It’s time for Historia’s summer reading suggestions. We asked 12 historical writers to each recommend two books for history lovers, fiction or non-fiction, which stood out for them recently. Whether you’re going overseas for the first time this decade or relaxing at home, we hope you enjoy our picks! Jean Fullerton My first must-read is The […]
Widows of the Ice by Anne Fletcher
As Captain Scott lay freezing and starving to death on his return journey from the South Pole, he wrote with a stub of pencil his final words: ‘For God’s sake look after our people.’ Uppermost in his mind were the three women who would now be widows: Kathleen, his own bohemian artist wife; Oriana, the […]
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 […]
Elizabethan Secret Agent: The Untold Story of William Ashby by Timothy Ashby
This is the biography of William Ashby, Elizabethan intelligence agent and diplomat who served as ambassador to Scotland during the Spanish Armada crisis. It provides a fresh social, political and foreign policy insight from the perspective of a gentleman spy who took part in some of the most important events of his time. Much of […]
Damned Souls: an aristocratic Victorian scandal
Among the late 19th-century circle of aristocratic artists and wits known as the Souls, adulterous affairs were accepted. But when a relationship between two unmarried Souls resulted in a pregnancy, the scandal that followed threatened to destroy careers and exposed the group’s conventionality. Jane Dismore’s latest book tells their story. It was not until she […]
Tangled Souls: Love and Scandal among the Victorian Aristocracy by Jane Dismore
Outrageously handsome, witty and clever, Harry Cust was reputed to be one of the great womanisers of the late Victorian era. In 1893, while a Member of Parliament, he caused public scandal by his affair with artist and poet Nina Welby Gregory. When she revealed she was pregnant, horror swept through their circle known as […]
Historical books to look out for in 2022
Our popular annual list of books to look out for during the year is back for 2022, with history, biography and historical fiction. Here are books to read from HWA authors covering eras from Ancient Rome to the 1980s and sweeping across continents from China to Russia and India, the USA to Australia and the […]
Erich Karl, one of the first children saved
Clare Mulley, the award-winning historian and broadcaster, tells Historia about some astonishing news which led her to speak to one of the first child survivors of World War One who was helped, over a century ago, by the newly-formed Save the Children. History often holds remarkable surprises, but only rarely does it seem to circle […]