Historian Linda Colley is the fifth interviewee in Historia’s 2021 HWA Crown Awards series. Her latest book, The Gun, the Ship & the Pen, was shortlisted for the Non-fiction Crown Award. Subtitled Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World, it begins in Corsica in 1755 and moves through every continent, showing how constitutions […]
Van Gogh and Japan
Lesley Downer visits the new exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. ‘All my work is based to some extent on Japanese art,’ wrote Vincent Van Gogh. This absorbing and beautiful exhibition at the glitzy Van Gogh Museum explores Van Gogh’s fascination with Japanese art and with Japan – you could almost call it obsession […]
The Shogun’s Queen by Lesley Downer
The year is 1853, and a young Japanese girl’s world is about to be turned upside down. When black ships carrying barbarians arrive on the shores of Japan, the Satsuma clan’s way of life is threatened. But it’s not just the samurai who must come together to fight: the beautiful, headstrong Okatsu is also given […]
Historia Q&A: Lesley Downer
Lesley Downer is a novelist and journalist who has written numerous books, both fiction and non-fiction, about Japan and Asia. She is the author of The Shogun Quartet, four novels telling the stories of four different women who are caught up in the cataclysmic events when the shogunate collapsed and Japan leapt into the modern western […]
Hokusai: Beyond The Great Wave
Lesley Downer visits the new Hokusai exhibition at the British Museum. The British Museum Hokusai exhibition is full of dazzling works yet The Great Wave still leaps out. Its strong, rhythmic, instantly recognisable lines have made it quite simply iconic. The froth of the waves, as Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, is […]