H for History Blog

What originally inspired you to write Hamnet? When I was studying ‘Hamlet’ at school, my teacher mentioned in passing that Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet, who died several years before the play was written. […]

  The short answer is no. Not at all. And yet, when reading some newspaper articles in the last few days, I’ve seen this crisis described as a modern day plague, with all sorts of […]

Many historical fiction fans in their thousands have this month been reading The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel, the final book in her remarkable recreation of the life of Thomas Cromwell that, in […]

To celebrate the publication of The Slaughterman’s Daughter, we asked author Yaniv Iczkovits to tell us about the real-life history behind his sprawling historical epic.       Growing up in Israel, I always felt […]

Private Investigator Flavia Albia is back in Lindsey Davis’s next gripping and witty mystery set in Ancient Rome, The Grove of the Caesars. Publishing in April 2020, we are delighted to share a sneak-peek extract […]

In the 4th book of The Seeker series, Captain Seeker is back in London, on the trail of an assassin preparing to strike at the heart of Oliver Cromwell’s Republic. Take a sneak-peek at the […]

For the publication of the fifth book in the bestselling Six Tudor Queens series Alison Weir has created this special True or False quiz about Katheryn Howard. Click below to take the quiz!   A […]

The story of Katheryn Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife, is one of the saddest and most shocking episodes in English history. It is also the subject of a very modern debate. Was Katheryn a promiscuous […]

  To mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and international Holocaust Memorial Day, we are sharing this extraordinary message from Edith Friedman Grossman, one of the survivors whose story is told in […]