Sarah Glazer confesses her weakness for historical fiction even as some historians bash it.

 

I learned most of my history from historical fiction—at least at first. Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy hooked me on Alexandrian Greece.  Shakespeare’s history plays, on public television during my childhood, thrust me into a fascinating world of intrigue and assassination among England’s royal families. Of course, much of what I read wasn’t true at all—it reflected the agenda of the writer more than a pure distillation of the era.

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