Book Reviews
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Miranda Malins, author of The Puritan Princess, has returned to the Cromwell’s and provided a real treat: a step back in time, to the 1640s, to trace the family’s uneasy rise to power. This time, however, a different Cromwell daughter - Bridget - takes centre stage.The great problem with ...
Few other outlaw groups in history have left such an enduring legacy as the seafaring pirates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In The Pirate Menace, Angus Konstam explores how, when, why, and where the world’s most infamous (and many lesser known) pirates plied their trade. Along ...
Our hapless hero, son of the king’s late black trumpeter John Blanke, is once again pressed into service as a spy by Cardinal Wolsey, the second most powerful figure in the land. Wolsey is pre-occupied with preparations for the forthcoming opening of Parliament at Blackfriars. All must be ...
As a former policewoman, Blessin Adams is well aware of the human cost of murder. In Great and Horrible News, this moving nonfiction study, she investigates the crimes that shook Tudor and Stuart England. In doing so, she approaches her cases forensically: and what a diverse bunch of true ...
The Stuart era is currently undergoing something of a rebirth in historical fiction, with authors turning their keystrokes to the long-reviled and much-decried Stuarts. Andrew Taylor has been amongst the vanguard in reassessing and promoting this era as the passionate, fascinating, and lively ...
The wonderful cover of Steven Veerapen’s Of Blood Descended invites the reader to enter a rich world of murder and mystery in 16th century England. The contents within do not disappoint.Of Blood Descended carries Veerapen’s hallmark of exemplary historical research to immerse you in the ...
Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate - the British nations’ only foray into republicanism – receives too little popular attention. It is often referred to obliquely as the Interregnum: a failed experiment and an interruption to the otherwise smooth course of monarchical history. The reasons for this ...
William Ashby, ambassador and spy, is not a well-known historical figure. Indeed, so successful a secret agent was he that few today will have heard of him. To me, he has always been little more than a name, mentioned in biographies of King James (when Ashby, seeking to buy the Scottish king’s ...
Winston Churchill refuses to die. Through film and television - not least The Crown and Darkest Hour - he reappears, chewing cigars and epitomising an imagined British bulldog spirit. He lives on, too, as an ogrish bogeyman, his appalling racial prejudices now freely scrutinised; and the legend
Miranda Malins, author of The Puritan Princess, has returned to the Cromwell’s and provided a real treat: a step back in time, to the 1640s, to trace the family’s uneasy rise to power. This time, however, a different Cromwell daughter - Bridget - takes centre stage.The great problem with ...
The personal reign of Mary Queen of Scots is an endless source of fascination to historians and fans of historical mystery alike. The reasons why are obvious: her relatively brief period of rule offers romance, political drama, murder mystery, and high tragedy. I am mindful of Lady Antonia ...
The Elizabethan Mind is a book I’ve awaited with excitement. Some years back, I was fortunate to hear Helen Hackett present her work on what would become this book at a symposium held in honour of my supervisor and friend, Alison Thorne. To my delight, the text not only met but exceeded my ...
Short Stories
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Another young life lost.
Simon Danforth pictured the boy’s body, lying bloodless and cold on the wooden bench of the coroner’s office. Harry Alwin had been a few years younger than his own twenty-two. Even now, as he looked into Mr Richard Alwin’s face, he pictured it. It was somehow hard to ...
David Starkey is the latest historian to get in on the action of YouTube. Viewers will be familiar with him, of course, from his media presence (on television, radio, and in print); now, he has begun a YouTube series, the scope of which includes English political and social history - with a ...
James I: The Wisest FoolWhat makes a good king? What, for that matter, makes a good leader? Nowadays, we might identify qualities such as charisma, presence, and – one would hope – intelligence in decision-making and genuine care for the wellbeing of the people governed. In a monarch, ...
Author Interview
What prompted you to choose the period that you wrote your first book in?In my case, I was following the old strategy of ‘write what you know’. I’d been researching and teaching this period for years and it seemed fertile ground for trying fiction. Once I knew I wanted to write about Mary Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley, the ...
Franny Moyle, welcome to Aspects of History. You’ve written a fantastic book, The King's Painter: The Life and Times of Hans Holbein, but when did you first “discover” Holbein, and what encouraged you to write ...
Edmond Smith, what inspired you to write about these early entrepreneurs, the subject of your new book, Merchants?My PhD set out to explore how individual investors shaped the infamous East India Company, but the more I dug into this, the more links I discovered with other parts
Nadine Akkerman, when first approaching this project, what was your understanding of Elizabeth Stuart and what, as a biographer, drew you to her?My first tussle with Elizabeth Stuart came about when I heard of her love for the theatre – I teach English literature, and started looking through her correspondence in the hope of finding something new about Shakespeare. As it turned
S.G.MacLean, The ‘Damian Seeker’ series marked a departure from your other novels in that you tackle the aftermath of the wars between the kingdoms. What drew you to the Cromwellian period?I came to it by accident. My first series was set in Scotland in the years preceding the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and my editor was very keen that I should send the main character ...
Helen Hackett, The Elizabethan Mind is the product of an enormous amount of research, comprising study of a variety of texts, from plays to printed prose works, to poems, and of course dramas. I’m curious as to whether you think the medium can tell us something about the popularity (or otherwise) of ...
In this Suzannah Lipscomb Interview, she discusses her latest book, Voices of Nîmes, which has brought to life the women of 16th and early 17th century Languedoc through the cases of consistories - moral courts. Through impressive archival research, we now know what women went through close to a daily basis, and Suzannah
A Dangerous Trade was the first in your Queen’s ...
The Queen’s Fire is the third instalment in the Christopher Marlowe series, how does this novel differ from the first two in the collection?The difference between this book and the previous ones is two-fold, I think. For one, Christopher Marlowe is, for once, dragged reluctantly into the central drama (whereas