The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Historical Heroes: Charles Dickens From pasting labels onto pots at the blacking factory, from taking supper with his family in the Marshalsea Prison, to the top of the Victorian literary tree, Charles Dickens’s story is a remarkable one. The blacking factory by...
Ben Kane we're here to talk about your new book, Napoleon’s Spy, and the Napoleonic era, and actually it's very timely because there's the Ridley Scott movie. Firstly, Scott has said that people who complain about his film being historically inaccurate ‘need to get a...
David Cairns’ latest detective novel, The Case of the Wandering Corpse follows the investigative duo Errol Rait and Major Findo Gask in this Sherlock Holmes-esque mystery set in the late 1860s in Melbourne, Australia. The mystery begins with a distraught and fearful...
John Brewer’s historically rich Volcanic: Vesuvius in the Age of Revolution takes readers on a fascinating journey through the history of Mount Vesuvius. Brewer carefully plots the changing attitudes towards Naples and Mount Vesuvius through the lens of the Sublime...
What inspired your latest novel The Case of the Wandering Corpse The murder that introduces Gask and Rait had its genesis in 1864, after Franz Muller - a German tailor - was publicly hanged for the murder of Thomas Briggs. This was the first murder on a British train....
Crime in Victorian London One of the settings for my new novel, The Jaggard Case, is Clerkenwell - the scene of the arrest of Oliver Twist for pickpocketing. Clerkenwell was famous not only for its jewellery and watchmaking industries, but also its criminality and...
Within the pages of my latest book, set in the gritty backdrop of 1860s Melbourne, The Case of the Wandering Corpse, a thrilling tale unfolds as my protagonists Findo Gask and Erroll Rait confront an elusive organization known as Die Broederskap (The Broederbond)....
Yet another film on Napoleon and, inevitably it seems, yet more myths are added to the old. As Simon Schama nicely observed, Ridley Scott and his ilk are not content with ‘just making films about Napoleon so much as climbing into his saddle, beguiled by the siren song...
Paul, your book was published 15 years ago to great acclaim. Why did you write it, after all it’s the only book you’ve written on the Napoleonic period. First and foremost I wrote Napoleon in Egypt because it was such an gripping story - one which included everything...
It’s a safe bet to suppose that while you’ll know of The Four Feathers and its essential storyline – after all, it’s been adapted for film six times – you probably won’t be able to name its author. In fact you’re almost certainly more likely to know that the most...
