Kate Griffin writes about discovering the history of the St Giles rookery, London’s most notorious slum and the backdrop to her new book. Why was the area left in a state of shocking poverty for two centuries? Because of its geography, and financial expedience, she found. Hogarth’s famous 1751 depiction of Gin Lane with its […]
Unboxing Pandora’s myth – in Georgian London
Susan Stokes-Chapman, author of Pandora, tells Historia why the Regency period is the perfect era for a retelling of a Greek myth – and how she went about unboxing it for her debut novel. As someone whose knowledge of Greek mythology went no farther than one module on the subject at university in 2004, I’m […]
Historia Interviews: Antonia Hodgson
Antonia Hodgson’s new novel, A Death at Fountains Abbey, is released on 25 August. Continuing the award-winning Thomas Hawkins series (The Devil in the Marshalsea, The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins) the book finds our eponymous hero blackmailed into investigating a murder threat, forced to leave London for Yorkshire, where he must hunt down those responsible or lose […]