It offers a perfect illustration, too, of David Cressy’s contention that the business of history is to ‘keep memory honest’, but the same rules clearly don’t apply to historical fiction. I could not give away the plot of The Firemaster’s Mistress even if I wanted to, but if an antidote to the academic conference is needed, then Christie Dickason’s cocktail of whores, pimps, codpieces, maidenheads, bear-baiters and spies — with the occasional injection of porn fed in like an automatic painkiller for the terminally bored — might be just the thing. Her story, the dust-jacket claims, is that ‘rare’ thing, an ‘historical novel utterly congruent with history and successful as a work of fiction’. Four hundred years after Equivocation took Henry Garnet to the scaffold it is nice to know that the doctrine is still alive and well.

Gunpowder by Clive Ponting (Chatto, £16.99, pp. 256, ISBN 0701177527)

Gunpowder Plots introduced by David Cannadine (Allen Lane, £14.99, pp. 188, ISBN 0713998865)

Remember, Remember the Fifth of November by James Sharpe (Profile Books, £15.99, pp. 230, ISBN 1861977271)

The Firemaster’s Mistress by Christie Dickason (Harper Collins £12.99, pp. 513, ISBN 0007180691)

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