Two really annoying things about historical fiction

I have a short attention span. I am easily bored. And if a book is set in the present day, something really has to happen very quickly or I will lose interest.

Turn back the clock 500, 1,000 or 2,000 years, though, and it's different. Well researched insights into how people probably lived, thought and acted in the distant past are, I think, fascinating.

There are just two things that you often find in historical fiction that I find really frustrating.

The first is the use of archaic language in completely the wrong time period. Say, 18th or 19th century slang applied to 11th century 'cockneys', who wouldn't even have been speaking anything like the English we recognise today.

I do see why authors do it; I understand that it's a device designed to take you into the past. And I can see that the alternative – to use entirely contemporary language – has its own problems (it's not historical fiction but, leaving aside the fantasy setting, the Lord of the Rings reads to me as though it's set in the 1930s or 1940s).

What I think is much worse, though, is for an author suddenly to switch a character's dialogue to the language they would have been speaking, only to have that character translate the expression into English.

For example: 'Veni, vidi, vici,' said Caesar, 'I came, I saw, I conquered.'

But Caesar – you're speaking Latin anyway. What language are you supposed to be translating into? And for whose benefit?

To me it's the literary equivalent of Lurcio's asides to the camera in Up Pompeii (keeping the Roman theme!). It just seems wrong in a serious novel. Again, I can see why it happens, especially when it comes to famous expressions, as in the example above.

But there's no need to put it in the dialogue, surely? Put the translation in the narrative and we'll all still get it. I promise!