H for History Posts

Royal Tudor blood ran in her veins. Her mother was a queen, and she herself was the granddaughter, niece, cousin and grandmother of monarchs. Some thought she should be queen of England. Beautiful and tempestuous, […]

Hélène BENSON MILITARY AIRFIELD, ENGLAND February 29th, 1944   I have gone by many names.   Some of them are real— I was given four at birth alone— but most are carefully constructed personas to […]

Every family has a story to tell, and I always knew that the roots of my tale were embedded in the 1950s. This was when my parents came to the UK from Cyprus.     […]

    The Grove of the Caesars, was intended to explore gardens – a regular haunt of serial killers of course! I pay attention to both, but I prefer an oblique approach, if only to […]

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 […]

Gretchen Berg highlights a moment in her novel which stunned America in 1938…   1938   Little Charlotte was sleeping in her crib in the bedroom while Edward and Vivian listened to The Chase and […]

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 […]