The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
CVHF 2023: Day 2 The Blazing World: A New History Of Revolutionary England - Jonathan Healey Revolutionary Spring: Fighting For A New World 1848 – 1849 - Christopher Clark With Tom Holland Living In The Third Reich - Julia Boyd & Martin Davidson Middling sorts...
CVHF 2023: Day 1 Ashes Heroes - Mike Brearley, Gideon Haigh, Simon Hughes The Ship beneath the Ice, The Discovery of Shackleton’s Endurance – Mensun Bound How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks – Adam Nicolson Bazball This year’s opener was a crowd-pleaser, the...
This book has such a level of coherence and insight that it will be read in a single session. Any book that manages to encompass the notion of L. P. Hartley that ‘the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’; Voltaire’s observation on the execution...
Soldiers: Great Stories of War & Peace Most civilians have no idea how soldiers think, how they react or what motivates them, while journalists are constrained by deadlines and column inches and find it difficult to expand when presented with the broader canvas of...
Food & Class Is it true that pineapples were so fashionable and expensive that they were hired out for Victorian parties? Alexis Soyer, the celebrity chef and philanthropist of Victorian London, delighted in retailing a rumour that the same “pine” was spotted...
When writing The Secrets of Hartwood Hall, I wanted to look at the position of women within the Victorian period – and I wanted to focus on the women who didn’t quite fit in to. the social structure. I gave my protagonist, Margaret Lennox, two roles that place her in...
Thomas Harding White Debt focuses on the vital case of the Demerara Uprising in 1823, Guyana, which has been largely underrepresented in historiography. Told from the viewpoint of four very different, but essential protagonists in the Demerara Uprising, Harding’s...
David Cairns’ latest novel The Case of Emigrant Niece is bursting with mystery, action, and adventure told through the eyes of protagonist Major Findo Gask. This novel dives into the changing world of the nineteenth century of upheaval, exploration and war filled with...
The novel centres around the gold rush era in Australia – what inspired you to write about this time period? My first novel came about because I was researching my Australian wife’s forbears who were transported to Van Diemen’s Land in the 1830s. Once they had served...
Charles Dickens and Charity: The most perplexing female I have ever encountered… In the research for my novels featuring Dickens as an amateur detective, I frequently turn to the Pilgrim Edition of the letters. The footnotes provide all kinds of fascinating detail for...
