Historical fiction has been a vexed genre for decades – or rather, centuries. You can (and many do) claim that it was invented by Shakespeare, and its best practitioners, ranging from Tolstoy to J G Farrell, persuade us that it stands among the highest literary fiction. Hilary Mantel fought to have it recognised as such, saying in her 2017 Reith Lectures: ‘I’ve never believed that fiction set in the past, or the future, is an inferior form of fiction. It demands the same attention to style and form as a story with a modern setting, and places a greater demand on the skills of placing information, and of managing complexity.’

Yet there is another variant of the genre, also deeply researched and imagined, which makes no pretensions to being literary. To this belong C J Sansom’s Shardlake series, S J Parris’s Giordano Bruno series and Wendy Holden’s twenty-first novel, The Queen’s Painter. That all are set in the Tudor period is thanks perhaps to the British history syllabus at GCSE level but the era makes for fabulous entertainment. In choosing to write about Henry VIII and Cromwell from the perspective of the great painter Hans Holbein, Holden has treated us to a thrilling tale of danger and revenge.

In The Queen’s Painter, Holbein is not just the greatest portraitist of his time but the avenger of Anne Boleyn. They meet in France when he is in his twenties, and he falls deeply in love with Boleyn’s beauty, wit, elegance and spirit, witnessing her marriage with pained dismay. When