Short Stories Archives - Aspects of History

Sugar Plum

Set during the Second World War, the story combines historical details about the challenges of putting on ballet performances in London during the war, with a fictional tale where magic and reality intermingle during a production of Casse Noisette.

Lucy Ashe

When rehearsals began for Casse Noisette, Theodore Frost couldn’t help thinking that Marie le Sansonnet would be a much better Mouse King than Sugar Plum Fairy. All that rushing around, thinking herself royalty, demanding hot drinks sweetened with sugar that certainly...

The Last Restaurant in Paris – Extract

Lily Graham

Paris, 1987 Gilbert The old antiquarian bookstore was a sliver amongst the larger pastel-coloured shops on the leafy Parisian street of Rue Cardinet. It was called Librairie d’antiquités de Géroux but was, nonetheless, as much a part of the Batignolles village as the...

What Remains

In this mysterious tale of intrigue, we are taken into the world of pathology and ancient Egypt.

Elizabeth Buchan

The Princess of Thebes was wheeled on a gurney into the laboratory. Peta Raven observed the porters’ careful progression through the doorway and up to the table. No corpse should be, or ever was, treated negligently in this place but custody of the princess invoked an...

Appointment in Tehran

The US Embassy is under threat, but surely it is secure?

James Stejskal

Appointment in Tehran In his apartment several blocks from the university campus, Abdul Mezad knelt on a carpet facing the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina and prayed. He was one of the few people in the city who knew what was about to happen. Although the Shah had...

The Roman

A Caesar’s Spies story

Peter Tonkin

The Roman I ‘Roman Liburnian!’ called the lookout. Captain Barzan of the Cilician pirate trireme Thalassa looked up, saw the direction of the pointing arm and the sleek Roman vessel it was indicating. He turned to the helmsman, ‘Come two points south. We can...

Exit Ghost

Drama, subterfuge and murder make happy bedfellows in this story from Shakespearean Southwark.

Philip Gooden

Exit Ghost, by Philip Gooden. It’s not the best part I’ve ever played or the biggest but it’s the one that had the greatest effect on my audience. In fact I’ve never seen an audience reaction like it. Very pleasing, in one way. Very unpleasing in another. Every time I...

Nightmare in Clapham

To Clapham in the 1960s, when mental illness was treated very differently.

Katherine Mezzacappa

Our affair ended when eventually I tired of Jim’s reluctance to say that he loved me. I fell victim instead, if victim is the right word, to something I now know is called the ‘proximity effect’. Proximity in this case was an engineering student on the second floor...

The Prisoner

A short story that led to the Earls of Mercia series

M.J.Porter

I’m the last of my family, and as I sit here, bounded by four unyielding walls, it grows daily less and less likely that I’ll ever continue my family line. We, who rose from little, and achieved so much, will die out here, in a prison of my king’s making. I know that...

A Meeting of Equals

The short story that gave M.J.Porter the characters of Coelwulf and Pybba from her novel, The Last King.

M.J.Porter

I’m used to dealing with warriors. I’m not sure what to make of the man before me. I’ve heard a great deal about King Alfred. It seems much of it is true. I confess I’m disappointed. I came here to find an ally in arms, prepared to assist me in beating back the...

The Christmas Murders

London, Christmas in 1892, and Detective Inspector George Bowman investigates bloody murder.

Richard James

December, 1892 A hard overnight rain had frozen hard as iron on the roads and paths. This Christmas Eve, the whole of London seemed an ice rink. Detective Inspector George Bowman gazed through the window of the two-horse brougham he had hailed on Finchley Road. The...