The historian Diana Preston travelled around the world to retrace Charles Darwin’s momentous voyage aboard the HMS Beagle for her new book, The Evolution of Charles Darwin. She tells Historia about her own voyage of discovery in his wake. After months of planning, I finally arrived on the densely-forested island of Chiloe, off Chile’s south-western […]
Finding empathy – the complexities of writing Robert Clive
How can an author find empathy in a historical figure who is necessary to their story, but whose ‘dark character’ we look back on with distaste? Diana Preston tells Historia how she found a way to write about Robert Clive ‘of India’ in all his complexity. The decision to write a novel centring on Robert […]
Mutiny on the Bounty
Diana Preston on the real history behind the infamous mutiny on the Bounty. ‘Know then, my own dear Betsy, I have lost the Bounty… On the twenty-eighth of April at daylight in the morning, Christian…with several others came into my cabin while I was asleep, and seizing me, holding naked bayonets at my breast, tied […]