Katharine Quarmby’s investigation into the gruesome burial of a suicide victim — for felo de se — with links to her home town inspired her first novel, The Low Road. For Women’s History Month, she explains why this punishment fell disproportionately onto poor women, and what made her want to tell this story. On a […]
Those Absent on the Great Hungarian Plain by Jill Culiner
A Hungarian village on the Great Plain: a microcosm reflecting this country’s history from early tribal invasion to Soviet subordination to European Community membership. Here, peasants, herders, party girls, former Nazis and lapsed communists share gossip as well as love stories; and unscrupulous leaders, totalitarian or freely elected, decide behaviour. Like a fly in amber, […]
PT Barnum and the Circassian girl
It was a shock for RN Morris to discover that PT Barnum, the famous showman, was a people-trafficker. Yet the facts are well documented. For Historia Roger investigates Barnum’s attempt to buy a ‘beautiful Circassian girl’. One of the things I discovered while researching my novella, The Crimson Child, is that PT Barnum, the famous […]
The magic of full moons
Kate Griffin explores the lore of full moons and explains why she chose moon magic to deepen the character of Marta, the protagonist of her latest novel, Fyneshade. Writing is a strange and solitary activity. Locked in their dens (or in my case chained to the kitchen table), most authors feel that they are howling […]
Historia exhibition review: Legion: life in the Roman army
Legion: life in the Roman army is the British Museum’s latest big exhibition. The historian Lindsay Powell reviews it for Historia and finds it “has seemingly achieved the remarkable and the impossible.” The Romans knew that their way of war was special. Their legendary legion was different from forms of military unit deployed by other […]
The Hundred Years’ War – a novel approach
David Gilman, whose acclaimed Master of War novels are set during the Hundred Years’ War, looks at the early years of the long-drawn-out conflict between England and France and how real events helped shape his books. Family arguments can stir up trouble and sometimes go beyond a family member not being invited to the next […]
The royal women of 10th-century England
Apart from two well-known women, Æthelflæd and Elfrida (Ælfthryth), there’s a lack of information in books about the royal women of 10th-century England, says MJ Porter. So MJ decided to write a book about them. Here are some of the women it covers, including the impressive Eadgifu. In recent years, I’ve set about fictionalising the […]
The Royal Women Who Made England by MJ Porter
Throughout the 10th century, England, as it would be recognised today, formed. No longer many Saxon kingdoms, but rather, just England. Yet this development masks much in the century in which the Viking raiders were seemingly driven from England’s shores by Alfred, his children and grandchildren, only to return during the reign of his great-great-grandson, […]