You’d think setting your interwar years novel where you live, in rural Devon, would make research easier. Not necessarily so, as Vanessa de Haan found out; the lives of ordinary people in the 1920s and 1930s hadn’t seemed worth recording. Walking the country lanes and talking to people was an important part of her research, […]
Charles I’s Private Life by Mark Turnbull
The execution of King Charles I is one of the well-known facts of British history, and an often-quoted snippet from our past. He lost the civil war and his head. But there is more to Charles than the civil war and his death. To fully appreciate the momentous events that marked the twenty-four years of […]
Businesswomen through the ages
Gill Paul writes about some of the businesswomen who defied convention and restrictive laws to become successful entrepreneurs through the ages, including the wealthiest woman in early New York; the painter Hogarth’s sisters; the inventor of a baby-making vegetable compound; the African-American who became the first self-made female millionaire in the US; and the rivals […]
Charles I – the boy who would be King
Charles I is often thought of in polarised terms, as a martyr or a murderer. Mark Turnbull, author of a new biography of the king, argues that by more closely examining Charles’s personal relationships a more three-dimensional image of the man can be built up. Here he writes about the boy who would become a […]
Calcutta Blues: why Kipling despised the city
Rudyard Kipling famously wrote about Calcutta, and not to praise it, says Vaseem Khan, author of the Malabar House crime series. He looks at the history of the first capital of British India, its place in the independence movement, and why men like Kipling despised both it and the Bengalis who used the written word […]
History as “a possession for all time”
History, by looking clearly at the past, can help to prepare for the future. This was proposed by the Greek historian Thucydides and expanded in the Renaissance by Machiavelli, whose analysis of power structures can be seen to apply again and again, argues Michael Arnheim, making history relevant “for all time”. Thucydides (c460 – c400 […]
The stigma of illegitimacy: forced adoption
Mary Chamberlain’s new novel, The Lie, exposes the truth about the stark choice faced by pregnant unmarried women before contraception was widely available. It’s all so different now, we think. But, she asks, will the rolling back of abortion rights in America revive the stigma of illegitimacy — and the practice of forced adoptions — […]
Books for history lovers: summer reading 2023
What will you be reading this summer? We asked 12 well-known and well-loved authors to each suggest a couple of books they recommend for history lovers to enjoy over the next couple of months – and long after. They’ve come back with a wide-ranging mix of history and fiction spanning 2,000 years, with a foray […]