Some historical fiction is uncontroversial because it presents the past merely as a backdrop for a story that does not suggest new facts or challenge widely accepted interpretations. Other successful creations go the other way, dispensing with the truth so brazenly that they render caveats fatuous because their narratives aren’t so much revisionist history as counterfactual fantasy. Only a pedant could object to Quentin Tarantino changing the course of World War II in Inglourious Basterds to tell a story of Jewish commandos assassinating Hitler in a French movie theater. 

In between these extremes, however, are works that invite controversy by treating history in minute detail and yet, without comedy or even an ironic wink at the audience, they seek to overturn what everybody thought they knew. This is what Hilary Mantel did brilliantly in her Wolf Hall trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, a figure central to the religious and dynastic upheavals of 16th-century England, who influenced the nation’s subsequent 500 years of history. The last volume of the trilogy was published in 2020, two years before Mantel’s death, and has now, like the second novel, been adapted triumphantly into a television series jointly produced by PBS Masterpiece and the BBC, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.