Windsor, England, 2019, and Amelia Prentice is recovering from the worst two years of her life. First her daughter and then her parents have died, leaving her without any surviving relatives. As she gets ready to put the family home, a vast Victorian house in Windsor, on the market, she fulfils her mother’s last request […]
The true story of the man who broke the Monte Carlo bank: Joseph Hobson Jagger
When historian Anne Fletcher started looking into a family story about her great-great-great uncle, Joseph Hobson Jagger – that he’d gone from working in a Bradford woollen mill to breaking the bank at Monte Carlo – she found little evidence to back up the claim. But after ten years of research, she uncovered the true […]
From the Mill to Monte Carlo by Anne Fletcher
Among the men ‘who broke the bank at Monte Carlo’, Joseph Hobson Jagger is unique. He is the only one known to have devised an infallible and completely legal system to defeat the odds at roulette and win a fortune. But he was not what might be expected. He wasn’t a gentleman or an aristocrat, […]
The White Rajah by Tom Williams
When James Brooke arrives in Borneo on the schooner ‘Royalist’, he plans to make a quick profit trading with the natives. Instead he finds himself taking sides in a civil war. And when his side wins, he ends up the ruler of his own country. As the first White Rajah of Sarawak, Brooke is determined […]
Circus of Wonders by Elizabeth Macneal
It’s 1866. In a coastal village in southern England, Nell picks violets for a living. Set apart by her community because of the birthmarks that speckle her skin, Nell’s world is her beloved brother and devotion to the sea. But when Jasper Jupiter’s Circus of Wonders arrives in the village, Nell is kidnapped. Her father […]
The death of honour: duelling’s last hurrah
The slap of the glove, the demand for satisfaction, pistols at dawn; duelling is a familiar ritual to anyone who has read historical writing set in Europe from the Early Modern period onward. The duel as a gentlemanly way to settle matters of honour survived many attempts to suppress it over the centuries; but what […]
Why I wrote about Irish history
Tom Williams’s Burke series of novels set during the Napoleonic Wars takes the spy James Burke across continents as he pursues adventure, love – and the French. But when it came to sending his character, a historical figure born in Ireland, back to his native land, Tom found himself asking: why write about Irish history? […]
The Year Without Summer – fact, fiction and the climate crisis today
Author Guinevere Glasfurd tells Historia how a local news story showed her the way to write her sweeping climate change novel, The Year Without Summer, which was shortlisted for the HWA Gold Crown Award in 2020. Up until a couple of years ago, the impacts of climate change often seemed abstract, forever far away; set […]