I was lucky enough to know the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm and I happened to be at a party about ten days before he died.

All things not excepted shall be pardoned by the general words of this act, as well as if particularly named. An Irish act by the same name "An Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity, and Oblivion [for Ireland]" was sent to the Duke of Ormonde on 16 August 1664 by Sir Paul Davys, the Irish Secretary of State. It also said that no action was to be taken against those involved at any later time, and that the Interregnum was to be legally forgotten. Harris's bestselling first novel, the alternative-history Fatherland, has as its setting a world where Nazi Germany won the Second World War. When the Act of Oblivion which the title refers to is passed, those responsible for the regicide of Kind Charles I are tried in absentia and found guilty.The men being hunted are Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe, both of whom had been colonels in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, fighting for the Parliamentarians against Charles I’s Royalists.

My only negative comment is that it was perhaps a little too long, as I did find my interest and attention wane during the mid stages of the narration.

This is the main advantage of Harris's approach: The story is all about the two sides of a war and the ways people on each side justify their actions. The titular Act of Oblivion pardoned the past treasons committed against the Crown, with the exception of the regicides. Disappointed Royalists commented that the Act meant "indemnity for [Charles'] enemies and oblivion for his friends". What struck me most, though, was way in which it served as a reminder of all the horrific things done over the millennia in the name of religion. I came across this phrase about the manhunt for them across Puritan New England, across that wilderness of a nation just being forged, and it sparked my interest," he explains.