Linda Porter reviews a new and timely book about the later Stuart queens. This is an important and interesting collection of essays, she says — but how many will be able to afford to read it? Historia readers may be taken aback by a review of a book with the eye-watering price of more than […]
Disobedient by Elizabeth Fremantle
Rome in 1611 is a jewel-bright place of change, with sumptuous new palaces and lavish wealth on display. A city where women are seen but not heard. Artemisia Gentileschi dreams of becoming a great artist. Motherless, she grows up among a family of painters — men and boys. She knows she is more talented than […]
Disobedient by Elizabeth Fremantle
Rome in 1611 is a jewel-bright place of change, with sumptuous new palaces and lavish wealth on display. A city where women are seen but not heard. Artemisia Gentileschi dreams of becoming a great artist. Motherless, she grows up among a family of painters — men and boys. She knows she is more talented than […]
The Flames by Sophie Haydock
A new century is dawning. Vienna in 1912 is at its zenith, an opulent, extravagant city teeming with art, music and radical ideas. It is a place where anything seems possible… Edith and Adele are sisters, the daughters of a wealthy bourgeois family. They are expected to follow the rules, to marry well, and produce […]
Hogarth’s Britons by Jacqueline Riding
Hogarth’s Britons explores how the English painter and graphic satirist William Hogarth (1697–1764) set out to define British nationhood and identity at a time of division at home and conflict abroad. With notions of community cohesion, good citizenship and patriotism, wrapped up in a unifying idea of British national character and spirit in all its […]
National Treasures by Caroline Shenton
As Hitler prepared to invade Poland during the sweltering summer of 1939, men and women from across London’s museums, galleries and archives formulated ingenious plans to send the nation’s highest prized objects to safety. Using stately homes, tube tunnels, slate mines, castles, prisons, stone quarries and even their own homes, a dedicated bunch of unlikely […]
Hogarth: Life in Progress by Jacqueline Riding
On a late spring night in 1732, a boisterous group of friends set out from their local pub. They are beginning a journey, a ‘peregrination’ that will take them through the gritty streets of Georgian London and along the River Thames as far as the Isle of Sheppey. And among them is an up-and-coming engraver […]
Discovering Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s porcelain
What does a biographer do when they learn something new about their subject after their book has been published? This happened to Jo Willett, author of The Pioneering Life of Mary Wortley Montagu, when she found out about some porcelain linked with the 18th-century smallpox inoculation pioneer. We’re delighted that Jo is sharing her discovery […]