Stuck in the Past: Why is modern literature obsessed with history?

Novelist Amanda Craig, author of Hearts and Minds, explores the lack of contemporary relevance in British fiction, in the Independent:

"The way the world works does not change, no matter how much scientific knowledge we have acquired since Tudor times. But by failing to notice or celebrate our own age, with all its eccentricities and agonies, and by sticking our collective heads into bonnets, we fail also to understand what is special about the way we live now. This is the Victorian's legacy to us, and this, I believe, is what we have to rediscover."