The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
In my life today I have no servants living in my house. The work done by servants in previous centuries is now done by machines, or automation has rendered it unnecessary. For a historical fiction writer the presence of servants in the house is a massive opportunity...
The concept of dieting would have been alien to our 17th century forbears. In those days, the plumper you were, the better. Plumpness indicated wealth and class, and women aspired to be plump and white, rather than thin and tanned as is the fashion now. The 17th...
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On 30th January 1649 parliament cut off Charles I’s head. A year later the ‘king’s crown’, dating from the early Tudors, was ‘totally broken and defaced’. Charles’s father King James had called it ‘the symbol of a people’s love’. Parliament valued it at £1,100. The...
In the early hours of 11th January 1645, King Charles I’s soldiers shadowed Abingdon, led by his nephew Prince Rupert. In the endgame of the English Civil War, the town had become a symbolic milestone; to finally capture it would resuscitate the royalist cause after a...
What prompted you to choose the period that you wrote your first book in? I’d always had a love of history, but my fascination with the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (or British Civil Wars) was sparked when I was 10 years old and my parents took me to Helmsley Castle,...
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Fiction and other works of imagination have an insidious way of working their way into history. Stories that ring true, that look true, that appeal of our prejudices, become ‘fact’. I have uncovered several examples of this form of historical truthiness in which...
The common phrase is that history is written by the victors. Do you think this is true? Yes it is true, and it is one reason why a subject is worth returning to again and again. Each generation brings new insights to the past – or at least they should! It amazes me...
10 Minute Tudors Leanda's series of 10 minute podcasts on: Soundcloud or Podbean
