Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their […]
Review: Les Miserables
Everything about Les Miserables is built on an epic scale. At around 1500 pages, depending on which edition is making your bookshelf sag, Victor Hugo’s novel (published in 1862) is not only physically enormous, but also it deals with MASSIVE themes: love, obsession, redemption, justice, fate and the nature of good and evil. It’s human […]
Review: The Long Song
The Long Song, (BBC1, 9pm) is an adaptation of Andrea Levy’s Man Booker shortlisted novel and tells the story of July, a slave growing up on a Jamaican plantation in the dying days of slavery. The first episode takes place against the backdrop of the ‘Baptist War’, or ‘Christmas Rebellion’, a slave revolt that increased […]
Review: Death and Nightingales
Locals will tell you that for six months of the year the lakes are in Fermanagh, and for the other six, Fermanagh is in the lakes. Rain sweeps in quickly in this small corner of Ulster. Waters rise and landscapes change. Frontiers are always on the move and borders once thought traversable can suddenly become […]
Peterloo by Jacqueline Riding
Manchester, August 1819: 60,000 people had gathered in the cause of parliamentary reform. To those defending the status quo, the vote was not a universal right, but a privilege of wealth and land ownership. To radical reformers the fundamental overhaul of a corrupt system was long overdue. The people had come to hear one such […]
Sagas: they’re not all trouble at t’mill
Now I’ve loved history for as long as I can remember. In fact, I think I fell in love with the past and everyone living there when I was a child and saw Roger Moore gallop over the hill on that white charger in Ivanhoe on our 12-inch black and white TV screen. I love […]
Historia Interviews: Daniel Beer
Historian Daniel Beer on Russian history, the joys of archival research and his Non-Fiction Crown shortlisted book, The House of the Dead. The HWA Non-fiction Crown celebrates the best in historical non-fiction writing. Have you always been interested in history? Yes, I have, but I came to Russian history in particular through my interest in […]
Queen Victoria’s Matchmaking
Our guest this month, historian Deborah Cadbury, on the royal dynasty that ruled Europe. While researching extensively in the royal archives at Windsor Castle for my latest book, Queen Victoria’s Matchmaking, I was struck by the resonance between late-nineteenth-century Europe and today’s world. Reading accounts of the inflammatory rhetoric of the German Kaiser, the incidents of […]