I should begin with an admission. I’m not a great fan of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels. To me, they are tediously long and too self-consciously ‘literary’. One of the most telling remarks made about them recently was that of the eminent Tudor historian, Diarmaid MacCulloch, whose eagerly-awaited biography of Thomas Cromwell will no doubt become […]
Reviews
Looking for your next read? HWA members review the best new historical writing, recommend their desert island books and revisit some old favourites.
Ancient World Roundup
The King and the Slave – Tim Leach (Atlantic Books) Following on from the magnificent The Last King of Lydia, The King and the Slave isn’t so much a sequel as a depiction of another phase in the life of Croesus, once the King of Lydia, the richest king of them all and now reduced to […]
Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans
I’ve never knowingly seen in action how a book becomes a word-of-mouth best-seller – the dream of all writers whose books are not (yet) advertised on 10-foot-high billboards by their publishers. So I was intrigued when I first became aware of the insistent whispering and tweeting about Lissa Evans’ Second World War novel, Crooked Heart. […]
Manda Scott watches Peaky Blinders
Warning: contains spoilers! If you’re old enough to remember Last of the Mohicans – the first, amazing, black-and-white-but-blood-red-scarlet-on-the-inside, Philip Madoc version in which he learned the Mohawk language to play the part, not the ghastly, plastic Daniel Day Lewis vehicle – will know that once in a while, the BBC steps beyond its comfort zone […]
Historical Crime Roundup
Since I told our esteemed editors that I’d do a round up of some of the recent crime fiction published by HWA members, I’ve become overexcited and overwhelmed by the number of superb books that have published this year. It has, at least, made my Christmas shopping a bit easier, but my kindle has overloaded, […]
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters
Eagerly awaited, Sarah Waters’ latest novel The Paying Guests does not disappoint. Fans of Waters have come to expect her tight and ingenious plotting, meticulous period scene setting and vividly distinctive use of language: who but she would describe the sound of a dripping tap as making, ‘the occasional echoey plink of drips,’ or the eyes of […]
