The Drowned City, the first in KJ Maitland’s Daniel Pursglove series of historical crime novels, is set in Bristol in 1606 – a year after the Gunpowder Plot – where a Jesuit conspirator is said to be hiding. KJ Maitland tells Historia how religious conflict caused an increase in people-smuggling in Tudor and Jacobean England. […]
Transubstantiation. And why it matters (Honestly. It does)
Author SD Sykes tells Historia how researching a 14th-century dispute over church doctrine started her on the path that led to her latest Oswald de Lacy novel, The Bone Fire. When my son started his senior education in 2008 at a Catholic school, we dutifully attended the first family mass as part of our introduction […]
Why the Glorious Revolution was . . . well, neither
On the 330th anniversary of William of Orange’s arrival in England, author Angus Donald argues that the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 was neither a revolution nor glorious, but a coup won by treachery. I went to a friend’s wedding recently. I wore a suit, prayed a little, received Holy Communion and happily belted out Jerusalem […]