"From the outside it looks like a long shot, but to get to this stage I'd guess they must have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds and got top legal brains to study it. They must really believe they've got a case," Rickett said.
"In a sense they're admitting their work has elements of fiction to it. If it was pure history, how could they copyright history? When historians discover something they can't copyright it," he said.
Rickett added that if the pair won an unlikely victory it would set an astonishing precedent.
"It would have seismic implications. Novelists would have to be very, very careful when using non-fiction sources to build their fiction. Many novelists read a single work of history and use it as the basis of their book," he said.
Lisa Jardine, a professor and former Man Booker Prize judge, said: "They are not going to win. I don't think plagiarism any longer holds up -- we live in a world of cut and paste, and in a global village."
"Creativity is always a beautifully arranged patchwork that nudges something a little further on," Jardine said.
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