In the mid-1960s the Conservative Party was still recovering from the Profumo affair when a new scandal was uncovered… and quickly covered up again, with the help of some unexpected allies. Historian Daniel Smith, author of The Peer and the Gangster, tells Historia how the story was quickly and conveniently ‘forgotten’. There was a peer, […]
Historia interview: Alexandra Walsh
Author Alexandra Walsh talks to Historia about her books, writing, research, women’s friendships, and her links with historical figures
The Templars and the reconquest of Spain
SJA Turney’s Knights Templar books follow the adventures of Arnau de Vallbona as he travels across Europe to fulfil his duties as a new knight of the Temple. Simon tells Historia about the background to his latest book, The Crescent and the Cross. This is the fifth and penultimate book in a series in which […]
A Plague on your Business by Michael Jecks: part 2
Historia’s serialisation of A Plague on your Business by Michael Jecks continues with the second and final part. This is an exclusive extract from By the Sword, the new HWA collection of short stories set in the medieval period. The cook was a lugubrious, scrawny fellow, like a man whodid not enjoy his own food. […]
A Plague on your Business by Michael Jecks: part 1
Historia is delighted to publish an exclusive extract from By the Sword, the new HWA collection of short stories set in the medieval period. This is part one of Michael Jecks’s story, A Plague on your Business. Part two follows in a few days. The body was wrapped at last. He had carefully washed her, […]
How to radium party
Lucy Jane Santos, the cultural historian, explains how to hold a radium party like the ones that lit up New York a century ago. At the beginning of July 2020 I held a radium party for friends and family to celebrate the launch of Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium. We had specially-created (slightly) glowing […]
Tell Me How It Ends: writing a film noir novel
VB Grey pays homage to the post-war American movies that inspired her novel, Tell Me How It Ends. Tell Me How It Ends is set in London in that moment in 1963 when the 1950s finally gave way to the Swinging Sixties. The young men and women who swept to fame in music, film, photography […]
Beware of Greeks: when Homer meets Holmes
Peter Tonkin, author of many adventure and murder mystery books, takes his skills to another age: mythical Ancient Greece. Homer’s epic tales of Odysseus and the Trojan war have been favourite holiday reading for many years. What, he wonders, would happen if he took Sherlock Holmes and dropped him into the Mycenaean Bronze Age? July […]