SOURCE: "Playing Modern Detective In the Gunpowder Plot," in The New York Times, December 4, 1996, pp. C3, C7.

In the following review, Gussow investigates Fraser's ideas on the research she conducted for Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot.

While writers as diverse as John le Carré and V. S. Naipaul journey to exotic places in search of material, Antonia Fraser habitually goes to the reading room of the British Museum, where she is surrounded by her research (and sometimes by her mother, daughter or other members of her family of writers, the literary Longfords). For Lady Antonia there is also a sense of adventure, despite the quietude and the archival aspect of her creativity.

In her books she has looked deeply into the lives of major figures in English history, searching for facts behind myths. For her new work, Faith and Treason: The Story of the...