History is the art of making things up. Why pretend otherwise?

In a recent interview, the celebrity historian and Tudor expert David Starkey described Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall as a ‘deliberate perversion of fact’. The novel, he said, is ‘a magnificent, wonderful fiction’.

But if Oxford has taught me one thing, it’s that all the best history is. Starkey is a Cambridge man, and maybe they do things differently there. But any perceptive Oxford undergraduate will soon realise that a little bit of fiction is the surest way to a First. What the admissions material opaquely describes as ‘historical imagination’ turns out to be an irregular verb: I imagine, you pervert the facts.

Any success I’ve had in my first year and a half at Magdalen College, I owe to the fact that I have no qualms about taking this approach. My highest-marked essays include ones which argue that Martin Luther was a fraud, that Second Wave American feminists were profoundly sexist and that King Alfred the Great was a historical irrelevance.

In another essay, I said that the Counter-Reformation was a success because the Catholics were so flexible, tolerant and easy-going — I didn’t mention the Inquisition once. Saying it was ‘completely wrong, but a delight to read’, my tutor gave it a First.

The same tutor recommended Fernand Braudel’s seminal 1949 tome, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, as the greatest history book of all time — while adding, as a cheery side-note, that he was sure Braudel had made all the facts up.

The list of historians who’ve been led by their imaginations as much as their sources is distinguished.