The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Members Behaving Badly by Debbie Kilroy is an alternative history of the nation as seen through the stories of fifty-two rogue MPs who served in the House of Commons between 1603 and 1945. It’s an interesting framework and a clever idea. Research suggests that trust...
Hello Debbie. Members of Parliament behaving badly is a particularly fruitful topic these days! What was it that led you to write about these historical rogues? I was researching an academic paper looking at MPs in James I’s first English parliament, to see if you...
In the introduction to Lest We Forget, Tessa Dunlop writes: “Monuments and statues are inanimate, static entities that depend on their relationship with human beings for relevance and agency.” This statement goes to the heart of this brilliant book. Each monument is...
On the 13th November 1715, two battles took place concurrently on British soil. The first, at Sherrifmuir in Scotland, saw John Erskine, 6th Earl of Mar, with a Jacobite army of 12,000 men engage with a far smaller government force under the 2nd Duke of Argyll. After...
If a hero is a person who is greatly admired for their courage, outstanding achievements or noble qualities, then the phrase “folk hero” has a slightly different emphasis. A folk hero is someone who is popular with and respected particularly by the ordinary people....
Those readers of the same vintage as I am may remember Dick Barton, Special Agent, the television programme at least, if not the original radio series. The iconic music from that series was playing in my head whilst I was reading Alec Marsh’s Ghosts of the West,...
As Tessa Dunlop says in her introduction, when she began to write Elizabeth and Philip, she did not expect the story to end so definitively with Queen Elizabeth’s death, despite her great age. The monarch had lost her husband of seventy-three years in 2021; he had...
The Winter Garden is a historical fiction time-slip novel, exploring the Gunpowder Plot as it has never been done before. Unravelling the myths, legends and stories we know about the events of 1605, Nicola Cornick brings to life the people behind our modern-day...
This is your second novel of the Tudor era, what is it about the Tudors do you think fascinates us so much today? Nicola Cornick I think there are a number of reasons why people are fascinated by the Tudor era. Firstly it’s a period of history that’s very familiar to...
Nicola Cornick effortlessly blends historical fiction with mystery-writing in her latest dual-time novel, The Last Daughter. An international bestselling author renowned for her time-slip mysteries, Cornick interweaves the 15th century with the present day to create a...
