I first chanced upon the work of Richard Blake a year or so ago when perusing the recent-fiction section of a prestigious Sydney bookshop (yes, there are such things) on the scout for new entrants to the college library where I work. As I was on the final lap a novel of my own on seventh century history (yes, there are such things--and from my point of view, the fewer the better), my subconscious went into overdrive when the novel I found in my hand, lurid cover and all, proclaimed--"610 AD. The bloodthirsty emperor Phocas--"

"Christ," my subconscious said.

And then it said, "Yeah, but BLOODTHIRSTY--and look at that cover! Richard, Richard, Richard!" (for the author was, as I said, a certain Richard Blake), "--this'll be worth a laugh".

Well, as you can see from the existence of this review (and the present contents of the WEA Sydney library), Richard is still laughing.

My previous most complete experience of seventh century history had been the large and exacting biography of the emperor Heraclius by Walter Kaegi. I am eternally grateful to Walter: he got me through Heraclius' wars without having to consult a single manuscript (in ninth-century Armenian). But, alas, Walter is an academic. Richard is not. Richard is a WRITER, by which I mean, he knows how to talk to YOU, rather than to a PhD committee, or to a Professorial Board, or to the editorial director of Cambridge University Press.

This doesn't mean that Richard is capable of that lurid cover. He lives in a garden in Athens, I hear, where everything is done with the utmost taste, discretion and refinement--and no, we're not talking Petronius. Oh, Richard will have you think that it's ALL Petronius where he comes from, but how would that leave him time to be as precise about the seventh century as I can and will assure you he is? (--DAMN YOU, Richard.)

Or as imaginative? For example, anyone who knows anything about the seventh century knows that for all Heraclius might have been a complete dimwit (carrying around his tabernacle of the Lord from campaign to campaign, like some face-painted version of Billy Graham) he did at least reduce the Persians to a rabble (after they'd reduced Byzantium to a rabble) and cemented a dynasty that lasted a hundred years. For Richard, Heraclius is just a dimwit, a fop, a clown, who has to have Aelric the Briton around to do the dirty --Aelric being the hero of this book and the three others in the mounting and highly popular series. Not to mention Priscus, who no-one will have heard of until Richard came along, though he did exist just as surely as Heraclius did, and could, just conceivably, have borne a faint resemblance to the awesomely uncute Priscus we see in the book. Well, Priscus alone is worth the price of the book. But Aelric (whom other readers at the time had already met in the book's precursor Conspiracies of Rome) is the real jewel. In the course of these four books, Aelric has aged six to ninety-six, and nowhere in any of them--and in the last one he's just about wheeled through the seventh century world in a pram--does he let his author down.

Well, that's my review. Sorry, but I'm just not gonna sing Richard's praises any more. For one thing, in fifty years time when my own novel finally gets published, you won't read it, you'll just say, Oh Richard Blake already did all that.

Sideways history is an odd game. After years of watching Margaret Thatcher beaten around the gills by any number of bleeding-heart-artistes from Roger Waters to Salman Rushdie, Sean Gabb, hardly a well-known Thatcher-fan, has turned Michael Foot into Ellsworth Toohey and introduced British politics to the world of South Park.

Well, The Churchill Memorandum is nowhere as dire as all that sounds. It's a bit of a caper, really, a tiptoe through some pretty deformed tulips. And it is a testament to the author's understanding of twentieth century history and well worth reading on that account alone.

Gabb's use of "Victory Mansions" (for his hero's residence) and "O'Brien" (for his hero's British bobby) indicates not so much the influence of Orwell's 1984 as its use as effluence. "Airstrip One" is notable by its absence, in a book that simply can't bring itself to believe that the Wilsonian settlement of World War One was either ineffectual or benevolent, or Rooseveltism's settlement of World War Two (the destruction of the British Empire, and a "world safe for America" guaranteed by any number of "freedom-froms" squashing a proportionately greater number of "freedoms-to") made any sense at all. The latter, in the event, has been sidestepped here and we have a world order ostensibly governed by Great Power balances rather than agitprop at the UN.

Anthony Markham is a Churchill biographer fallen on hard times. He is completely gay, slightly (?) Asiatic, and as patriotic as the lads in The Riddle of the Sands. He lives in a decaying but hardly defunct British Empire - for which the author has as much sympathy as any devout reader of The Jungle Book, and here's the peculiar character of this book, if you read it to any degree seriously you come to acquire some of that sympathy yourself. Though I have to say: I'm not about to abandon my fond illusion that Michael Foot was a benign old gentleman whose politics were no worse than those of Eric, sorry Tony, Blair - and under whose prime-ministership you might have seen the Falkland Islanders rebadged as Spanish without a word. (On the other hand, wasn't Maggie responsible for Mugabe - and, of course, "climate change"?)

Anyway, back to Our Hero and the thickening plot. It is 1959. Owing to a slight accident to the Führerprinzip on a Czech road in 1939, Germany is now run by the two libertarian vons, Hayek and Mises; Goering is front-man. Yes, the Jews are on the Nazis' side, Himmler is a rancid memory, and Ayn Rand (presently imprisoned under the natively American fascist regime described with more historical acumen by Jonah Goldberg than by Ayn herself) is about to have her Hitler-eulogy (no less) published by Markham's own publisher. Foot is the leader of the Communist Party; Macmillan conspires to take the Prime Ministership from Halifax. And Markham is pursued around the English countryside on account of his erstwhile possession of the "Churchill Memorandum", a document which purportedly, when fully published according to Macmillan's plan, will change the face, and course, of relations between Britain, America and Germany.

Sideways-history though it often reads daft, very seldom reads comic. It would be a mistake to read Sean Gabb as daft, despite the persistent "Bulldog Drummond" surface to his tale. Here is an accomplished writer who knows exactly how comedy is to be used, and uses it in fiction that goes where the angels (the prim little Anglicans in Paradise Lost, not to mention the cuddly Roosevelteers on the West Wing) have no intention to tread. His plot-twists are generally unpredictable, which could merely mean that his train of thought is unusual, but you do feel that the last thing you'll ever end up with is just a piece of silliness, or the usual weasel-words of political fiction (into which, I think, too much of late Le Carre seems to fall).

Too often unusual books - and this is certainly a most unusual book, right to the point of being a most original book, even by the standards of 1984, and one whose every word I cannot imagine too many people fulsomely "agreeing" with - are flicked aside on account of their limited market. So little vigour in the book trade today.