London, 1925. With their band the Dizzy Heights, jazz musicians Ivor ‘Skins’ Maloney and Bartholomew ‘Barty’ Dunn are used to improvising as they play the Charleston for flappers and toffs, but things are about to take a surprising turn. Superintendent Sunderland has had word that a deserter who stole a fortune in diamonds as he […]
The Race by Alice Fowler (the 2020 HWA Dorothy Dunnett Short Story winner)
We’re delighted to publish The Race by Alice Fowler, the winner of the Historical Writers’ Association Dorothy Dunnett Short Story Prize for 2020. The judges praised the “sheer brilliance” of the premise and her “mastery” in “building atmosphere that tracks with the story’s mounting tension”. We hope you enjoy it, too. And the 2021 HWA/DD […]
Powder Smoke by Andrew Martin
York railway station, December, 1925. Detective Inspector Jim Stringer is enjoying a pint in the Parlour Bar before accompanying his wife, Lydia, to a charitable function. But when the couple meet at their regular spot near the footbridge, Jim is alarmed to see a man pointing a revolver in his direction. His thoughts go spinning […]
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 […]
Review: Art Deco by the Sea
Historian Lucy Jane Santos reviews Art Deco by the Sea, an exhibition at the University of East Anglia’s Sainsbury Centre, transferring to the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle in the summer. The term Art Deco, coined in the 1960s, refers to the decorative modern style that spanned the boom of the roaring 1920s and the […]
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters
Eagerly awaited, Sarah Waters’ latest novel The Paying Guests does not disappoint. Fans of Waters have come to expect her tight and ingenious plotting, meticulous period scene setting and vividly distinctive use of language: who but she would describe the sound of a dripping tap as making, ‘the occasional echoey plink of drips,’ or the eyes of […]