Historian David Cannadine claimed in 2004 that the Britain of the late 1990s and early 2000s was interested in history to an unprecedented level. Cannadine judged that this interest was widely dispersed ‘among publishers, in the newspapers, on radio and in film, and (especially) on television; and from the general public who, it seemed, could not get enough of it’. Translating this interest to ‘the market-oriented language of our day, it looked as though more history was being produced and consumed than ever before’ (quoted in Korte and Pirker 2011: 11). Yet history itself was not the only growth area, literary historian Jerome de Groot noting in 2010 that ‘at present the Historical Novel is in robust health, critically, formally and economically’. De Groot adds that ‘in particular the last two decades [from 1990] have seen an explosion in the sales and popularity of novels set in the past’ (de Groot 2010: 1). The reasons for the detectable upsurge in history and in the historical novel particularly in the 1990s were many, but in some measure that interest was activated by the almost unique confluence of the end of the decade, century and millennium. Allowing that these were Christian artificial historical markers, such a treble had only happened once before, and never, of course, with the global interest it received through the last decade of the second millennium. With the historical novel, though, it was sometimes difficult to delineate the historical from the fictive, illustrated by the epigraph above, from the final ‘Author's Note’ in Pat Barker's acclaimed novel Regeneration. Implicit in Barker's statement, appended to a narrative in which real and imagined characters interact, is the question of the complex purpose and effect of historical fiction in general, and its relation to historical reality. In what, if any, sense is historical fiction ‘history’? This type of question became even more multi-faceted and controversial in the 1990s, when the academic centres of History themselves were under assault from postmodern thinking on, and rendering of, the topic.