The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
John Rastell: Renaissance Man and Bookseller Around the year 1500 Wynkyn de Worde moved his printing press from the precinct of Westminster Abbey to premises in Fleet Street. De Worde was the Dutch assistant of William Caxton, who had introduced printing to England,...
Hidden in Plain Sight Michael Carter, a properties historian at English Heritage and the man who oversees, among others, the ruins of Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, is troubled by the effect that Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy has had on the public imagination. The...
Books of 2021 from Aspects of HistoryAlan Bardos Author of The Dardanelles ConspiracyLaw of Blood is the first in R.N. Morris’s new Empire of Shadows series, featuring magistrate Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky. In Law of Blood, Virginsky investigates the murder of a...
Peter Tonkin, you clearly have a passion for the Elizabethan era, when did this interest start? I have always been fascinated by history. One of my earlier memories (aged 6?) is sitting in my bedroom in Holland (as my father was posted to Germany at the time and we...
Books Click on any of the books covers below to either buy or get more information on Amazon Articles Click on the links below to read the full article [dpdfg_filtergrid custom_query="advanced" multiple_cpt="post,short_stories" use_taxonomy_terms="on"...
Peter Tonkin proves again there is much to explore within the dramatic reign of Queen Elizabeth I. His first novel in The Queen’s Intelligencer series, Shadow of the Axe, focuses on the fascinating events that led to the Essex Rebellion of 1601, and the rival factions...
Merchants, in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are ubiquitous. One finds them represented on the stage, for example, in the works of Shakespeare and Jonson (‘let’s see him creep!’). The word itself conjures up a host of senses: the jingling...
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...
Abandoned on the banks of the Benin River in 1553, the first English merchants to travel to West Africa could only look back and reflect that, perhaps, their organisational strategy had not been very effective. Things had started well enough, with a painless departure...
Gordon Corrigan, what first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? Inspirational history tutors both at school and at Sandhurst gave me a lifelong fascination with history, and my service in the army sharpened the focus to specialise in military history....
