What is it about Henry VIII? Shakespeare tiptoed warily round the subject but English writers and readers ever since have been addicted to his charismatic reign, especially the extraordinary years from 1525 to 1540.
For some, the stories surrounding Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More, Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell are more vivid than everyday life itself. On the internet you'll find that these Tudor sagas of greed, lust and ambition, punctuated by violent death, get hashed over as if they happened yesterday.
When it's done well, the retelling of these years in fiction and drama becomes box-office gold. Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, her 2009 Booker prize winner, are simply the most distinguished examples of an industry that incorporates the legend of the virgin queen Elizabeth I, who is also narrative pay dirt.
In hindsight, 16th-century England was dominated by the lives and loves of some very powerful men and women. Perhaps that's the key to its appeal. The main objection to history, even in fiction, is expressed by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey as "The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all."
So Mantel, a lifelong and committed feminist, might seem an unlikely advocate for Thomas Cromwell. Her brilliant sleight of hand is to actualise and modernise her narrative through the use of the historic present, combined with timeless and up-to-date dialogue, while luxuriating in the lovely detail of the past. The publication of her Wolf Hall sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which centres on the trial and execution of Anne Boleyn, will surely reignite another frenzy of Tudor mania. Is there, indeed, an historical moment quite as mesmerising to readers as the reign of Henry VIII ?
Well, yes, there is. From the recent past, and still grimly present in our imagination, we have Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Put a swastika on a book cover and you are looking at an almost certain reprint. The obsession with the Third Reich is partly about British national pride, of course, but it's also a European phenomenon, with many literary expressions.
Last year Esi Edugyan was Booker shortlisted for Half Blood Blues, partly set in Vichy Paris, and inspired by a true story from the death camps. At the same time the global launch of The Adventures of Tintin got bogged down in the author Hergé's alleged collaboration with German occupation forces in Belgium. Today, in this publishing season, Nazi Germany is back on the agenda again.
Last week saw the release of Laurent Binet's Goncourt prize-winner HHhH. (SeckerHarvill).This postmodern examination of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the sinister architect of the Final Solution, is historical fiction for grown-ups. It makes a nice counterpart to Mantel's study of Thomas Cromwell, the kind of amoral public servant who would, one imagines, have flourished in the SS state.
There is something about the Third Reich and its ogres that never fails to inspire novelists and historians. Is it gangster chic? Possibly. The sickening, warped purity of its twisted vision? No doubt. The banality of its evil, in Hannah Arendt's famous phrase? For sure. But there's something else that has virtually no moral dimension: from a storytelling point of view, a lot of its appeal has to do with narrative pace.
As with the years 1525 to 1540, history happens very fast between the publication of Mein Kampf and the Holocaust. And it's some history. Tudor England and the Third Reich have this in common: there's an awful lot of jeopardy and bags of incident. The courts of Henry Tudor and Adolf Hitler were terrifying places in which the king or the Führer's enemies came to horrible ends.
Hitler and Henry VIII have few rivals as perennial historical subjects. The contenders include some French revolutionaries (Danton stands out); two or three Americans (Lincoln, JFK and Nixon) and one or two Romans, notably Julius Caesar and Claudius, whom Robert Graves exploited to dive into the excesses of imperial Rome. Readers like larger-than-life characters and extremes of emotion to which they can relate. Mercifully for us, history does not deliver such people too often.
Never have so many been drunk by so few
Hitler in his table talk used to describe Winston Churchill as "an insane drunkard" and everyone knows the PM liked to start the day with a glass or two of champagne. In one of the most entertaining books published this past year, Dinner With Churchill, from Short Books, amateur historian Cita Stelzer takes issue with those who argue, from anecdotal evidence, that Churchill was a chronic alcoholic. It's a difficult line to sustain. Lunch at No 10 usually began with sherry, followed by white wine, with port and brandy afterwards. An alfresco meal with one of his generals included plovers' eggs, chicken broth and chocolate souffle, washed down with a bottle of Pol Roger. This was all part of the war effort. "If I could dine with Stalin once a week," said Churchill, "there would be no trouble at all." The PM's grasp of cooking, however, was sketchy. "I shall cook for myself," he once boasted to his wife, Clementine. "I can boil an egg. I've seen it done."
Bloomsbury conjures new JK Rowling – again
As publishing formulae go, a dystopian vision plus a bit of JK Rowlingcorrect looks like a fairly safe bet. Bloomsbury thinks so. It has just signed up a seven-part fantasy series, The Bone Season, by an Oxford undergraduate, Samantha Shannon, a policeman's daughter who advertises herself as "one of the Harry Potter generation". Ms Shannon also says that "reading John Donne's poetry, I thought up the idea of there being a sort of 'spirit trade' in a world populated by clairvoyants. I realised it was a big story to tell but I know exactly what will happen to Paige [her protagonist] and how it will all end." How indeed ? Ms Shannon joins a growing list of writers (FE Higgins, Marina Fiorato and Philip Womack) who have been greeted as the heirs to Rowling's magic kingdom. But where are they now?
