Varius Avitus Bassianus, known to the modern world as Heliogabalus, was proclaimed emperor. The next four years were to be the strangest in the history of the empire. Heliogabalus humiliated the prestigious Senators and threw extravagant dinner parties for lower-class friends. He ousted Jupiter from his summit among the gods and replaced him with Elagabal. […]
HWA Crown Awards 2022: the longlists
We’re delighted to announce the HWA Crown Awards longlists for 2022: 36 books celebrating the best in historical writing, fiction and non-fiction, published in 2021-2022. There are three awards categories: HWA Gold Crown, HWA Non-fiction Crown, and HWA Debut Crown. The books longlisted for the HWA Crown Awards for 2022 are: Gold Crown Award 2022 […]
The French Resistance: shadier than you think
Chris Lloyd, author of the HWA Gold Crown Award-winning The Unwanted Dead, talks about his fascination with the German occupation of France and the concepts of resistance and collaboration; topics in which, he says, “the grey areas become shadier” the deeper you look. His novel was selected as Waterstones Welsh Book of the Month for […]
How Roman was Roman Britain?
The Romano-British were the native people living under Rome’s rule in the province of Britannia. But just how Roman were they? Jacquie Rogers looks at the evidence. We all think we know what is meant by Roman Britain — the four centuries, give or take, when our islands were part of the Roman empire. But […]
The Fairy Tellers by Nicholas Jubber
Who were the Fairy Tellers? In this far-ranging quest, award-winning author Nicholas Jubber unearths the lives of the dreamers who made our most beloved fairy tales: inventors, thieves, rebels and forgotten geniuses who gave us classic tales such as Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast and Baba Yaga. From the Middle Ages to […]
The Twenties, then and now
The Twenties opened with a worldwide epidemic, followed by profound social change: a shift in working practices, new technologies, more rights and freedoms for women, an obsession with celebrities, rising inflation. Gill Paul, whose new book, The Manhattan Girls, is set in 1920s New York, looks back 100 years and wonders how similar our world […]
The Fairy (tale) Godfather
Where did our fairy tales come from? Nicholas Jubber set out to find the story behind the stories and found himself “bewitched” by one collector, a 17th-century poet and soldier who preserved the earliest-known versions of so many of our best-loved fables that he surely deserves the title of Fairy (tale) Godfather. These are tales […]
Henrietta Maria by Leanda de Lisle
Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s queen, is the most reviled consort to have worn the crown of Britain’s three kingdoms. Condemned as that ‘Popish brat of France’, a ‘notorious whore’ and traitor, she remains in popular memory the wife who wore the breeches and turned her husband Catholic – so causing a civil war – and […]