Diminished, disparaged, derided. That’s how Sean Lusk describes the fate of Mary Wortley Montagu and other great women of the 18th century. He looks at how they came to be forgotten. I had not intended to write a novel about Mary Wortley Montagu. Her Turkish Embassy Letters were the inspiration for the character of Aunt […]
Looking for radioactivity in Las Vegas
Lucy Jane Santos, the author of Chain Reactions, is prepared to go anywhere to look for the history of radioactivity. Even Las Vegas. Fortunately, she found that the sinful city still radiates with its atomic heritage, which hasn’t decayed yet. Over the last — almost — decade of tracing the history of radioactive elements – […]
Spycraft by Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman
Early modern Europe was a hotbed of espionage, where spies, spy-catchers, and conspirators pitted their wits against each other in deadly games of hide and seek. Theirs was a dangerous trade — only those who mastered the latest techniques would survive. Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman explore the methods spies actually used in the period, including […]
Writing about Margaret Tudor
Linda Porter wasn’t intending to write Margaret Tudor’s biography. She came to it in a roundabout way, as she explains here. But Margaret’s story needed to be told. My new biography of Margaret Tudor seeks to challenge the negative views so often expressed about this overlooked 16th-century queen. How I came to write it is […]
The Thistle and The Rose by Linda Porter
Margaret Tudor, the elder sister of the more famous Henry VIII, is the single most important Tudor figure of this era that historians have consistently overlooked. Married at 13 to the charismatic James IV of Scotland, a man more than twice her age, she would learn the skills of statecraft that would enable her to […]
The Sark riddle of 1933
‘Island riddle’ said the headline in October, 1933, reporting the mysterious disappearance of a man and a woman on the Channel Island of Sark. The case gripped people around the UK. And, around 90 years later, the author Mary Horlock was intrigued, too. She writes about the background to her latest novel, The Stranger’s Companion. […]
Heroines of the Tudor World by Sharon Bennett Connolly
These are the women who ruled, the women who founded dynasties, the women who fought for religious freedom, their families and love. These are the women who made a difference, who influenced countries, kings and the Reformation. Heroines of the Tudor World focuses on the women who lived through the Renaissance and Reformation, examining the […]
The many marriages of Bess of Hardwick
The Countess of Shrewsbury — or Bess of Hardwick, as she’s more widely known — was one of the richest people in England by her death in 1610. Yet she hadn’t even got a dowry when her father died. How did she do it? Through many fortunate marriages (and a canny mind), Sharon Bennett Connolly, […]