THE GUARDIAN: Hard times: 20th century conflict dominates historical fiction

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Jerome de Groot, senior lecturer in Renaissance studies at the University of Manchester, agreed. “The 19th century is familiar to us in as much as the cities and the money and the European countries are much the same – they were the same kind of people thinking the same kind of way,” he said. “But writers can also use it to comment on contemporary life … You can draw parallels without necessarily making it so obvious that you are making a political argument – and that’s kind of what Scott himself was doing, too.”