The article endeavours to demonstrate that in the fiction written in Britain after World War II a discernible feature is the renewed interest in history, which is perceived by quite a few novelists as a modality of departing from realism, without returning to the formalism and experimentalism of high modernism. There are several ways of turning history into fiction: historical novels proper, writings belonging to 'historiographic metafiction', novels in which history is symbollically represented through the plight of a family, straight parodies, fictional biographies and novels dealing with alternate history.