The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Holmes Is Where the Heart Is Crime comes to south-east London again, but this time in the form of an innovative adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story, The Valley of Fear, at The Southwark Playhouse. The drama covers two stories - the mystery of the murder of John...
In the summer of 1870, France declared war on Prussia. Within weeks, it faced invasion by a Prussia-led German coalition that included both the North German Confederation that Prussia dominated and the southern German states of Bavarian, Baden, and Württemberg. The...
The letter begins as an intimate billet-doux. ‘Oh Harry, my own precious darling, your letter today is one long yearning cry for your little love.’ But within a few lines, a more sinister story begins to emerge. ‘Yesterday, I administered the powder you left me . . ....
It’s one of history’s greatest myths: Napoleon Bonaparte was short. This is not quite true. In 1815 an English captain described him as “a remarkably strong, well-built man, about five feet seven inches high”. He was above average height of the time, and would have...
Colonialism: a Moral Reckoning contains a lot of history. If it does nothing else, I hope it will inform Britons, young and old, of the whole truth about our three-hundred-year career of imperial endeavour all over the world. For it tells not only of the tragic,...
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....
