Art & Creativity Quote by Bernard Cornwell

Cornwell is doing a neat bit of two-step: he nods to literary nationalism while quietly puncturing it. By admitting his books have "a greater appeal to a British audience", he concedes the obvious about his brand - historical fiction steeped in British wars, geography, class codes, and the particular weather of English identity. That kind of material comes pre-loaded with local meaning. It flatters home readers by treating their past as intrinsically legible, theirs to inherit.

Then he flips the frame with "but that hasn't stopped them" and the sentence turns from concession into gentle flex. The subtext is commercial but not crass: whatever the cultural specificity, the marketplace keeps translating it into desire. Best-seller lists in Brazil and Japan aren't offered as curiosities; they're receipts. Cornwell isn't arguing that his stories are "universal" in some misty, uplifting way. He's pointing to a more interesting reality: readers often want the texture of someone else's history, as long as it's delivered with propulsion, clarity, and a hero you can follow across a map.

The phrasing is careful, too. "Places like Brazil, Japan" signals distance and difference, a quick sketch of global reach without claiming mastery of those audiences. "At least a dozen other countries" is deliberately imprecise, less a statistic than a shrugging reminder that cultural borders are porous when narrative technique is strong. It's also a quiet rebuke to the gatekeeping idea that Britishness makes a book parochial. Cornwell's point: specificity sells, and the world keeps proving it.