H for History Posts

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 […]

Gill Thompson, highly acclaimed author of bestselling novel, The Oceans Between Us, writes about the research and inspiration behind her latest novel, The Child On Platform One. My old school singing teacher would have laughed […]

  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 […]

Most people think of Anna of Cleves – or Anna of Kleve, as she should be known – as the luckiest of Henry VIII’s wives. Having re-researched her story in depth for Anna of Kleve: […]

If you are, like us, hooked by the recent third series of The Crown (definitely NOT on our third re-watch, definitely not), then you’ll also want to know more about the history behind the events […]