The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Much is made to make history relatable to audiences, readers and listenerships in the 2020s, whether that is parallels with bygone eras, the immutable notion that we can plot what will come from what once happened. Barnaby Phillips’ The African Kingdom of Gold can lay...
In the epigraph to his previous book, How to Stop Fascism (2021), Paul Mason recalls the anti-fascist lawyer and political scientist Karl Loewenstein's observation that "history teaches us the deathlessness of ideas". The quotation encapsulates a view of history...
G.M. Trevelyan spotted it in September 1939. He feared, he wrote, that the England ‘of an old song’ was coming to an end. By that, as Judith S. Lewis explains in her account The Country House at War, he meant ‘a green and pleasant land presided over by intelligent and...
While the battles of World War Two raged across the skies, seas, and land, an entirely different kind of warfare was being fought deep in Britain's forests. Joanna Foat’s The Lumberjills Under Suspicion is a truly gripping and dynamic work of historical fiction. As a...
If one was to conceive of Themistocles’ story as an altarpiece (and it seems the eponymous subject did so!), the central image would be a well-known one: the Athenian slipping surreptitiously out of the Greek naval command’s evening deliberations to send his...
Although one character, Zofia, features in a previous story, Deborah Swift’s The Enemy’s Wife can be read as a standalone novel. Swift has penned a compelling work about a perhaps not so well known arena of World War Two in that it is set in Japanese-occupied...
A few weeks ago I heard Tom Licence speaking on a podcast (part of the promotion of this new work, no doubt) about how King Harold’s famed feat of generalship (marching from London to Stamford Bridge and back again in under two weeks), may not have been a march after...
The Fourth Queen is Nicola Cornick’s latest Tudor historical fiction, set in the aftermath of the 1539 dissolution of the monasteries under King Henry VIII. Whilst Cornick is perhaps best known for her time-slip novels, The Fourth Queen takes a slightly different...
Back in the (late) 1980s when I was at university, it was the period leading up to and following AD 410 that most filled me with trepidation. Almost nothing in the way of contemporary written sources, combined with archaeological findings that were only really just...
The Model Patient is Lucy Ashe’s third historical thriller novel, exploring female autonomy, obsession, and the potentially perilous intimacy of psychotherapy. Set in 1960s London, this novel follows Evelyn Westbrook, a former model turned increasingly unfulfilled...
