Historical fiction is still fiction. Yet the amount of detailed research that goes into the period and characters that writers develop, and the realistic nature of the final product, leads viewers and readers to treat it as history proper. We might think there’s an easy way of separating the factual, historical bits from the made-up, fictional bits, but there isn’t. Plato, it seems, was right: art is dangerous as it can make us believe things that are false. Art is at best a representation of reality, not reality itself. And yet, the same can be said of historical non-fiction. History is also the product of the perspective of the writer, and perspectives belong to individuals, not reality itself, writes Derek Matravers.

In his ‘Advertisement’ for the first edition of his Life of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell complained that ‘I have sometimes been obliged to run half over London, in order to fix a date correctly; which, when I had accomplished, I well know would obtain me no praise, though a failure would have been to my discredit’ (Boswell 1992: 3). Authors of histories, autobiographies, and other non-fictions have a special obligation to get everything right; as Boswell says, we can rightly criticise an author for getting something wrong even if, were he or she to have got it right, it would have passed by pretty much unnoticed. This does not mean, of course, that everything in a non-fiction is true; but it does mean that, if things are going well, everything in a non-fiction (putting aside tropes such as metaphor) is there because the author thought it was true. This is some kind of guarantee, kite mark, that means that readers (or viewers) of non-fictions are justified in believing what they find there.