Authenticity

We all want our books to be, and to seem, authentic – don't we? – but there is plenty of room for debate about what that really means. Robert Barnard tells a story about an American critic who praised his deep understanding of the backstage world of opera, when in fact Robert had no first hand knowledge of that milieu at all. But he wrote well enough to persuade the critic that he did.

A book or film that makes obvious mistakes of fact will tend to be panned, but a common experience is that...