Netflix’s latest foray into original drama shines a spotlight on three crucial years (1304-1307) in the life of Robert the Bruce, the king who would eventually win independence for Scotland at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. We first meet Bruce two years before his 1306 coronation as he surrenders to King Edward I at […]
Reviews
Looking for your next read? HWA members review the best new historical writing, recommend their desert island books and revisit some old favourites.
Review: The Little Stranger
1947. A young Doctor Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) visits the ramshackle Hundreds Hall to attend to a servant girl who is claiming to be ill. However, strange things are afoot and Faraday soon becomes embroiled in the closed off world of the Ayres family that live there: the stern-faced matriarch; Roderick, a disfigured war veteran; and […]
Review: Emily Brontë Reappraised by Claire O’Callaghan
On the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth, Katherine Clements reviews a new ‘biography with a twist’. Emily, the elusive Brontë sister, is often portrayed as antisocial, difficult, perhaps even slightly unhinged. Two centuries of Brontë scholarship have created an inscrutable image of this singular woman; Emily as enigma has become integral to Brontë myth making. […]
Review: The Story Keeper by Anna Mazzola
“It was the birds that woke her, their liquid voices trickling into her dreams.” An apt quote from a novel that does precisely that: trickles in and won’t let you go. Anna Mazzola’s second novel The Story Keeper is inspired by the West Ham vanishings: the unexplained disappearance of a number of children and young […]
Review: Civilisations
Civilisations (Episode 1, BBC2 Thursday 1st March, 9:00pm) is about history in two senses. On the one hand there is the story of the hard-to-define stuff we call civilisation, now quite rightly pluralised to include other cultures, on the other there is the history of television itself. It is nearly fifty years since Kenneth Clark […]
The Coffin Path by Katherine Clements
The Coffin Path is a seventeenth-century ghost story. A story in which the oppression and wild beauty of the Yorkshire moors provides a compelling backdrop, where a sense of encroaching malevolence seeps like a ‘winding sheet of fog … silent, still, watching’ through the very stones of Scarcross Hall, and the fates of all who live there. Scarcross […]
The Good Doctor of Warsaw by Elisabeth Gifford
Elizabeth Gifford’s debut novel, Secrets of the Sea House, was a sweeping, beautiful work, imbued with myth and mystery; it was shortlisted for the HWA Debut Crown award in 2014 and was one of my personal favourites that year. Gifford is a talented writer with the ability to create satisfying stories and haunting atmosphere from […]
Review: Britannia, Episode 1
We’ve all been waiting to devour Britannia, we history buffs, just as the Romans did nearly 2000 years ago. Where Julius Caesar turned and ran, Aulus Plautius returns, nine decades later, in AD 43, brimming with bravado. ‘I am lucky,’ he tells his second-in-command, the wonderfully named Perfectus, vowing to succeed where Caesar had failed. […]