Act of Oblivion: The Thrilling new novel from the no. 1 bestseller Robert Harris

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The story opens with their 1660 arrival in the Massachusetts colony and unfolds over many years, moving back and forth across the Atlantic as Nayler's determination to capture them becomes an obsession. The New York Observer, headlining its otherwise hostile review The Blair Snitch Project, commented that the book's "shock-horror revelation" was "so shocking it simply can't be true, though if it were it would certainly explain pretty much everything about the recent history of Great Britain.

a b Bray, Christopher (13 November 2007), "The Blair Snitch Project: Thriller Pulps Britain’s Ex-Prime Minister", The New York Observer. The passage of the Indemnity and Oblivion Act through the Convention Parliament was secured by Lord Clarendon, the first minister of King Charles II, and it became law on 29 August 1660 during the first year of the English Restoration. Beginning with the best-seller Fatherland, Harris focused on events surrounding the Second World War, followed by works set in ancient Rome. Relentlessly pursued, the pair trek hundreds of miles across inhospitable territory, hiding out in barns, attics and caves, harboured by Native Americans and millenarian cultists. Robert Harris brings his signature storytelling power to an exciting manhunt through colonial America.

Those whose complicity was judged the most serious (even those who had been forced to sign the King's death warrant) were executed before baying crowds. All things not excepted shall be pardoned by the general words of this act, as well as if particularly named. Co-authors Nelson DeMille and his son Alex have created interesting characters, though Brodie might be the type that appears more in fiction than in the real world: About to be handcuffed by a pair of armed men, he “suddenly spun around and delivered a ball-busting kick, under the guy’s ballistic vest, and into his non-ballistic balls. Harris told The Guardian before publication: "The day this appears a writ might come through the door. I've always thought I would have been on the Parliamentary side in the Civil War but I find their extreme Puritanism repressive and the suppression of music, entertainment and theatre, the tearing down of imagery, very like the Taliban," Harris explains.

The story is told through the eyes of two young civil servants – one German, Hartmann, and one English, Legat, who reunite at the fateful summit, six years after they were friends at university. In 1660 Richard Nayler is obsessed with hunting down two men he considers responsible for the murder of King Charles I. Richard Nayler, a minor administrator in the court of King Charles II, accepts the task of tracking down the signatories to the death warrant of Charles I, who was beheaded in 1649.

We can’t be certain the executioner did or did not weep as he took the life of a young man caught up in the machinations of church and state. There are hairsbreadth escapes aplenty but also a good deal of downtime, in which Whalley – cousin and boyhood companion of Cromwell, and later his commissary general of cavalry – reminisces about the “half mad” Protector and the events of the Civil War.

As the German poet and philosopher Novalis remarked more than two centuries ago, novels arise out of the shortcomings of history. Oliver Cromwell had subsequently taken power as Lord Protector, but now he and most of the regicides have been tracked down and executed, and a new king is on the throne. Though I'm not a Royalist by any means, thank goodness Cromwell and his followers were eventually deposed if their portrayal here is anything to go by!The novel’s narrative structure moves to and fro between them, ultimately leading to a brisk if slightly implausible conclusion. Harris has appeared on the BBC satirical panel game Have I Got News for You in episode three of the first series in 1990, and in episode four of the second series a year later. 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.

Yet Harris depicts even scenes of violence with a poetic description that makes reading Act of Oblivion like watching a movie; everything springs from the page to the imagination. The Harris novel The Fear Index, focusing on the 2010 Flash Crash, was published by Hutchinson in September 2011. Since the gap between his second and third appearance was nearly 16 years, Harris enjoyed the distinction of the longest gap between two successive appearances in the show's history until Eddie Izzard appeared on 22 April 2016, [24] just under 20 years after his last appearance on Episode 5 of Series 11 (17 May 1996). Many of the men who signed the warrant for the King’s execution have already died in the normal course of things, or have been rounded up and imprisoned, to be executed in their turn. 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.It will be compulsive reading for those who loved An Officer and a Spy, Harris's book about the Dreyfus affair. General Edward Whalley and his son-in law Colonel William Goffe board a ship bound for the New World.