The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
London: Origins of a Modern City If there ever was a revolution in 17th century Britain, it did not occur on the battlefields of the 1640s between the forces of the Royalists and the Parliamentarians. It was a slower, more evolutionary transformation that spanned a...
Nadine Akkerman, when first approaching this project, what was your understanding of Elizabeth Stuart and what, as a biographer, drew you to her? My first tussle with Elizabeth Stuart came about when I heard of her love for the theatre – I teach English literature,...
Women's Football and the First World War December 5 2021 marks the 100-year anniversary of women’s football being effectively banned by the FA and it’s progress set back by decades. The ban was finally formally lifted 50 years later in 1971. Although there had been a...
Starting to write a new novel is both an overwhelming and, contrarily, exciting experience for me as I never know which path the book will take me. In my latest novel, The Orphan’s Secret, Lily Armstrong, enlists in the Women’s Timber Corps – something of which I had...
The love stories of the Tudors have been fodder for historical fiction for centuries. Few do not know the stories of Henry VIII’s wives, Mary I’s marriage to Philip of Spain, and Queen Elizabeth’s array of courtships and succession of favourites. One might be forgiven...
A scandal of such allure that the House of Lords, the judicial system, the British press and London society ignored a turning point in the American War of Independence, possibly the last moment peace might have broken out: this was the trial for bigamy of Elizabeth...
When the Nightingale Sings In 1930s London, by pure chance, Judy Morgan meets Hedwig Kiesler. Judy Morgan has just finished her studies of Physics at Cambridge University. Hedwig Kiesler has just left her beloved home in Austria to escape from her ex-husband. Hedwig...
When the Nightingale Sings is a novel based on the true story of Joan Curran, a Welsh physicist, and Hedy Lamarr, a Hollywood movie star whose scientific contributions changed the course of history and World War Two. Joan Curran (represented in the story as the...
What do you do if you’re an uneducated 20-year-old Victorian woman, married to an unimpressive man, with two children but still living with your Mum, the threat of the workhouse ever looming? This was the life of Emily Soldene when she read a glowing review of the...
There are iconic images of the end of the Second World War: the Soviet army reclaiming the Reichstag; jubilant sailors embracing their girls; women paraded semi-naked, heads shaved, a placard of shame around their necks. These were the ‘horizontal collaborators,’ the...
