GORY fantasy drama Game of Thrones returns for its sixth series later this month, and it doesn't take a historian to recognise the various influences on its story and style.

Medieval-set tales on both big and small screen have a chequered history, typically doing poorly at the box office, but there is no doubting the general draw of the period drama.

By looking to history as a source for our fiction, for a wartime drama like Band of Brothers, the recent well-received adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace, or indirectly with Thrones set in a fantasy world which draws on the real, we can create a story which appeals as much for how we can recognise our own traits in the people of the past as for the swords, costumes, guts, gore and bodice-ripping of the setting.

Some of the most enjoyable episodes in the study of history - or of the products of history in any medium be it literature, music, architecture, even mathematics - is when by chance one comes across an apparently anachronistic and very familiar detail, something we can directly relate to.

In his Letters, the younger Pliny wrote in ancient times about his exasperation with younger fans of the chariot races, whom he says care not for the skill and origin of their chosen contender but rather support their shirt colour with tribal loyalty. The more things change...

But just as we look for and see ourselves and our world in the past, so our own identities - so dependant on the culture of our upbringing - are determined by it.

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is the best known of a series of dystopian novels written in the early part of the 20th century, books which are often regarded chiefly as a reaction to the gradually revealed excesses of ideological government - Stalin's Soviet Union and the rise to absolute power of a certain failed painter in 1930s Germany.

Orwell had direct experience of the excesses of idealistic thinking through his service with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War - so evocatively portrayed in his autobiographical work Homage to Catalonia.

One of the less obvious disquieting features of that book are the attempts of the communists, who later turn on their erstwhile allies in the form of the author's chosen anarchists, to erase the cultural traditions of the past.

In fact, it is this desire on the part of those seeking power to isolate a people from their past, and why this must be resisted, that is at the heart of the later work.

Downtrodden everyman Winston Smith finds, in a bric-a-brac shop in an unruly part of London granted greater freedom through its poverty, a glass paperweight - through which he crystallises his own vision of the past.

Where the regime of Big Brother seeks control by the total domination of the identities of its citizens, the aspiring rebel who finds a physical connection to history is a man who begins to discover the essence of liberty.

Not for nothing does Orwell choose to place his protagonist as a worker in the Ministry of Truth, the state organ dedicated to the rewriting and erasure of the past. The book is a trumpet blast for the value of knowing the past, and how we form a crucial part of our identity by doing so.

Often when people speak out in defence of history it is to claim that those who fail to learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them.

This, I feel, is misleading. Advocates of postmodern historical analysis are being flippant when they dismiss the course of events as 'just one damn thing after another', but the idea that by looking at the past alone we can make definitive judgements about the best course of action in the present disregards the many variables of culture and human psychology.

The value of history is not in the prediction of the future, rather the knowledge enables us to consider why we hold the values we share - their provenance and evolution - and empowers us with the tools and vocabulary needed to establish the intellectual freedom on which we thrive.