We last saw Ross Poldark (Aiden Turner) atop a windswept cliff, arrested for looting a wrecked ship, inciting a riot and murdering his rival’s cousin. Season two opens without missing a beat (there’s a story so far preview available on BBC iPlayer if you want to jog your memory) as Ross is dragged away from […]
Historia Interviews: Antonia Hodgson
Antonia Hodgson’s new novel, A Death at Fountains Abbey, is released on 25 August. Continuing the award-winning Thomas Hawkins series (The Devil in the Marshalsea, The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins) the book finds our eponymous hero blackmailed into investigating a murder threat, forced to leave London for Yorkshire, where he must hunt down those responsible or lose […]
Historia Interviews: Hallie Rubenhold
Billed as the raunchiest costume drama of the year, The Scandalous Lady W caught the nation’s attention when it aired on BBC Two in August this year. Based on the book Lady Worsley’s Whim by HWA’s own Hallie Rubenhold, the true story of the Worsleys’ calamitous marriage and subsequent court trial was one of the […]
Farinelli and the King, Duke of York Theatre
It’s fair to say that a year ago a lot of people had not heard of Mark Rylance. He is one of our greatest actors and yet, until recently, he’s flown under the radar, largely keeping himself to one of the less commercial corners of British culture – the floorboards of ‘serious’ theatre. This all […]
Curating History
Earlier this year I visited a fascinating exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Treasured Possessions was a history of items that our forebears – rich and poor – kept in their homes or close to their bodies. Put more simply, it was a history of ‘stuff’, and it was brilliantly done. From tableware to […]
A Plea Not to be Forgotten
This copper penny was created by a British convict sentenced to transportation to ‘the ends of the earth’, as Australia was described in the eighteenth century. It’s motto reads, ‘When On this Peice you Cast an Eye, THINK ON THE MAN THAT is NOT NIGH’. On its reverse are the initials of an unknown convict, […]
Rake, Whores and Highwaymen
Every generation likes to think it invented sex. After all, the alternative is to accept your parents were at it, which is unthinkable. But attitudes towards sex – how we talk about it, how open and relaxed we are about it – do fluctuate. You can’t track a straight, progressive line from year zero to […]