H for History Posts

Read an exclusive extract from the opening of The Silver Collar, Antonia Hodgson’s new Thomas Hawkins adventure. Read the extract here.     Autumn, 1728. Life is good for Thomas Hawkins and Kitty Sparks. The […]

As Katheryn Howard: The Tainted Queen is written wholly from Katheryn’s point of view, the reader never gets to see the reaction of Katheryn’s husband, Henry VIII, to her fall from grace. We see only […]

During the English High Middle Ages of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there was a succession of foreign queen consorts.  Some were honoured as the mothers of kings; others were also mothers of kings, […]

Ahead of the publication of The Silver Collar, bestselling creator of the Thomas Hawkins novels Antonia Hodgson updates us all on her antihero’s story so far…   The Silver Collar is the fourth book in the […]

  I’ve always been fascinated by social history and listening to stories about how the past has impacted different individual lives and those of future generations. I guess doing a history degree, followed by a […]

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 […]