Operation Foxley was the name of the secret plan supported by Winston Churchill to assassinate Hitler in 1944–45. More than 75 years after its conception, the assassination plan remains shrouded in mystery. Eric Lee’s new book is the product of painstaking research and sheds more light on this plan. This book asks what would have […]
Hogarth: Life in Progress by Jacqueline Riding
On a late spring night in 1732, a boisterous group of friends set out from their local pub. They are beginning a journey, a ‘peregrination’ that will take them through the gritty streets of Georgian London and along the River Thames as far as the Isle of Sheppey. And among them is an up-and-coming engraver […]
Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History by Alex von Tunzelmann
In the past few years, there has been a rush to topple statues. Across the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Belgium and elsewhere, Black Lives Matter protesters defaced and in some cases hauled down statues of slaveholders, Confederate icons, and imperialists. In Bristol, Edward Colston was knocked off his plinth and hurled into […]
The unsung heroes of Grub Street
Grub Street has been a synonym for hack journalism (and journalists) for over 300 years. But where would the hacks have been without being published? Ruth Herman looks at two once-famous printers, Grub Street’s unsung early heroes – or possibly villains, depending on whose side you took. We celebrate the British tradition of a free […]
Down the rabbit hole – to kill Hitler
The historian Eric Lee made some surprising discoveries when he found himself going down research rabbit holes in pursuit of plots to kill Hitler. I love working in archives. Holding in one’s hand original documents written a century ago (or much longer) is the closest thing I will ever experience to time travel. (I’ve written […]
International Trade in the Middle Ages by Hilary Green
This is a journey through the complex developing trade of the Middle Ages, which is the foundation of trade today. Taking the production of wool in the abbeys of the north of England as a starting point, she follows its journey to Flanders where it was woven into a variety of textiles in the growing […]
Reconstructing Emma Hardy’s secret diaries
The Chosen is Elizabeth Lowry’s new novel about the days immediately following the death of Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma, in November, 1912, and of Hardy’s writing of Tess of the d’Urbervilles some 20 years earlier. It’s also the story of how some of the greatest love poems in English, Hardy’s Poems of 1912–13, came […]
Discovering Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s porcelain
What does a biographer do when they learn something new about their subject after their book has been published? This happened to Jo Willett, author of The Pioneering Life of Mary Wortley Montagu, when she found out about some porcelain linked with the 18th-century smallpox inoculation pioneer. We’re delighted that Jo is sharing her discovery […]