Historical fiction is as popular today as it was at its birth in the nineteenth century. The imaginative recreation of a period beyond living memory has a power to evoke the past better than any history text book. The stories in this collection travel in time from pre-history and the ancientGreeks to Regency bucks and Edwardian suffragettes, by way of medieval Europe, the English Civil War and the French Revolution. Emperors and kings, poets and soldiers walk these pages, in tales of intrigue, adventure, mystery, and romance.As well as the giants of the genre - Stanley Weyman, Rafael Sabatini, and Georgette Heyer among them - this anthology also includes tales by Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner, and Marjorie Bowen, and by writers from the golden age of the Victorian magazine.In their choices the editors demonstrate the vitality of a form that cuts across the boundaries of popular and literary fiction to appeal to anyone who enjoys a cracking good read.`History is too important to be left solely to historians. Or, to put it less provocatively, historical fiction shows that there are parts - important parts - of the experience of history that the professional historian cannot be expected to reach.'From the Introduction