Gill Paul, herself a bestselling author, looks at how top-selling books mirrored the times they were published in. They weren’t only contemporary, either; historical fiction and fantasy are high on the list, perhaps not surprisingly to those who know the genres. Gill’s latest novel, Scandalous Women, is about the authors of two of these bestsellers. […]
Businesswomen through the ages
Gill Paul writes about some of the businesswomen who defied convention and restrictive laws to become successful entrepreneurs through the ages, including the wealthiest woman in early New York; the painter Hogarth’s sisters; the inventor of a baby-making vegetable compound; the African-American who became the first self-made female millionaire in the US; and the rivals […]
The Twenties, then and now
The Twenties opened with a worldwide epidemic, followed by profound social change: a shift in working practices, new technologies, more rights and freedoms for women, an obsession with celebrities, rising inflation. Gill Paul, whose new book, The Manhattan Girls, is set in 1920s New York, looks back 100 years and wonders how similar our world […]
The politics of Tutankhamun’s tomb
Nearly a century after the excavations at Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, we are coming to regard the finders, keepers attitude towards ancient objects in countries other than our own as (at least) problematic. No such hesitation troubled Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter at the time, though the discovery would […]
My problems writing about Jackie Kennedy and Maria Callas
Writing historical fiction about famous 20th-century people may mean that there are more records to draw on than are available for previous centuries. But it brings its own set of problems, as author Gill Paul found while working on her latest novel, The Second Marriage. Biographical novels have long been a popular form of historical […]
Review: The Last Czars
Gill Paul, author of two novels about the Romanovs, reviews the Netflix series The Last Czars for Historia
Stockholm Syndrome in Ekaterinburg?
In April 1918, the former Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and their children were moved by their Bolshevik captors to a house in Ekaterinburg, owned by a merchant called Ipatiev. Three weeks later, the rest of the family followed. They would never again set foot outside its confines. The building was surrounded by a […]