The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
A Fairytale for Christmas - Review Irish - and English - eyes were smiling at the Dominion Theatre on Sunday evening as the venue hosted Fairytale For Christmas, a celebratory show featuring Irish standards and festive hits. There may have been no discernible plot to...
A Very Tudor Christmas Have you ever wondered how the early Tudors marked Christmas? Well, I hope you have because that is exactly what this article will explore! Now, Christmas traditions in the UK (and indeed, the rest of the world) may appear set in stone – for...
Whig vs Tory During the pulsating and action-packed months of 1712, 1713 and 1714 many people, including a hefty chunk of MPs, were convinced that the country teetered on the edge either of the imposition of an absolutist Roman Catholic King and the extirpation of the...
With Americans celebrating Thanksgiving at the end of the month, November seems a good time to consider the Pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower from Europe in 1620. Whilst researching my Alexander Baxby mystery Paying in Blood, I learnt more about their roots in...
Shadow of A Queen As I am by no means the first to observe, history, like hindsight, tends to be 20/20 vision. We know how things turned out in the end and we often assume that this was the way they were meant to be - whereas of course the men and women actually...
Emma Sergeant’s ‘La Selva Oscura’ - Review Emma Sergeant’s newest exhibition, titled ‘La Selva Oscura’ at the Lavery Studio in South Kensington, explores the themes of Dante’s Inferno, as well as being inspired by her home in Poland. Sergeant is one of our most...
From Fact into Fiction: The Origins of The Devils of Cardona As every historian knows, the past is another country, and documents are the indispensable tools that we use to find our way into it. Wander too far from the paper trail, and history can easily drift into...
Anywhere But The Western Front More than 100 years after the guns finally fell silent, our memory of the outbreak of the World War One is still firmly centered on what happened in Belgium and France. This is perhaps not surprising, as, in many ways, it was here that...
Finding Carthage Among The Romans The destruction of Carthage by the armies of the Roman Republic in 146BC was a seminal event in the rise of Rome to power across the Mediterranean. In popular memory, Carthage has, ever since, been remembered as that ‘enemy’ of Rome....
The Captive Years of Mary, Queen of Scots If my latest book Exile were a novel, nobody could predict its ending. With the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, however, the final chapter is well known: the ailing queen, dressed in russet, with a small dog hidden beneath her...
