On the island of Jamaica in 1772, people have started disappearing without trace. Have they run away, trying to start new lives in the British colony under assumed names, or is something darker afoot? Some of the missing had taken out large life insurance policies before leaving England, and so word of the vanishings reaches […]
The Art of a Lie by Laura Shepherd-Robinson
It’s London in 1749, and following the murder of her husband in a violent street robbery, Hannah Cole is struggling to keep her head above water. The Punchbowl and Pineapple, her confectionary shop on Piccadilly, is barely turning a profit, and her suppliers are conspiring to put her out of business. So when she learns […]
The Scot who was the Caribbean’s first serial killer
PD Lennon was intrigued to learn that there was a place in Jamaica called Edinburgh Castle. But she couldn’t have guessed the person who built it was an 18th-century Scot who’s remembered as the Caribbean’s first serial killer. She tells Historia about her research and how she blended fact and fiction for her new novel, […]
Politics and the Grand Tour: the Jacobite threat
For wealthy young British men in the 18th century, travelling around Europe was not always just about education, culture, and adventure. Politics — sometimes quite dangerous politics involving a threat to the established order in Britain — were a draw as well. Dr Jérémy Filet, author of The Jacobites and the Grand Tour, explains. Art, […]
A Thief’s Blood by Douglas Skelton
A family is found butchered in a dismal room in the Rookery, London’s poorest district. Not even their small children are left alive. Most of the authorities pay scant attention, except for Thieftaker General Jonathan Wild. Intrigued by this development, Colonel Nathaniel Charters tasks his most trusted operative, Jonas Flynt, with discovering why. When another […]
The Tiger and the Thief by Griff Hosker
Although he’s now hidden in a company of East India soldiers, Bill ‘Smudger’ Smith still harbours an intention to escape. These plans are put on hold, however, when his former life as a wharf rat comes back to haunt him. Bill is a skilled thief with a sharp talent for deception. When the Company needs […]
A Woman of Opinion by Sean Lusk
Mary longs for adventure, freedom and love. When her powerful father schemes to marry her off to a foolish aristocrat, she has to find a man who will offer her the independence she craves. Never one to fear a scandal, she elopes with Edward Wortley Montagu. Mary uses her charm and connections to live a […]
The Jacobites and the Grand Tour by Jérémy Filet
In the first monograph to fully examine the intersecting networks of Jacobites and travellers to the continent, Filet considers how small states used official diplomacy and deployed soft power — embodied by educational academies — to achieve foreign policy goals. This work uses little-known archival materials to explain how and why certain small states secretly […]