The recent dramatisation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall into a very successful television series, poses questions about the relationship between the past, fiction and the dramatization of the those perspectives on history. There has always been a powerful relationship between ‘history' and fiction, and the imagination. My own thoughts on the issue were made more evident recently as a result of the reading and thinking undertaken for a short BBC radio programme (see www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0507lhd) on Francis Bacon's use of ancient Greek myths to explore ideas of natural philosophy: in particular the myth of Daedalus, the inventor of the Labyrinth and the scientist behind the breeding of the monstrous minotaur. Bacon used these myths to dramatise both the creativity of science, but also its potential dangers. As well as reading many articles in the learned journals (as you would expect no less), I also returned to my battered copy of Roger Lancelyn Green's Tales
of the Greek Heroes (1958). This reading prompted thoughts about the power of narrative and literary expression in the successful and proper representation of the past. Many modern research works, whether in the learned journals or in distinguished monographs,
are not driven by literary elegance but by the marshalling and display of archival erudition, and as a consequence have a very narrow band of readership and influence outside university  audiences...