How paradoxical it is that fiction can open up the true drama and reveal the full spectrum of human behaviour of any actual situation that's occurred than hard observed fact. I've been thinking about this after reading a lightly fictionalised memoir of a Polish Jewish young boy and his aunt on the run, never more than a step ahead of the Germans, savage Ukrainian militias, and mostly indifferent, sometimes callous Polish Catholics during the darkest days of the second world war.

It's the tiniest details that the history books either ignore or are oblivious to that this novel - Wartime Lies by Louis Begley - depicts that drives home the humming terror anyone in this the most awful of all predicament must have felt: this little boy could never urinate in public because (as I am too) he was circumcised. To do so risked discovery and a hitherto secret life instantly jeopardised. On such a thing hung a life. I can't get over that; it's almost laughable except it could be the tipping point between life or descent into hell.

Another book, a collection of short stories by an Urdu writer called Saadat Hasan Manto, is a chilling recount of the effects of another great British colonial fiasco: the partition of India and the communal demons that set free - massacre, pogrom, rape, arson.

Tell me that fiction means nothing if you dare. These two books alone would explode that canard should anyone dare to raise it.