The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
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...
Ian Gentles, The New Model Army: Agent of Revolution is an updated edition of your earlier title, but it’s almost a different book – just how much has changed? The first edition has been condensed to about half its original length. It assimilates much new research,...
Deborah Swift, what is it about Samuel Pepys that makes for such an entertaining subject, even today? I think as a writer I just appreciate the fact he took the time to document in such detail the age in which he lived. This has made him a source for historians and...
The New Model Army takes on board a great deal of new research – by Phil Baker, Rachel Foxley and John Rees among others -- on the Leveller movement, with whom the New Model was in close contact throughout its fifteen-year history. When in the 1650s the soldiers...
V.L. Valentine’s visceral debut skilfully immerses the reader in the dread and despair of plague-ridden London during the stinking hot summer of 1665. The story centres on Symon Patrick, the young Rector of St. Paul’s in Covent Garden, and his discovery that, among...
The path toward my novel, The Plague Letters, started with letters written by the Rev. Symon Patrick of St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden to his friend, Mrs Elizabeth Gauden. The year was 1665 and a massive plague epidemic had broken out in London. After initially...
There is much legend associated with her life as a poisoner, and like all novelists do, I have taken the aspects of the story I liked best, and used a combination or research and imagination to fill the gaps. For the most succinct and detailed analysis of the real...
Timothy Ashby, what first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? I have been fascinated by the Elizabethan era since reading that a distant relative was a top “intelligencer” and English ambassador to Scotland. I lived on the island of Grenada as a young...
The Midlands was hotly contested in the English Civil War, and in 1643 it was a region more vital than ever to the Royalists. Boatloads of royal supplies had been shipped, against all odds, from Holland to Bridlington, escaping Parliament’s patrolling navy. Six...
The Italian proverb ‘Old sins have long shadows’ is tactfully used at the beginning of Deborah Swift’s sequel The Silkworm Keeper. Where Swift’s first book in the series, The Poison Keeper, exhibits the nefarious activities of poisoner Giuila Tofana, the sequel sees...
