True!

Most of what I know about the world has been learnt through fiction. Stuff that people made up… But when I say these books enabled me to “know about the world”, I mean that they gave me a deeper understanding than the mere nuts and bolts of historical events; that is, how undemocratically the government behaves, who invaded whom, when and where, what the labour camp was like, which calibre of bullet was used by the execution squad, and so on. I realised all this the other day when, finally, exasperated, I threw aside my copy of John Updike’s latest novel, Terrorist, and decided instead to watch Deal or No Deal on Channel 4. I had read just 64 pages, and it had been a struggle to get that far… Somehow, fiction had lost its power to enthral or inform. The interesting corollary is that while fiction may have lowered its sights, truly great writing can be found these days just down the aisle, in nonfiction. You would be hard-pressed to find a more exquisitely crafted book than Gordon Burn’s Happy Like Murderers, the grim story of Frederick and Rosemary West. Or, for that matter, Michael Burleigh’s Earthly Powers: The Conflict between Religion & Politics from the French Revolution to the Great War. It is a mixed-up world where the greatest literary inventiveness, the most imaginative writing, is found in matters of fact.

- Rod Liddle The Times