What has changed the most – and I’m sorry if this makes me sound an old fart – is the quality of the politicians. For example, I got to know Roy Jenkins very well, and no one can tell me that Priti Patel is an adequate replacement. The bigger picture of politics is always fascinating, but the day-to-day of Westminster, especially the quality of speeches and debates, is perhaps the most dispiriting in our history. So I’m glad to be out of it.

Harris has dealt with religion and religious conflict before. Successfully in Conclave, where the election of a new pope becomes a political nailbiter. Less so in The Second Sleep, which I felt never quite worked out how to bring its ideas together in a coherent whole. The year is 1660. Two men flee Britain for their lives. Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe were among those who signed Charles I’s death warrant and now Charles II wants revenge.

The publishers have provided a list of personae and a map of New England, but I rarely needed either. I found it fascinating to join a journey through famous towns and cities as they must have been in their very early years. From a nascent Boston to the future New York and many townships in between. But these are small cavils in a chase story that generally grips from start to finish. And yes, I did care. Read more And while the author has invented him, he has done this with good reason. As Harris says, if there was a pursuit, there must have been a pursuer. It’s just that no records of who he was have survived. Vulnerabilities

His new novel, Act of Oblivion represents his first foray into the politics of the seventeenth century. Which might seem surprising. Harris thrives on times of ideological conflict and moral challenge, and the English Civil War provides that in spades. I’m writing a novel about the English civil war, so I’m reading Pepys’s diary and the speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Also Carlyle’s letters are there.Act of Oblivion is an epic journey across continents, and a chase like no other. It is the thrilling new novel by Robert Harris. It’s a tribute to Harris’s skill and research that Naylor is virtually the only invented character – he tells us this at the very start – and yet he rings as true as the others. However, true stories rarely provide the writer with a neat structure, and here I feel the middle sags a bit. Robert Harris (no relation) has an impressive CV. His historical thrillers stretch from Imperial Rome ( Pompeii and Imperium) to 800 years in the future ( Second Sleep). It feels churlish to say this. It’s not a big thing, but I suspect it comes from Harris’s strict adherence to the facts as we know them. He is careful not to invent anything that could not be deduced, but that leaves him with an episodic story.

Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law, Colonel William Goffe, cross the Atlantic. They are on the run and wanted for the murder of Charles I. Under the provisions of the Act of Oblivion, they have been found guilty in absentia of high treason. Do remember, though, that this is fiction, told from Cicero’s point of view, and (for example) Julius Caesar may not have been quite as bad as he is portrayed by Robert Harris. According to Classics teacher Olly Murphy, in his interview on the best Classics books for teenagers, Harris “does put in things which now we might say are controversial or we’re not sure about but, for the most part, his portrayal of what it would have been like for a senator going about his daily business is absolutely spot on.” The wounds of the brutal civil war are still visible on men’s bodies”: the execution of Charles I in Whitehall, London, 1649. Illustration: Hulton Archive/Getty Images There’s a passage in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate in which the author imagines the parallel lives of a man and his murderer. “If one man is fated to be killed by another,” he writes, “it would be interesting to trace the gradual convergence of their paths. At the start they might be miles away from one another … and yet eventually we are bound to meet, we can’t avoid it…” This is the idea that animates Robert Harris’s latest novel, Act of Oblivion, which, although it is set in the 17th century, sends the reader on a riotously enjoyable and thoroughly modern manhunt that weaves between Restoration-era London and the wilds of pre-revolutionary New England. He took a while to reply. By the time he spoke the men had gone inside. He said quietly, 'They killed the King.'I would hardly be the first person to point out the dramatic parallels with our own age. Polarised religious sects. Fierce political debates spilling over into violence. A sense that anything was possible, for good or bad. It’s particularly pressing when the story relates to events that took place around three hundred and fifty years ago, to people of whom we are unlikely to have heard. If any of this makes the book sound heavy, this is very far from the case. At no point does Harris’s research ever get in the way of the storytelling. In parallel strands, we follow Whalley and Goffe as they criss-cross New England, trying desperately to remain hidden, and their dedicated pursuer Richard Naylor. This article was amended on 30 August 2022. The Act of Oblivion was passed in 1660, not 1652 as an earlier version said.

His journal allows us to see into his uncertainties and vulnerabilities, sides of his character which are crucial to ensuring that we stay engaged. If you like history, Robert Harris is one of the best historical novelists around. Pompeii (about the eruption of Vesuvius), An Officer and A Spy (about the Dreyfus Affair), even Archangel (set in Soviet Russia) are fabulous thrillers that bring the past alive. But when it came to Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman statesman, Harris really went to town and wrote an entire trilogy about him: Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator. The reason Harris was able to do this with a degree of accuracy is because Cicero wrote so much—indeed we have Cicero to thank for large chunks of our knowledge of the Latin language. The trilogy is just a wonderful evocation of what it was like to be an ambitious person in the days of the late Roman republic, as it fell apart and became an empire. Whalley was Oliver Cromwell’s cousin and close to the heart of the Commonwealth. Goffe is if anything more fanatical and Whalley’s increased doubts in the face of his son-in-law’s entrenched beliefs form one of the many fascinating subplots. But both were Colonels in the Roundhead Army and both had blood on their hands. One of the challenges of writing about this period is that the intricacies of religious faith and faction can seem distant and abstruse to a modern audience. Goffe is a religious man – he had wanted to become a minister before the war intervened – but Harris doesn’t allow himself to become hung up on the niceties of Christian doctrine. Rather, he makes a broader point about the position of the colonels in New England: the simplicity of their faith and anti-monarchical feeling finds a natural home among the dissenters and Puritans of the New World. The impulses that would animate the revolution a hundred years hence were all there in the English civil war. This does not, alas, mean that the men have an easy time of it in Massachusetts.

Retailers:

I realise now that I was always a novelist earning a living as journalist, rather than a journalist who one day happened to write a novel. So I wouldn’t want to be a political editor again, although I’m grateful for the experience and I draw on it all the time, whether the novel is set in ancient Rome or 19th-century France.