Early modern Europe was a hotbed of espionage, where spies, spy-catchers, and conspirators pitted their wits against each other in deadly games of hide and seek. Theirs was a dangerous trade — only those who mastered the latest techniques would survive. Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman explore the methods spies actually used in the period, including […]
Writing about Margaret Tudor
Linda Porter wasn’t intending to write Margaret Tudor’s biography. She came to it in a roundabout way, as she explains here. But Margaret’s story needed to be told. My new biography of Margaret Tudor seeks to challenge the negative views so often expressed about this overlooked 16th-century queen. How I came to write it is […]
The Thistle and The Rose by Linda Porter
Margaret Tudor, the elder sister of the more famous Henry VIII, is the single most important Tudor figure of this era that historians have consistently overlooked. Married at 13 to the charismatic James IV of Scotland, a man more than twice her age, she would learn the skills of statecraft that would enable her to […]
A Divine Fury by DV Bishop
Florence. Autumn, 1539. Where Cesare Aldo was once an officer for the city’s most feared criminal court. Following a period of exile, he is back – but demoted to night patrol, when only the drunk and the dangerous roam the streets. Chasing a suspect in the rain, Aldo discovers a horrifying scene beneath Michelangelo’s statue […]
The Bedlam Cadaver by Robert J Lloyd
It’s 1681, and London cooks in summer heat. Bonfires are lit in protest against the King’s brother, James, heir to the throne but openly Catholic. Rumours abound of a ‘Black Box’, said to conceal proof the King’s illegitimate son is really the rightful heir. When a wealthy merchant’s daughter is kidnapped and murdered — even […]
The Stranger’s Companion by Mary Horlock
October 1933, and with a population of five hundred souls, isolated Sark has a reputation for being ‘the island where nothing ever happens’. Until, one day, the neatly folded clothes of an unknown man and woman are discovered abandoned at a coastal beauty spot. As the search for the missing couple catches the attention of […]
Firebrand by Elizabeth Fremantle
Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded… will she survive? My name is Katherine Parr. I’m 31 years old – already twice widowed. I love a man I can’t have. I’m to wed a man no one would want. He has cast aside two wives and watched another die in childbirth. Two more have had their heads […]
The Sark riddle of 1933
‘Island riddle’ said the headline in October, 1933, reporting the mysterious disappearance of a man and a woman on the Channel Island of Sark. The case gripped people around the UK. And, around 90 years later, the author Mary Horlock was intrigued, too. She writes about the background to her latest novel, The Stranger’s Companion. […]