The crookbacked lawyer whose talent for cutting through Tudor murk sees him pressed, by turns, into the service of Thomas Cromwell, Archbishop Cranmer and finally Henry VIII's last queen, Catherine Parr, is our man on the inside. Through the character of Shardlake, Sansom attempts just that.

That's what's so interesting about writing about the period: to comprehend it, you have to work your way into a totally different worldview.' If I were to talk today with someone from the 16th century, they'd think I was mad, and probably heretical. And the more I read about it, the more I realised how like the 20th century it was in its anxiety and uncertainty, even though people thought so differently then. It was a time of extraordinary ferment: in the space of a few years, the state took on a completely different meaning. 'I'm drawn to it,' he explains, 'because it's the moment at which the medieval certainties that had endured for centuries were turned upside down. But as he talks on, it becomes clear that Sansom's is the disapproval of an expert, not a cynic a man whose grasp of the period is so broad and deep that he looks with faint bemusement at those who construe it as one long cavalcade of skulduggery and sex.

I like to get away from that.' This is, on the face of it, a curious position for the creator of Matthew Shardlake, the 'Tudor Morse' whose adventures amid the religious wrangling and rolling heads of Henry VIII's England have done much to fan the flames of Tudormania in recent years. C J Sansom winces at the mention of The Tudors, the BBC's recent dramatisation of the life of Henry VIII, starring a pouting Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

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