Jill Culiner investigates why Jews who had survived the Holocaust vanished from a village in Hungary in 1946 and about the centuries of propaganda that led up to a wave of violence in the country. In 2001, while preparing a photographic exhibition about Europe’s vanished Jews, I heard about the pogrom in Kunmadaras, Hungary: in […]
The window-smashing suffragettes of 1912
Jennifer Godfrey writes about some of the suffragettes involved in the window smashing campaign in 1912, and the careful planning that went into their latest mission. In June and July 1912, 112 years ago, suffragette prisoners were being released from prison having served time for window smashing. Some had completed their full sentence but others […]
10 Scotland Street by Leslie Hills
10 Scotland Street – the story of an Edinburgh home and its cast of booksellers, silk merchants, sailors, preachers, politicians, its stories of cholera and coincidence and its widespread connections over two centuries across the globe. 10 Scotland Street by Leslie Hills is published in paperback on 6 August, 2024. Read Leslie’s feature about how […]
Crime and politics in the early 18th century
Douglas Skelton found inspiration in the criminals and politics of the early 18th century, a time relatively unexplored in fiction, for his historical crime novels. He explains what it was about the period that drew him to set his Jonas Flint books then. When I began my adventure in historical fiction, following years of writing […]
Dora Maar: much more than a muse
Even now, Dora Maar is probably remembered for being Picasso’s lover and the subject of many of his paintings rather than as the innovative artist she was. Louisa Treger, whose latest novel retells her story, explains why Dora was much more than a muse. For years, the epithet ‘Picasso’s Weeping Woman’ has followed every mention […]
Ravenous: A Life of Barbara Villiers by Andrea Zuvich
Barbara Villiers was a woman so beautiful, so magnetic and so sexually attractive that she captured the hearts of many in Stuart-era Britain. Her beauty is legendary: she became the muse of artists such as Peter Lely, the inspiration of writers such as John Dryden and the lover of John Churchill, the future great military […]
Barbara Villiers, beautiful, powerful… ravenous?
Barbara Villers, Countess of Castlemaine and later Duchess of Cleveland, was one of the most beautiful women of the Restoration period and probably Charles II’s most politically powerful mistress. She had a great appetite for wealth, influence, and handsome men, as Andrea Zuvich, author of Barbara’s biography, Ravenous, explains. The Stuarts, who ruled over Scotland, […]
The Bomber and the Weathervane by Tony Aston
In 2009 Helen and John bought an old metal weathervane, fashioned in the shape of a Lancaster bomber, and placed it on the roof of their house where it remained for the following nine years. Only when it was removed as part of them packing to relocate in 2021 was a small inscription noticed on […]