Jemahl Evans, author of the Blandford Candy series of novels about a man known as the last Roundhead, surveys 300 years of fiction about the English Civil Wars. The popularity of the English Civil Wars and the wider 17th century as a period for historical fiction novelists has ebbed and flowed over the last 300 […]
Review: A Night of Flames by Matthew Harffy
Jemahl Evans reviews Matthew Harffy’s A Night of Flames, set in Northumbria and Norway in the late 8th century, and finds it rich with “humour and heartbreak, and a plot which rattles along at a breathless pace”. I am always chuffed when I get one of Matthew Harffy’s books to review. A Night of Flames […]
Stealing the secret of silk: the first international industrial spies?
Into the crisis-ridden Eastern Roman Empire of the 6th century two monks arrived with an audacious plan: to steal the secret of silk production from China. Why was this idea so important to Emperor Justinian? Jemahl Evans, author of The Charioteer, unravels what may have been the first recorded case of international industrial espionage in […]
Reinventing Thomas Becket
Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was assassinated on 29 December, 1170. He was almost immediately venerated as a martyr and, on 21 February, 1173, Pope Alexander III canonised him. From turbulent priest to Chaucer’s “holy blissful martir”, “stubborn man” to counter-culture agitator, Becket has been reinterpreted over the centuries to suit the purposes of the […]
Merkins and masochists: a brief history of sex
Sex was just as naughty and inventive in previous centuries as in our lifetimes, despite our perceptions of the past as often prudish, writes author Jemahl Evans. It’s just public attitudes that have changed
Review: Storm of Steel by Matthew Harffy
It’s been an exciting few days for readers of Matthew Harffy’s Bernicia Chronicles, his series set in 7th-century Britain. The fourth book, Killer of Kings, came out in paperback on 2 May, 2019, the same day that its sequel, Warrior of Woden, was published. A week later, Beobrand returns in a “stunning new instalment”, Storm […]
Mr Beeston and the Cockpit
Jemahl Evans brings us a brief history of London’s first West End theatre. The Cockpit Theatre in Drury Lane was initially, as its name suggests, a venue for cockfights and animal baiting on the east side of Drury Lane with an entrance in Cockpit Alley. As such it was the first playhouse in the West […]