The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
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...
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...
Royal yachts - like the word yacht in English - haven’t been with us forever. They both began during the English Civil War, and it was only when Charles II took to the sea himself - and loved it - that the whole business of royal yachts began. The first one was...
The Buckingham History Festival, which takes place in the celebrated market town over the weekend of 15-17 September, is one that subscribers to Aspects of History will relish. There’s a particular emphasis this year on the Early Modern period – which is no surprise...
It is estimated that one in six people in England have Huguenot ancestry. Yet the Huguenots (Protestants who were largely artisans and professionals) integrated so seamlessly into their adopted countries that, generations on, it is easy to forget the circumstances...
On 1st January 1645, Captain John Hotham, having played loose with his loyalties in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, faced his end at the Tower of London. His proposal to pay Parliament £10,000 to commute his sentence to banishment had been declined, therefore...
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...
The poet of Paradise Lost was better known in his own time as a pamphleteer. From 1641 to 1644, his writing optimistically imagined the world that might emerge from all the turmoil of civil war. It was an idealised, classical paradise of goodness, culture, education,...
