At first it seems a strange title. “They shall grow not old” is from Laurence Binyon’s epitaph on The Fallen of World War I, but the emphasis in Peter Jackson’s masterly film is firmly on those who survived it: the men who enlisted and went out to France, but lived and came home to tell […]
Review: Outlaw King
Netflix’s latest foray into original drama shines a spotlight on three crucial years (1304-1307) in the life of Robert the Bruce, the king who would eventually win independence for Scotland at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. We first meet Bruce two years before his 1306 coronation as he surrenders to King Edward I at […]
Review: The Little Stranger
1947. A young Doctor Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) visits the ramshackle Hundreds Hall to attend to a servant girl who is claiming to be ill. However, strange things are afoot and Faraday soon becomes embroiled in the closed off world of the Ayres family that live there: the stern-faced matriarch; Roderick, a disfigured war veteran; and […]
What counts as historical fiction?
Our resident agony aunt, Dr Darwin, answers a common question: what counts as historical fiction? Dear Dr Darwin, I told my grandmother that I was writing a historical novel set in the Liverpool of the early Beatles, and she laughed so hard she nearly fell off her motorbike. I told my brother the Beatles weren’t […]
How do you research historical fiction?
Our resident agony aunt, Dr Darwin, answers a common question – how do you research historical fiction? Dear Dr Darwin, Everyone says “research till your eyes bleed” – you did in your post about cultural appropriation – but when I Google, all I can find is the information I know already, repeated in a million […]
Are there multicultural boundaries we must not cross in historical fiction?
Dear Dr Darwin, I’m working on a script that begins during the 1830’s. The central character is a fictional young Black teen, and two major characters are actual historical figures: a young Native American warrior and a mixed-blood warrior; the true purpose of the script is to tell their fascinating story. I, however, am White. […]
Review: Civilisations
Civilisations (Episode 1, BBC2 Thursday 1st March, 9:00pm) is about history in two senses. On the one hand there is the story of the hard-to-define stuff we call civilisation, now quite rightly pluralised to include other cultures, on the other there is the history of television itself. It is nearly fifty years since Kenneth Clark […]
Review: Britannia, Episode 1
We’ve all been waiting to devour Britannia, we history buffs, just as the Romans did nearly 2000 years ago. Where Julius Caesar turned and ran, Aulus Plautius returns, nine decades later, in AD 43, brimming with bravado. ‘I am lucky,’ he tells his second-in-command, the wonderfully named Perfectus, vowing to succeed where Caesar had failed. […]