I n his recently published A History of the Novel in Britain , Philip Hensher makes a bold claim. Historical novels, he tells us, don’t last. However popular and prestigious a historical novel might be in its day, it will almost always get thrown overboard as the ship of literary culture sails on, piled high with novels of contemporary life. He might be on to something. Who now prefers Walter Scott to Jane Austen? The historical novel risks a double obsolescence, courting a future in which it has become an old-fashioned vision of an old-fashioned time.

However much this news might dismay writers of historical novels, Hensher is untroubled: “As readers enjoying our contemporaries, we should not let our readerly pleasures be affected by the probability of ultimate oblivion.” Will the future, what there is of it, rate Wolf Hall as highly as we do? It doesn’t matter. Posterity, as Gore Vidal once wrote, is “a permanent darkness where no whistle sounds”.…