Louise Morrish looks at two courageous women who defied the authorities and went on the warpath during the First World War: one, literally, as a soldier, and one as a doctor. Louisa Garrett Anderson and Dorothy Lawrence inspired her new book, Women of War. In 1914, a surgeon and a soldier went to war — […]
Holbein: The Ambassadors by Tracy Borman
Holbein’s The Ambassadors is one of the most famous paintings in the National Gallery. It is also one of the most intriguing. Laden with hidden symbols and mysteries, the work has been the subject of intense debate among historians during the five centuries since it was created. Tracy Borman’s book unpicks the secrets of this enigmatic artwork, […]
Lady Dorothy Mills, explorer and writer
She was a pioneering explorer, a travel writer writer and novelist, an earl’s daughter who reinvented herself, a woman with a drive to “be something”. So why haven’t more of us heard of Lady Dorothy Mills? Her biographer, Jane Dismore, aims to change that. When Lady Dorothy ‘Dolly’ Mills was a young girl, a female […]
No Country For a Woman by Jane Dismore
Lady Dorothy ‘Dolly’ Mills was a trailblazer, whose larger-than-life personality led her to extraordinary adventures. Born in 1889 into the Walpole family, who were eminent in political and literary spheres, Dolly defied the constraints of her upper-class upbringing by marrying a poor army captain, prompting her disinheritance. From becoming the first English woman in Timbuktu […]
Lionessheart by Catherine Hanley
Richard the Lionheart travelled to far-flung realms, went on crusade, met kings and popes, and exerted a great deal of influence on the world around him… And so did his sister. The sons of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine have been the subject of much historical attention, but their daughters have been curiously overlooked. […]
Joanna Plantagenet, the lionhearted woman
Joanna Plantagenet, Queen of Sicily, later Countess of Toulouse, was every bit as lionhearted as her more famous brother Richard I. As her biographer, Catherine Hanley, says, she “led an extraordinary life full of adventure and danger”, the more so because she was a woman. Joanna’s eventful life also illustrates many of the major issues […]
Agent Zo by Clare Mulley
This is the incredible true story of Elżbieta Zawacka, the WW2 resistance fighter known as ‘Zo’. The only woman to reach London from Warsaw during the Second World War as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command, Zo undertook two missions in the capital before secret Special Operations Executive training in the British countryside. […]
Shame and the Ancient Greek hero
Sulky, brutal Achilles; vain, passive Helen. Have we misjudged these characters from the stories of the Trojan War? Susan C Wilson, author of Helen’s Judgement, argues that we need to go back to the Iliad to understand them, and appreciate the importance of the concept of shame, which drove the Ancient Greek heroes and heroines. […]