The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Lincolnshire often seems to be a forgotten county even though it is the second largest in England. It has no motorways, a sketchy rail network post Beeching and is stereotyped as a place of flat agricultural land and cheap seaside holiday resorts. That is to ignore...
In 1783 (or in some accounts 1793), three men were allegedly playing cards in the Chequers Inn, Holbeach, and talking about a friend who had recently died and who used to make up a foursome with them. They hatched a plan that must have seemed like a bloody good one...
Whether you are interested in being introduced to British history, or you are familiar with it, Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee, will prove to be a find. Borne out of a successful podcast of the same name, Charlie Higson has written a book which entertains and educates in...
The setting of a story is vital for a historical novelist, perhaps even more than for those whose books are set in the present. This is for the blindingly obvious reason that a contemporary novel is set in a place or a milieu, whereas a historical novel has not only a...
The Business of Conquest In 1756, the East India Company decided to strengthen its position in Kolkata by investing heavily in new fortifications. The Indian city had grown from only a few thousand people to around 400,000 in only fifty years – larger than any town in...
How did the Industrial Revolution come about? And why did it start in Britain? Professor Edmond Smith examines these fundamental questions in compelling fashion, from the founding of the Royal Society in 1660 to the onset of imperial glory at the turn of the 19th...
Books of 2025 from Aspects of HistoryZeb Baker-Smith Editor of Aspects of HistorySeven Rivers by Vanessa Taylor explores how humanity and waterways have shaped one another across millennia, offering vivid historical portraits of the Nile, Danube, Ganges, Thames,...
Whig vs Tory During the pulsating and action-packed months of 1712, 1713 and 1714 many people, including a hefty chunk of MPs, were convinced that the country teetered on the edge either of the imposition of an absolutist Roman Catholic King and the extirpation of the...
Thomas Messel, what first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? The focus of my study was a late eighteenth-century ancestor called Elizabeth Linley. I was aware that she eloped with and married the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, but initially, I...
Elizabeth Linley at the age of seventeen is England’s most celebrated singer. Her beauty and voice can captivate the King, or send an audience into a state of wild infectious hysteria, but suddenly and mysteriously she disappears during the night of March the 18th...
