How can an author find empathy in a historical figure who is necessary to their story, but whose ‘dark character’ we look back on with distaste? Diana Preston tells Historia how she found a way to write about Robert Clive ‘of India’ in all his complexity. The decision to write a novel centring on Robert […]
Mutiny on the Bounty
Diana Preston on the real history behind the infamous mutiny on the Bounty. ‘Know then, my own dear Betsy, I have lost the Bounty… On the twenty-eighth of April at daylight in the morning, Christian…with several others came into my cabin while I was asleep, and seizing me, holding naked bayonets at my breast, tied […]