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 […]
At the National Archives in Kew, the past comes alive
The historian Eric Lee, author of Night of the Bayonets: The Texel Uprising and Hitler’s Revenge, April – May 1945, looks back at – and forward to – the pleasures of research at the National Archives. One of the great advantages of writing history in the UK is being able to use the National Archives […]
Night of the Bayonets by Eric Lee
In the final days of World War II in Europe, Georgians serving in the Wehrmacht on Texel island off the Dutch coast rose up and slaughtered their German masters. Hitler ordered the island to be retaken and fighting continued for weeks, well after the war’s end. The uprising had it origins in the bloody history […]
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 […]
Fifty years of fake news; the cover-up of the Katyn Massacre
Thursday, 10 April, 2020, marks the commemoration of a war crime 80 years ago in which the Soviet Union massacred thousands of Poles in locations including the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk, not far from Russia’s present western border. The atrocity was covered up for 50 years, and it took the fall of the USSR for […]