World War Two, which was debatably just a tad more tyrannical than the raising of a few tax rates by a bespectacled technocrat with a slightly tangled love life. Now, it’s possible to forgive Boris on the grounds that it’s his usual jokey hyperbolic style and, after all, it’s not his period, inter alia, but unsurprisingly his rant didn’t exactly go down too well across the Channel, and it’s symptomatic of the way in which politicians think they can get away with serving up sloppy History to serve their own dubious ends. (Before anyone accuses me of party political bias, I should add that Labour and Lib Dem politicians are just as guilty. Don’t get me started on Ed Miliband and ‘One Nation’, for example…) Of course, we Brits have no monopoly on this – all American presidential candidates, including the current crop, are quick to press their own versions of their national past into the service of getting them elected, no matter how much they have to distort it to do so, and much American political discourse is fundamentally moulded by differing interpretations of a document written in 1787.

I spent the past week in Scotland, working on the plot outline for ‘Quinton 5’ and various other ideas for new books. There, the independence debate is cranking up nicely, despite the referendum date being two years away. Whatever the eventual outcome, this is clearly developing into a classic case study of the manipulation of History by two ferociously antagonistic sides – just read the comments on any political or historical story on any Scottish newspaper’s or TV channel’s website for depths of vitriolic unpleasantness unknown even on the comments pages of the online version of the Daily Mail. The nationalists’ appeal to what might be called the Braveheart version of Scottish history is being countered by the unionists’ appeal to ‘Britishness’, mustering to their cause such events as the Olympics and the forthcoming centenary of World War I. But a potential weakness of the unionist strategy is revealed in the latest blog from the always interesting Eagle Clawed Wolfe. It seems that at Carlisle Castle, the English Heritage guides have been told not to talk about the Border Reivers for fear of offending Scottish visitors. This is a case of ‘don’t mention the war’ writ large, and ludicrously so: the existence of the Reivers has much to do with why Carlisle Castle is there at all, so omitting it from the castle’s story is very much a case of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. (And history, or elements within it, should offend – just as other elements should move, entertain and inspire.) As the Wolfe rightly points out, there are no such qualms on the other side of Tweed and Solway, where the Reiver history is celebrated – and, it might be added, where the history of conflict with England is part of the national psyche to an extent that is simply inconceivable south of the border, except perhaps in certain quarters of the BNP and English Defence League. One trivial but telling example: many Scots football fans fly flags adorned with the slogan ‘Bannockburn 1314’. When was the last time you saw the flag of St George adorned with ‘Culloden 1746’, or, at England-France fixtures, ‘Agincourt 1415’, ‘Trafalgar 1805’ or ‘Waterloo 1815’?

Of course, one could turn this argument on its head and say that it proves the Scots generally have a stronger sense of their own history than the English, even if it is a distinctly slanted one – and arguably, the Irish have an even stronger sense than either, or rather ‘senses’, given the two rival traditions which both depend for their mythologies upon distinctly myopic views of Irish history. (And yes, I’ve deliberately omitted my own countrymen, the Welsh, from this analysis; a subject for a future blog when Britannia’s Dragon is about to see the light of day. But I might go to the next Wales-England match with a Red Dragon flag adorned with ‘Bryn Glas 1402’ and see if anybody knows what it’s all about…) No doubt historically literate English football fans – and surely there must be some, somewhere? a few?? one??? – could argue with some justification that a flag bearing the names of all their country’s great victories would probably be too big to get into the ground. But surely a sensible, non-triumphalist acknowledgement of past conflict is better than Carlisle Castle’s precious and utterly wrong-headed policy of ignoring it. Ultimately, ignoring leads directly to ignorance, and ignorance breeds the sort of dangerous manipulation of history practised by cynical politicians and those with more dubious agendas. Indeed, with racism and sexism now regarded as increasingly unacceptable, maybe this ‘historyism’ is rising to replace them – that is, the use of shakily-founded throwaway historical references deliberately to offend or to employ a distorted view of the past to promote a prejudiced view of the present.

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Many Scots claim to have learned their history from the novels of Nigel Tranter, and I spent last week staying very close to Aberlady, where Tranter lived in his latter years and where he wrote his books as he walked along the coastal footpath that began at what he called ‘the footbridge to enchantment’. Every time I visit the bridge and the adjacent memorial cairn to him, my mind boggles both at his working method (if I tried it, I’d keep bumping into people or stumbling in rabbit holes) and his sheer productivity – he wrote well over fifty historical novels, all of which I’ve read and still have on my shelves, covering the whole span of Scottish history, as well as twelve children’s books, ten westerns, and about twenty non-fiction books. True, his novels are uneven – the later ones tend to be quite weak and repetitive, his sex scenes are always hilariously bad, and his one attempt at ‘naval’ fiction, The Admiral (about James IV’s naval commander Andrew Wood), had late 15th century cogs and caravels possessing roughly the handling characteristics of modern warships. True, his historical interpretation is invariably old fashioned, distinctly nationalist and often hopelessly romanticised. But Tranter described his vision of Scotland, particularly medieval Scotland, quite brilliantly, and many Scots claim to have learned their history from the man often regarded as ‘Scotland’s storyteller’. Perhaps that’s one of the problems with English history. Historical novelists now tend to stay within their ‘comfort zones’, which they’ve researched to the nth degree (‘I’m Roman’ was heard more than once at the Historical Novel Society conference the other day). Bernard Cornwell is a rare exception, but even he has concentrated on three or four fairly narrow chronological periods, and only on military history. Where is ‘England’s storyteller’, the equivalent of Nigel Tranter, who can produce an attractive, popular narrative across pretty much the whole span of the country’s history, embracing the political and social ‘big pictures’ as well as the battles? Or is that simply too big an ask for any author?

The Art of Male Multi-Tasking

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It’s a very odd and hectic time at the moment. I’m simultaneously completing the final edits of ‘Quinton 3’, The Blast That Tears The Skies, ahead of its UK publication on 17 April, while also writing number 4, The Lion of Midnight, keeping a weather eye on the US publication of The Mountain of Gold on 17 February, and continuing the research for Britannia’s Dragon. (In fact, when this post goes ‘live’ I hope to be in the new Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum, getting on with work for the latter). Then there’s a book review, a conference paper, two talks, and the imminent arrival of the proofs of my essay in the latest Transactions of the Naval Dockyards Society, all to be done within the next few weeks. Fortunately I’ve never found it particularly difficult to juggle a lot of things simultaneously and can work very quickly, but all of the above has caused me to make a few fairly random reflections on my working methods and on the nature of what authors do.

The first lesson- Don’t say ‘yes’ to so many commitments. Something that seemed like a good idea six months ago invariably comes back and bites one on assorted parts of the anatomy. And double-check the deadline: misreading ‘2 February’ as ’28 February’ several months ago has caused not a little angst here in the Lair over the last couple of weeks.

The second lesson – Don’t assume a project is completed until the hard copies of it turn up on one’s doorstep. I’d blithely assumed that all of the edits on Blast had been put to bed; the same thing happened on The Mountain of Gold. The consequence of this is…

The third lesson – Always factor in time for the unexpected that’s bound to crop up.  If it doesn’t, great, take a few days off and congratulate yourself on the brilliance of your time management. But if it does…

The fourth lesson – I suppose I’d always assumed that writing was an entirely solitary profession, where one delivered one’s inherently perfect manuscript to a grateful publisher with a heavenly choir singing in the background. Well, it’s true that it’s largely solitary up until the time when the first draft is completed. From then on, though, the author becomes simply part of a team, all of whom are working towards the same goal, the success of the book, and it’s essential to flick an internal switch and go into ‘team player mode’. The critical readers, the agent, the publisher’s editor, the other publisher’s editor…everybody will have their say, and it’s important to react to this input positively. Apparently Patrick O’Brian reacted badly to any criticism whatsoever, so his editor, Richard Ollard, had to handle him with kid gloves; and much as I love O’Brian’s work, one of the biggest influences on my own, it has to be said that some of the books in the series could have done with rather more rigorous editing. In my case, I still remember the horror I felt when the major edits of Gentleman Captain arrived with suggestions to delete whole swathes of treasured text and to add new passages. But that editor’s input was undoubtedly wholly well-founded, and her changes made the book vastly better than it might have been. Which leads into…

The fifth lesson – A book is therefore a product of compromise, but that doesn’t mean surrender (on the basis that ‘these people have been doing this sort of thing much longer than me, they must be right’). With The Mountain of Gold, one of my editors wanted the deletion of three scenes. I was prepared to go to the wall over one of them, and in the end we compromised: I got to keep the scene I was prepared to spill blood for, while the other two went (to be replaced by newly-written scenes that, again, tightened the narrative and thus made it a much better book). So honour was satisfied.

The sixth lesson –  Not even ‘the team’ has a monopoly of wisdom. At dinner last night, a friend who’d read Mountain of Gold said that it would have been really useful to include a map of the River Gambia, and that he’d only realised the ship was sailing east when he read my description of Matthew Quinton watching the sun sinking through the windows of his stern cabin. I suddenly thought: yes, now I come to think about it, I really wish I’d included a map. Other readers have balked at some of the nautical language that I take for granted, although I hope not to quite the same extent as O’Brian did, so there’s a running debate on whether or not to include glossaries in the Quinton books. I’ve resisted thus far, hearing my previous incarnation as a History teacher of 30+ years say countless times ‘If you don’t know what something means, go away and look it up!’. But I can see the counter argument, too, and would welcome readers’ thoughts on whether such an addition would be useful.

Anyway, that’s enough reflection for now. After all, writing a weekly blog is another commitment to add to those I listed at the beginning, and I really must get back to the ‘day job’ proper!

History and Fiction

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I thought I’d take a brief break from my accounts of ‘the real gentlemen captains’ to give my impressions of last week’s conference at the Institute of Historical Research in London, Novel Approaches: From Academic History to Historical Fiction, which continues this week in virtual form. First of all it was great fun, and it was good to meet and to listen to other people with similar enthusiasms to my own – although it was somewhat disconcerting to enter the hall and discover that roughly 80-90% of the delegates were female (one of them asked me at lunchtime if I was feeling outnumbered, which I definitely was!). It was particularly interesting to hear from others with a similar background to my own, i.e. people who started out as academic historians and then crossed over to write historical fiction, notably Alison Weir and Ian Mortimer. There was much discussion of the need to be ‘authentic’, but not entire agreement on what’s meant by ‘authenticity’; some authors clearly go to enormous lengths to ensure that there are no factual anachronisms in their work and that they comply entirely with the known historical record, while others (such as Mortimer, when writing fiction under his alias James Forrester) prefer to be ‘authentic’ in a broader way, to the sense and atmosphere of the period. I’m firmly in the latter camp, but this might be because authors like Mortimer and myself, who have been steeped in academic research on our periods for well over twenty years, possibly have a more instinctive feel for that atmosphere (and for the language of the time, etc) than someone researching a period from scratch, who might be more anxious to avoid making even minor factual errors, to alter the chronology, or to take liberties – up to a point – with the known life stories of real people. From an entertainment viewpoint, undoubtedly the highlight of the conference for me was the contribution by the literary agent Peter Straus, who emphasised the continuing primacy of word of mouth as the best means of promoting a book, the importance of luck (notably lacking in the case of the US edition of The Instance of the Fingerpost, published in the week that Diana died), the notion of the Booker Prize-winning formula (‘myth, love and history’, a la A S Byatt) and the lack of omniscience of publishers; hence the horrified initial reaction of the sales and marketing department to C J Sansum’s stunningly successful Shardlake series, namely ‘hunchbacks don’t sell’ (presumably forgetting what Shakespeare did with Richard III).

However, I think the main thing I took away from the conference was the increased acceptance from all parties that academic history and historical fiction aren’t two sides of a great divide, but are both staging posts in a spectrum – and both, indeed, are simplifications to a greater or lesser degree. Academic history used to like to see itself as a disinterested pursuit of truth; as Simon Schama put it, historians are ‘party poopers’, demolishing the widely accepted myths that the public is comfortable with. (Perhaps therefore historical novelists are ‘party animals’, perpetuating the myths – e.g. Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker with ‘mud, blood and donkeys’ in World War I – and dealing with those things that historians dare not touch because they lie beyond the boundaries of the sources, such as people’s emotions, such big issues as loyalties and beliefs, and the ‘what ifs’ of history). However, as several speakers stressed, academic history itself is increasingly seen as a fictive concept: historians select and interpret their material with greater or lesser degrees of subjectivity, while even ‘primary sources’ aren’t the beginning of a process but the end of one. They are the recording of an event that has already taken place, and are thus themselves subject to selection and subjectivity, rather like modern TV or newspaper reporting; or as Arthur Marwick used to put it, ‘history’ is actually the artificial construct, the prism, through which we study the totality which was ‘the past’, only a minute fraction of which we can ever recreate. I think this realisation that history and fiction aren’t really so far apart after all reflects the fact that academic history, once remarkably hierarchical and even snobbish, has become rather more tolerant and inclusive in the last 15-20 years or so. When I started work on my doctorate in the early 1980s there was a definite ‘pecking order’, with political and religious history at the top – the former, for my period, dominated by such titans as Sir Geoffrey Elton, Conrad Russell and Hugh Trevor-Roper, all of whom I encountered at once time or another. (In Trevor-Roper’s case, this involved knocking him off his bike when rushing to his lecture; as far as I know, the trauma he might have suffered from my carelessness has never been advanced as a possible cause of his subsequent faux pas in authenticating the Hitler diaries.) Economic history was tolerated, social history was mainstream thanks to the likes of Hobsbawm and Thompson but was still not entirely respectable, while naval history was regarded very much as an unfashionable and insignificant backwater (although then probably still more ‘mainstream’ than gender and race history, etc).

Thus I was something of an exotic beast at Oxford historical seminars in the mid-1980s, although the tide was already turning. Indeed, the very fact that I was taken on as a DPhil student by Gerald Aylmer, one of the most eminent political historians of the day, has been used in a recent study of the progress of naval history as proof that things were changing. Now there is a chair in naval history at King’s College, London; a naval historian holds a fellowship of All Souls; Cambridge runs a maritime history workshop; and the numbers of those studying naval history at such institutions as King’s, Greenwich and Exeter probably run into hundreds. So maybe I’ll live to see a professorship in historical fiction at Oxford, but perhaps we’ll only be certain that all the barriers really have come down when David Starkey writes a sex-filled Tudor bodice ripper (ideally with a black protagonist) or Niall Ferguson succeeds Sebastian Faulks and Jeffery Deaver as the author of the next Bond novel, in which Q gives Bond six really ‘killer apps’. But I won’t hold my breath.