The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
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 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...
Inside A Renaissance Painter’s Studio In 1510, the year in which my new novel The Colour Storm is set, nearly every great painter of the age was actively at work. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Bellini, Titian, Raphael, Dürer, Hieronymous Bosch and, the principal of my...
Summer Reads from Aspects of HistoryTimothy Ashby Author of Elizabethan Secret Agent: The Untold Story of William Ashby (1536-1593)At the top of my favourites list of recent historical books is Leanda de Lisle´s The White King. Although non-fiction, the book reads...
In the 1570s Thomas Whythorne, a musician and composer, wrote an account of his life. It’s an extraordinary document, not least since the term and concept of ‘autobiography’ didn’t yet exist. Whythorne charts his changing mental states through the different phases and...
As soon as I picked up this book I knew it was a brilliant idea, and wondered why no-one had thought to do it before. The answer lies in the book itself, which is that the amount of research taken is enormous. Writing as an amateur, and not a historian, it is a...
Kill or cure? Consulting an Elizabethan physician could often be that much of a gamble. Almost everything sixteenth century doctors believed they knew was wrong. They had inherited a view of disease and the human body steeped in the writings of the Greek, Roman and...
HistFest is a festival, running for only two years seeking to offer history for all audiences, and who could complain about such an aspiration? Partnered and hosted by the British Library, it’s easy to get to, and the 2022 line up featured many fantastic subjects, not...
The world watched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with horror and disbelief. The siege of Mariupol, the shelling of Kharkiv, alleged war crimes in Bucha. A willingness to lay waste cities, destroy infrastructure and murder civilians. All presided over by a leader in...
Margaret Willes, what inspired you to write about this subject, a book not about the cathedral, but about its surrounding area? My first memory of St Paul's Churchyard was emerging from the Underground into an area of devastation. It was probably in 1953, when my...
