Miranda Malins, author of The Puritan Princess, writes for Historia about the extraordinary life of Oliver Cromwell’s youngest daughter, Frances, and how we need to forget everything we thought we knew about the Lord Protector’s rule. The caricature of Oliver Cromwell’s protectorate is that it was a joyless, masculine, military dictatorship presided over by a […]
The Scottish Radical Rising of 1820
Two hundred years ago, a wave of political protest swept through Central Scotland and Ayrshire, part of unrest throughout Britain following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Maggie Craig is the author of a new history of the events, One Week In April: The Scottish Radical Rising of 1820. By 1820, living and working conditions […]
Liberation by Imogen Kealey
A thriller inspired by the true story of Nancy Wake, whose husband was kidnapped by the Nazis and who became the most decorated servicewoman of the Second World War. To the Allies she was a fearless freedom fighter, special operations super spy, a woman ahead of her time. To the Gestapo she was a ghost, […]
The Lost Outlaw by Paul Fraser Collard
Louisiana, 1863. Jack Lark is on the long and lonely road to nowhere, the battlefield behind him. But soon his soldier skill lands him a job, and a new purpose – defending a valuable wagon train of cotton as it journeys down through Texas to Mexico. Working for another man, let alone the volatile Brannigan, […]
On Wilder Seas by Nikki Marmery
April 1579. When two ships meet off the Pacific coast of New Spain, an enslaved woman seizes the chance to escape. But Maria has unwittingly joined Francis Drake’s circumnavigation voyage as he sets sail on a secret detour into the far north. Sailing into the unknown on the Golden Hind, a lone woman among 80 […]
Maria: the African woman who sailed with Drake on the Golden Hind
Nikki Marmery, the author of On Wilder Seas, was inspired by a throwaway line in a 16th-century manuscript to resurrect the hidden life of an African woman taken on board the Golden Hind as spoils of – if not war, then piracy. She tells Historia how she reconstructed Maria’s life. On Wilder Seas is the […]
Death at Philippi by Peter Tonkin
Mark Antony’s most dangerous and dedicated agent, Iacomus Artemidorus, is swept overboard from Cleopatra’s flagship during a terrible storm. But the near end to the Roman spy is just the beginning. Artemidorus must find a way to travel through enemy-held Thrace and Macedonia until he reaches Antony’s beleaguered generals Saxa and Norbanus in the besieged […]
Cross of Fire by David Gilman
Winter, 1362. After decades of successful campaigning in France, Thomas Blackstone, once a common archer, has risen to become Edward III’s Master of War. But the title is as much a curse as a blessing. Success has brought few rewards: his family – bar his son Henry – is dead, slaughtered; his enemies only multiply. […]