The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Don’t Mention the War: The Start of Civil War in England The tragedy of the Civil War is explored by the author of a new biography of Charles I. The devastating civil wars of the 17th century tore Great Britain’s three kingdoms apart. They were wars ‘without an...
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...
When one looks at the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland under Oliver Cromwell in August 1658, would it have been fanciful to imagine a Republic for the foreseeable future, yet within two years the Stuarts were back on the throne? By August 1658, the...
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...
The Slipperiness of History I was really interested to read recently that the coded letters of Mary Queen of Scots have been deciphered by modern computer scientists and decoders. Undoubtedly this will give us hitherto unknown insights into what we know about her and...
In preparation for my meeting with Robert Harris (of course I’d read his latest novel, Act of Oblivion), I read a number of interviews and listened to his Desert Island Discs with Kirsty Young. 12 years old now, it is a fascinating and enlightening episode, and gave...
Leanda de Lisle’s biography of Henrietta Maria has burnt through the mist of four hundred years of propaganda. It pitches Henrietta at her own level. She is brought down from pious pedestals and raised up from the mire in which her reputation has often lain. With this...
The Winter Garden is a historical fiction time-slip novel, exploring the Gunpowder Plot as it has never been done before. Unravelling the myths, legends and stories we know about the events of 1605, Nicola Cornick brings to life the people behind our modern-day...
Would ‘penny for the Robert’ have quite the same ring to it? Probably not, but as Nicola Cornick demonstrates, it was Robert Catesby who was the driving force behind the terrorist plot to kill King James I, along with hundreds of others in the Gunpowder Plot. As a...
Paul Lay, your book Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell's Protectorate. This has been an in vogue subject of the last few years, really, this period of the 17th century, the Civil Wars and then the Interregnum. Oliver Cromwell played rather a sort of...
