The best writers prefer ideas to brand-name description. “Perhaps one could say that a classic novelist recreates an era from the inside out and concentrates on rendering rather than discussing the great social and political and intellectual currents of the period, whereas a lesser novelist attempts to make up for an insufficient grasp of the Zeitgeist by devoting himself or herself to its upholstery. Today the historical novel has been rehabilitated because it has radically changed its ways. The new historical novel is shorter or at least more crisply written than ever before, full of unexpected twists and turns in language, and rich in those ‘little true facts’.”