Catherine Hokin looks at why ghettos were created in the cities of occupied Europe during the Second World War – places of segregation and also of suffering. My latest World War Two novel, The Secret Locket, tells a story that’s very much tied to its settings. Part of the book takes place in the Bavarian […]
Historia giveaway: the 2024 HWA Crown Awards winners
Historia is giving away all three winning books in the 2024 HWA Crown Awards to two lucky winners! These awards celebrate the best in recent historical writing, fiction and non-fiction. The two winners of our 2024 HWA Crown Awards winners giveaway will each receive: Disobedient by Elizabeth Fremantle.Our judges called this book “the masterful telling of […]
Tiberius: 2,000 years of slander
The historian Lindsay Powell revisits the ancient sources and comes to a different conclusion about Tiberius Caesar, revealing a 2,000-year-old story of slander against Rome’s second emperor. Something strange happens in the mind of a historian while doing research about long dead people. Printed words evoke feelings, photographs morph into flesh, and unfamiliar names take […]
Politics and the Grand Tour: the Jacobite threat
For wealthy young British men in the 18th century, travelling around Europe was not always just about education, culture, and adventure. Politics — sometimes quite dangerous politics involving a threat to the established order in Britain — were a draw as well. Dr Jérémy Filet, author of The Jacobites and the Grand Tour, explains. Art, […]
The Barbed-Wire University by Midge Gillies
For most Allied prisoners of war, there were no heroic escapes through secret tunnels – the reality was a constant battle against boredom and brutality. Written when it was still just possible to find men alive who could tell their extraordinary tale, and republished now with a substantial afterword, Midge Gillies’s book casts a new […]
Queen Catherine’s Court by Sophie Shorland
Catherine of Braganza. Boring? Plain? Ineffectual? Think again. Charles II’s wife was a trouser-wearing tastemaker who introduced tea drinking, popularised card games and championed baroque fashion and art. Her salon culture was infamous for its parties, theatricals and frequent trips to the pub. A Catholic queen in a strictly Anglican country, she was the diplomatic […]
Tiberius by Lindsay Powell
History has not been kind to the memory of Tiberius Caesar (42BC to AD37), second emperor of the Romans. His reputation for capable generalship and sensible civic leadership are marred by reports of cruelty, treason trials and sexual depravity. Some historians have described him as a ‘tyrant’ or even a ‘monster’. But does he deserve […]
Prince Rupert of the Rhine by Mark Turnbull
Prince Rupert of the Rhine was an intrinsic part of the civil wars that devastated the three kingdoms of Stuart Britain. A nephew of King Charles I, Rupert was both the archetypical royalist hero and parliamentarian villain. In his lifetime, he accumulated at least nine derogatory pseudonyms – from ‘Duke of Plunderland’ to ‘The Diabolical […]