But

you're not one to duck controversy, as we know, Hilary. I mean, what do you think of the fact that the Colston Hall in Bristol is no longer going to be called the Colston Hall because Edward Colston made his money out of slavery? Or the push to take down the statue of Cecil Rhodes because he expropriated...

It's a question of one sectional interest pitched against another and i actually don't think that there is a principle that you can apply here i do think you have to look at these things on a case-by basis but i think that the fact that the debate arises is a very healthy one people are understanding that the past really matters that we are not separate from history it's not an exam we pass it's something we are in and we are not just rationally involved but emotionally involved in the past and its legacy but

the principle of apologizing for history, do you agree with that?

It often seems fatuous, I have to say, but I think... It's interesting that you hear the phrase truth and reconciliation. I think the nub of the matter is that those are two very different things. Sometimes we can't stand too much truth. Question

here. Nick Groom, Professor in English, University of Exeter. I was struck by how your language is really shot through with the uncanny. You're talking about the art and craft and practice of resurrection, about reanimating the dead, even about conjuring up a reality. So the supernatural is there. It's there in your composition, even if it's not there in the plot devices of your narratives. So I'm wondering what you think is the relationship between historical fiction and the Gothic, and whether, in a sense... I mean, you mentioned the Gothic at the end, but whether, in a sense, you're a covert Gothic writer. Are you a covert goth, Hilary? That's

a very good question. I have written a Gothic novel, but it's not a historical novel. It's my novel set in Saudi Arabia, where you have the classic Gothic setup of a disempowered woman, immured in a situation where she is literally locked in. She can't trust any of the men around her. And as time goes on, she trusts less and less the evidence of her senses. And it is put to her that she may be going mad. I wrote this quite unconsciously as a description of the situation as I perceived it to be and then realised, goodness, this is a contemporary Gothic novel. And I think when you're thinking about genre and form like that, it's fatal to try and force it, Just as it's fatal to say, I'll sit down and write something funny. It just has to happen. I prepared for my Tudor novels by writing a novel, Beyond Black, which was about a professional psychic and was an extended exercise in trying to imagine what it must be like to talk to the dead every day for money. Do

you want to come back on that, Professor? Yes, I think... I suppose what I'm wondering about is whether what you're really writing in ghost stories... Yes...that your relationship with the past is one, and whether consciously or unconsciously, you are adopting the conventions and the style and the genre of the Gothic novel. In fact, the Gothic novel and the historical novel emerge at exactly the same time as ways of dealing with the past and trying to explain what the relationship of the past is to the present.

Indeed. And I think when you're writing historical fiction, you are always looking for the untell story. You're looking for what has been repressed politically or repressed psychologically. You are working in the crypt. But

the language is, as the professor has said always, about resurrection, the laying out of the dead, the reverence of the dead. I mean, one does get the impression that you are, as Eliot said at Webster, you know, much possessed by death. You know, see the skull beneath the skin. Would you...?

I don't think I'm possessed by death. I think I'm possessed by the notion of afterlife and that in a sense if it doesn't sound too grandiose is what i'm trying to do i'm trying to have a rerun we know the end but they don't hello i'm marion gibson i'm professor of renaissance and magical literatures at the University. You talked about the dilemma of what to put into your books and what to take out, and how historians and literary critics

are going to read those choices differently.