The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Members Behaving Badly by Debbie Kilroy is an alternative history of the nation as seen through the stories of fifty-two rogue MPs who served in the House of Commons between 1603 and 1945. It’s an interesting framework and a clever idea. Research suggests that trust...
Hello Debbie. Members of Parliament behaving badly is a particularly fruitful topic these days! What was it that led you to write about these historical rogues? I was researching an academic paper looking at MPs in James I’s first English parliament, to see if you...
There are novels that inform you, and there are novels that transport you. Anna M Holmes's Dance of the Earth does both with rare confidence, depositing the reader into the smoky gaslight of a Victorian music hall and then sweeping them forward, through the...
Anna M Holmes – great to have the opportunity to chat about Dance of the Earth on behalf of Aspects of History. One of your characters, Rose begins life abandoned at a stage door – a very dramatic and symbolic entrance into the world of performance. What does it mean...
Annie Elliot crafts an intimate glance into the life and marriage of one of the most celebrated English writers of the 19th century, Charles Dickens. Within Mr & Mrs Charles Dickens: Her Story: “So The World May Know He Loved Me Once.”, Elliot masterfully explores...
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 Victorians were good at what we might call ‘spin’. En masse, they’ve been remembered as prudish, reserved, industrious, God-fearing. Their political leaders, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, seen as giants, fighting battles to modernise the state, to...
The world might have found it hard to believe. After 22 years of marriage and having made her pregnant at least 12 times, Dickens, aged 46, built a wall in their bedroom to keep his wife, Catherine, out, forced her to visit his 18-year-old mistress to quell rumours,...
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...
It seems apt that the paperback edition of Andrew Lambert’s gripping analysis in No More Napoleons should be published as Britain’s contribution to the preservation of the security of the continent of Europe, and indeed the wider world, is under debate and our very...
