Gone with the Wind, the book, celebrates its 80th anniversary this year. What’s so astonishing about this, besides the fact that by it’s 75th anniversary more than 30 million copies of the Pulitzer Prize winner had been printed worldwide, is that heroine, Scarlett O Hara, is so thoroughly modern. Her refusal to take no for […]
Reviews
Looking for your next read? HWA members review the best new historical writing, recommend their desert island books and revisit some old favourites.
The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses
William Shakespeare might have been the world’s greatest playwright but he was not the world’s greatest historian, so it would be a mistake to watch this adaptation of Henry VI Parts I, II & III and Richard III in order to discover exactly what went on in the Wars of the Roses. Shakespeare wrote to […]
Versailles: Gripping Drama or a Hall of Mirrors?
Versailles (BBC2, 1 June) follows, over 10 weeks, the transformation of Louis XIV (George Blagden) from weak king in a troubled realm to one of history’s top despots and seventeenth-century style icon. The first episode sees Louis making the key decision to move France’s entire machinery of the government to his father’s old hunting lodge […]
Desert Island Books: Harry Sidebottom
Harry Sidebottom picks his top five historical novels for castaways. Alfred Duggan, Family Favourites (1960) As a boy I got into historical fiction through the novels of Alfred Duggan, as well as those of Graham Shelby, George Shipway, R. F. Tapsell, and Wallace Breem. I have chosen Duggan’s Family Favourites, not only because it is a […]
The Girl in the Glass Tower by Elizabeth Fremantle
The Girl in the Glass Tower is the fourth novel from acclaimed historical fiction author Elizabeth Fremantle and continues her exploration of, in her words, ‘the invisibility of early modern women’s lives’ with perhaps her most challenging character. Lady Arbella Stuart was the great-granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret Tudor and niece to Mary Queen […]
Hooked on History: Andrew Taylor
Novelist Andrew Taylor explores the childhood favourites that made him the writer he is today. I have a theory that childhood reading maketh the man or woman. A few of the books I read and re-read as a child and young teenager survived the Stalinist purges of later adolescence and young adulthood. These are the books […]
Desert Island Books: Lloyd Shepherd
The brief is this: which five books would you take with you on a desert island? Five seems unnecessarily cruel, when the radio wallahs decreed eight songs, but a book takes up more space in your head than a song (he claims, controversially), so I suppose this is fair. How to choose? I need things […]
The Ashes of London by Andrew Taylor
Andrew Taylor is the award-winning and best-selling crime fiction author of, perhaps most notably, the Lydmouth series, but he has proved equally skilful at finely wrought, and solidly researched historical fiction, including the 2003 bestseller The American Boy, an unforgettable mystery set in London during the childhood of Edgar Allan Poe. In The Ashes of […]