Chrissie Gillies comes from the last ever community to live on the beautiful, isolated Scottish island of St Kilda. Evacuated in 1930, she will never forget her life there, nor the man she loved and lost who visited one fateful summer a few years before. Fred Lawson has been captured, beaten and imprisoned in Nazi-controlled […]
Prisoners of History: What Monuments Tell Us About Our History and Ourselves by Keith Lowe
What happens when our values change, but what we have set in stone does not? Humankind has always had the urge to memorialise, to make physical testaments to the past. There’s just one problem: when we carve a statue or put up a monument, it can wind up holding us hostage to bad history. In […]
What Only We Know by Catherine Hokin
A door slammed and the unmistakable sound of boots came crashing up the hall. Liese held her little daughter’s hand so tightly, the tiny fingers had turned purple. The SS officer’s hand was at Liese’s throat before she saw him move. “I can kill you easily, then I can kill your daughter.” He relaxed his […]
Concentration camps and the politics of memory
The preservation and interpretation of Second World War memorials of the Holocaust, such as concentration camps, varies across Europe, Catherine Hokin tells Historia. Decisions on what – and how – to preserve depended on the politics and beliefs of those in power at the time. I have spent much of the last two years researching […]
Review: A Map of the Damage by Sophia Tobin
When Historia asked acclaimed author Antonia Hodgson to review Sophia Tobin’s latest novel, there was only one problem. She’d love to do it, she said, but her copy wasn’t where she could get at it. Sophia’s publisher, like so many others during these difficult times of lockdown, was efficient and helpful and sent an ebook […]
Finding the spark: one author’s inspiration for a second novel
When Gill Thompson’s publishers gave her a deadline for her second novel, she reached into her emotional response to a historical event in order to find the spark that ignited The Child On Platform One. My first novel, The Oceans Between Us, came out of a chance discovery about the child migrant story whilst listening […]
When We Fall by Carolyn Kirby
England, 1943. Lost in fog, pilot Vee Katchatourian is forced to make an emergency landing where she meets enigmatic RAF airman Stefan Bergel, and then can’t get him out of her mind. In occupied Poland, Ewa Hartman hosts German officers in her father’s guest house, while secretly gathering intelligence for the Polish resistance. Mourning her […]
A Ration Book Wedding by Jean Fullerton
It’s February 1942, and as the Americans finally join Britain and her allies, 23-year-old Francesca Fabrino is doing her bit for the war effort in a factory in East London. But her thoughts are constantly occupied by recently married Charlie Brogan, who is fighting in North Africa with the Eighth Army. When Francesca starts a […]