Mortimer also tries to bring us living history by using the second person and the present tense throughout. So, you are travelling into the city, you are sitting down at table, you are eyeing up a cross-looking band of outlaws and deciding whether it is safe to run. It is a verbal tic, the present tense especially, which has become the default voice for documentaries and which is now creeping into history writing. This relentless presentism can seem irritating, until you remember that the perfect tense, in which history has conventionally been told, is equally arbitrary. As Mortimer points out, if you are to experience the 14th century the way he intends, then you must do so in the unspooling moment, oblivious to what lies ahead. Ian Mortimer doesn't hold with any fancy notion about the past being impossible to know. Not for him the