The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
It is generally accepted that the European Renaissance began in Italy. However, as this developed south of the Alps a historical transformation of similar magnitude began taking place in northern Europe. This ‘Other Renaissance’ was initially centred on the city of...
The Slipperiness of History I was really interested to read recently that the coded letters of Mary Queen of Scots have been deciphered by modern computer scientists and decoders. Undoubtedly this will give us hitherto unknown insights into what we know about her and...
Vesuvius in the Age of Revolution Volcanic is the first and only book I have written not focused on Britain, the only one that concerns the history of science, and the only one centred on Italy. So why the departure, the urge to explore something new? Restlessness...
Deborah, congratulations on The Fortune Keeper. What drew you to Renaissance Italy? I’ve always been fascinated by Renaissance art and science and its effect on cultural life. In these novels I explore the artist Bernini and the legacy of Galileo Galilei as well as...
Inside A Renaissance Painter’s Studio In 1510, the year in which my new novel The Colour Storm is set, nearly every great painter of the age was actively at work. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Bellini, Titian, Raphael, Dürer, Hieronymous Bosch and, the principal of my...
As soon as I picked up this book I knew it was a brilliant idea, and wondered why no-one had thought to do it before. The answer lies in the book itself, which is that the amount of research taken is enormous. Writing as an amateur, and not a historian, it is a...
My novel, The Clockwork Girl, was inspired partly by the real scandal of the vanishing children of Paris. In my book, I worked largely with the urban legends that sprang up around the scandal. But what, in fact, really happened? Rumours and leprous princes In the cold...
There is much legend associated with her life as a poisoner, and like all novelists do, I have taken the aspects of the story I liked best, and used a combination or research and imagination to fill the gaps. For the most succinct and detailed analysis of the real...
The Italian proverb ‘Old sins have long shadows’ is tactfully used at the beginning of Deborah Swift’s sequel The Silkworm Keeper. Where Swift’s first book in the series, The Poison Keeper, exhibits the nefarious activities of poisoner Giuila Tofana, the sequel sees...
On December 9th 2020, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech to the Federal Parliament: ‘I believe in the power of the Enlightenment.’ She said, ‘If Europe is what it is, it must thank the Enlightenment and the idea thereby derived that there is a...
