Ursula Todd, the novel's main character, lives any number of lives in the course of the book. It's as if the providential force that commandeered Bill Murray's Feb. 2 in "Groundhog Day" has taken over her entire existence. She is stillborn in an English country house in 1910, or the doctor arrives on time and she survives. She drowns with her big sister, Pamela, during a seaside holiday at age 4, or they are both rescued by an amateur painter. She falls out a window the next year or, eluding that fate, succumbs to the influenza epidemic of 1918. Her various possible means of demise include domestic violence, the Blitz, suicide and a stroke. No wonder Atkinson gave her heroine a name that means "death" in German; the downside of getting a seemingly infinite number of chances at life is having to die an equal number of deaths.

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The main character is Emil Larsson, a self-described man of "the Town," as the people in the book invariably refer to Stockholm. A hustler who has clambered his way into the ideal civil service job (he's a sort of undercover customs agent whose work consists of hanging out in taverns and coffee shops hunting smugglers), Emil believes it is in his interest "professionally and personally to be utterly forgettable — escaping entanglements, obligations and occasionally revenge." He has one friend, Mrs. Sparrow, an older woman who runs an exclusive gaming establishment and with whom he often serves as a partner in the popular game known as Boston whist.

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As with "Wolf Hall," the central character in "Bring Up the Bodies" is Thomas Cromwell, master secretary to King Henry VIII of England. The son of a drunken, abusive blacksmith, Cromwell has risen about as high as any commoner could hope to, entirely on the strength of his acumen, industry, cunning and resilience. As an often-quoted passage from "Wolf Hall" declares, "He is at home in courtroom and waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury."

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Martin has always maintained that he's been influenced at least as much by history and historical fiction as by the traditional epic fantasy of writers like J.R.R. Tolkien. Aficionados know that his novels (collectively called "A Song of Ice and Fire") are loosely based on the Wars of the Roses, a vicious series of battles of succession that took place in 15th-century England. Martin has also listed Maurice Druon and Thomas B. Costain as models, two mid-20th-century historical novelists who wrote about medieval France, and you can see echoes of that material in his fictional universe, as well.

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Thankfully the Tea Party has decided to produce its own entertainment, just like it produced its own history. If the grand liberal conspiracy theory of Hollywood is correct, underserved Real Americans will flock to Tea Party entertainment options in droves, forcing every film and television studio to produce appropriately conservative fare or go out of business entirely.

The first big offering from "Colony Bay Productions," the Tea Party-affiliated studio, is a TV show called "Courage, New Hampshire." It has not yet been picked up by any network, so the studio just released it on DVD and is selling it on its website.

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This, at least, is the thought that comes to me upon finishing Mary Doria Russell's "Doc." This extraordinary novel, whose central figure is John Henry "Doc" Holliday, is both a work of reclamation of the man from his legend as a coldblooded killer and an inspired evocation of a mythic quintessence. That fundamental aspect of Doc's life is announced from the start: "The Fates pursued him from the day he first drew breath, howling for his delayed demise."

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But just in case putting Bible stories on the History Channel makes you feel a little icky, don't worry. The series will be entirely free of historical context, according the network's president.

The Bible has its own layers of interpretation, of course, but Ms. Dubuc said the series would not try to impose any kind of historical context to events like the Flood. "It is just the magnitude of the book itself," she said. "We’re not stepping back to examine anything that could be called a controversy. We are just telling the stories that are in it."

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Here is how she put it: "He was going after our founders, and he was mocking them, and he was making fun out of them." Loosely based on historical events, "Burr" is purely fictional and fairly cynical, though the critics in 1973 found it quite entertaining. The novel does suggest that the founders were complex, calculating, and not always morally upright–in other words, that the politicians of old were not entirely unlike the politicians of today. But what could possibly have led young Michele, in 1976-77, to see the Republican Party as the moral antithesis of the Carter Democrats, or the Democrats reflected in a "snotty" historical novel?

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For Michele Bachmann, it was historical fiction.

Yes, Michele Bachamnn was a liberal until she read Gore Vidal's "Burr." Bachmann tells the tale of her creation about five minutes into the clip:

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This is all the more surprising when you consider that virtually every other British queen or princess has been celebrated in multiple historical novels and narrative histories. My neighborhood Barnes & Noble has an entire display table permanently devoted to such titles. The Tudors are, hands down, the great favorites of the genre; Phillipa Gregory has produced a string of bestselling novels about the wives, daughters and other assorted noblewomen surrounding Henry VIII, most notably the twice-filmed "The Other Boleyn Girl." Historians like Alison Weir have moved successfully between fiction and nonfiction in writing about female royals ranging from the ever-popular Ann Boleyn to the relatively obscure Isabella of France, who was married to the 13th-century King Edward II. And let's not even get started on Princess Di.

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Barry has shown a dazzling facility with poetry, drama and fiction -- his works form a mosaic-like whole, though each stands on its own. He never uses a fancy word when a simple one will do; his characters speak a plain vocabulary, but in cadences tempered and honed into poetry. Roseanne McNulty, his heroine in his new novel, "The Secret Scripture," tells us: "I am completely alone. There is no one in the world that knows me now outside of this place, all my own people, the few farthings of them that once were, my little wren of a mother ... they are all gone now." Roseanne, who has been hiding her memoirs under a floorboard at the Rosscommon Regional Mental Hospital for more than half a century, regards herself as "a thing left over ... a scraggy stretch of skin and bone in a bleak skirt and blouse, and a canvas jacket, and I sit here in my niche like a songless robin -- no, like a mouse that died under the hearth stone where it was warm, and lies now like a mummy in the pyramids ... No one even knows I have a story."

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In this fourth and final installment, we focus on historical novels: a gripping fictional portrait of Queen Elizabeth's early years, when she was still just "Lady Elizabeth"; a Victorian thriller featuring a mysterious housemaid and a gentleman obsessed with anthropometry; a juicy girl's-eye view of Louis XIV's court; and an intellectual romance that spans two centuries, partly set in Venice, where novelist George Eliot is on honeymoon.

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"The Lady Elizabeth" by Alison Weir

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The ghost is Virgil, the great Latin poet whose masterpiece, the Aeneid, tells of the founding of Rome by Aeneas, a Trojan rendered homeless by the fall of his city to the Greeks. Lavinia -- daughter of Latinus, king of the Latins -- marries Aeneas at the end of his wanderings, but their wedding isn't depicted in the Aeneid; Virgil died before he could finish the poem. Instead, the last scene ends in war, with Aeneas killing the prince of a neighboring tribe and a rival for Lavinia's hand. (Camilla, an Amazon-like warrior queen, is another heroic casualty in the battle over who will rule the Latins.) Of Lavinia herself, the real Virgil wrote only that she blushed (as befitted a virtuous maiden) when her wedding was discussed. She never gets to say a single word.

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The action, much of it fairly pointless, takes place over a 30-or-so-year span between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and just after the First World War. It centers around the three sons of Webb Traverse, a Colorado union "organizer" (his political activities seem to consist entirely of blowing things -- and presumably people -- up) who is brutally killed by a couple of thugs hired by an industrialist named Scarsdale Vibe. The Traverse boys -- Frank, Reef and Kit -- spend most of the book drifting in and out of a purposeful determination to avenge their father's murder. Dropping in (literally) every now and then are a troupe of pubescent boy balloonists called the Chums of Chance, whose exploits fighting "the Yellow Fang" and other antagonists are also recorded in a series of "boys' own" pulp novels that the other characters occasionally read.

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Waters tells the stories of four Londoners, going backward in time. We first see them rummaging around the wreckage of their lives in 1947, then at the tail end of the war in 1944, and finally in 1941, where we learn about the mistakes, illusions and leaps of faith that lead them to their stunned condition at the book's beginning. The keystone of the story is Kay Langrish, an ambulance driver and medic who works the night watch during the Blitz, saving lives and pulling body parts out of London houses after they've been pulverized by German bombs.

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What's really surprising about "Christ the Lord" is that it's pretty good, even if you aren't keen on Rice's tediously good-looking, well-dressed and filthy rich vampires, and even if you're not a believer. Rice's vampire novels -- initially a pleasingly ambitious, agreeably lush and atmospheric sector of popular entertainment, the perfect rainy-day diversion for the brooding adolescent who still lurks in most of us -- had grown baggy and bombastic. Their author became so keen on proving her gravitas that her formidable skills as a storyteller gave way before endless passages of metaphysical chest-beating.

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The crowds that make up the march sometimes have wills of their own. Early on, a Union general forbears telling his soldiers not to trash a plantation house, knowing that "in the great mass of men that was an army, strange currents of willfulness and self-expression flowed within the structure of military discipline ... Even the generals issued orders for the sake of the record only." Still, the march hasn't really got a mind, and therefore it never quite qualifies as a protagonist.

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Granted, this is a vampire story, of which there are surely already too many, but "The Historian" eschews the extravagant gore and even more extravagant pose-striking of the modern vampire novel. It's a multigenerational mystery about the search for the tomb of the medieval Wallachian (not Transylvanian!) tyrant Vlad Tepes (the real-life Dracula), conducted by a handful of historians who become convinced he is still alive -- or, rather, undead. The main narrator is an unnamed 16-year-old girl, whose father initiates her into the cause when she discovers a mysterious book -- blank save for a woodcut of a rampant dragon, hidden in their library.

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