Alec Marsh writes about the licensed brothels used by British troops in France during the First World War. They’re part of the background to his new novel, Cut and Run. One of the surprising and little known things about the Great War was the involvement, to a degree at least, of the British state in […]
The window-smashing suffragettes of 1912
Jennifer Godfrey writes about some of the suffragettes involved in the window smashing campaign in 1912, and the careful planning that went into their latest mission. In June and July 1912, 112 years ago, suffragette prisoners were being released from prison having served time for window smashing. Some had completed their full sentence but others […]
The lost cities of Berlin
Berlin is a city Catherine Hokin knows well. It’s the setting for many of her novels. But it’s a city that’s always changing, even though it’s soaked through with history, and there have been many Berlins, some only imagined. Here, Catherine goes in search of the lost cities of Berlin. When I first developed the […]
The Night in Venice by AJ Martin
Venice, 1911. Monica is a 14-year-old with a wild imagination and an unbearably dull governess named Rose Driscoll. She was supposed to be entering the most exciting time of her life but, with her parents and uncle now dead, she has been forced to leave leafy Hampstead and move to a flat on the busy […]
The Royal Station Master’s Daughters in Love by Ellee Seymour
Norfolk, 1919 and the war is over, but the effects of it are ever-present in the village of Wolferton. At just two miles from Sandringham House, the private residence of British monarchs, the people of Wolferton have a special connection to the royals — particularly the family of the royal station master, Harry Saward. But […]
The Paris Peacemakers by Flora Johnston
As the fragile negotiations of the international Peace Conference get underway, typist Stella Rutherford throws herself into her work and the mixture of glamour and devastation the City of Light reveals. Anything to escape the grief coming in waves for her beloved brother Jack. Her sister Corran is about to put her academic career to […]
Secret Missions of the Suffragettes by Jennifer Godfrey
Over two evenings in March 1912, more than 250 women – old and young, rich and poor, strong and delicate – were arrested and charged with using hammers and stones to smash the windows of shops and offices across London. The youngest amongst them was 19-year-old teenager glass-breaker and Kent working maid, Ethel Violet Baldock, […]
The Artist’s Wife by Clare Flynn
July, 1914, and in their sunlit Hampshire workshop, Alice Dalton mixes paints for the stained-glass artwork she and Edmund are working on, pausing only to joyfully cradle the soft swell of her stomach. But the looming war threatens her hard-won happiness. A knock at the door announces the arrival of Victor, her estranged brother, returning […]