Gnaeus Julius Agricola was a man fated for conquest and tied to the island of Britannia. He cut his teeth on military command during the revolt of Boudica, later commanded a legion against the warlike Brigantes, and was finally given the governorship of the province and was able to lead the armies north, incorporating into […]
Agricola’s victories in Britain
Agricola (AD40–93) was the only Roman general who could claim to have subdued the whole of Britain. Simon Turney has written the first biography of this important figure for nearly two millennia. He looks at why Agricola’s victories make him one of the great military figures in Roman history. A Roman general is marked by […]
This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin by Emma Darwin
Everybody knows about Charles Darwin, and many know about others in his family, from Erasmus Darwin and Tom Wedgwood, the first photographer, to composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and poet and radical John Cornford, the first Briton to be killed in the Spanish Civil War. But when Charles and Emma Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter, another Emma Darwin, tried […]
Rival kings and the fall of Mercia
The Kingdom of Mercia went rapidly from being the foremost power in 8th-century England to being conquered in less than a decade. What happened? MJ Porter explains a time of unrest, loss, and rival kings. Son of Mercia, the first book in a new series set in the ninth century, occurs against a backdrop of […]
Nördlingen, a town where history is past and present
The Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) was a European conflict so destructive and so complex that setting a novel during the period must be a challenge. For JC Harvey, whose The Silver Wolf, the first in her Fiskardo’s War trilogy, takes place in the middle of that chaos, a good place to start is a small […]
Henry VIII, impotence and the thorny question of male heirs
Henry VIII died 475 years ago, on 28 January, 1547. To mark the occasion, we asked the author Carol McGrath to draw upon her new book, Sex and Sexuality in Tudor England, to examine the king’s notoriously turbulent sex life. She focusses on the driving force behind his many marriages: his obsession with fathering a […]
Historia giveaway! HWA Gold Crown Award 2021 shortlist
Historia’s running three HWA Crowns giveaways to celebrate the books shortlisted for the 2021 Crown Awards. This final one is for all six books on the Gold Crown shortlist. The Historia Gold Crown 2021 giveaway is open until 11.59pm on 15 January, 2022. The two winners will each receive all six books in the 2021 […]
Historical books to look out for in 2022
Our popular annual list of books to look out for during the year is back for 2022, with history, biography and historical fiction. Here are books to read from HWA authors covering eras from Ancient Rome to the 1980s and sweeping across continents from China to Russia and India, the USA to Australia and the […]