What responsibility has an author of historical fiction towards real people who they write as antiheroes in a novel? Should authors feel guilty about how they portray them? AJ West, whose debut novel, The Spirit Engineer, takes people who have living descendants as its close inspiration, considers this dilemma. I don’t believe in ghosts, though […]
Delving into the history of a house
It’s a good week for anyone interested in the history of houses; a new series of A House Through Time begins, and the paperback edition of the book of the same name is out. If you’re inspired to delve into house history to find out more about the building you live in, or you’re a […]
A House Through Time by Melanie Backe-Hansen and David Olusoga
In recent years house histories have become the new frontier of popular, participatory history. People, many of whom have already embarked upon that great adventure of genealogical research, and who have encountered their ancestors in the archives and uncovered family secrets, are now turning to the secrets contained within the four walls of their homes […]
Some reasons why history gets lost
The revealing – or reappraisal – of ‘forgotten’ histories, from national to family ones, is a recurring theme in historical fiction, as several recent features in Historia have shown. Often this burying of the past is an attempt to cover events which people have considered shameful, but that’s not always the reason for history getting […]
The uncanny story behind my novel
You might expect a thriller to give you the shivers. But when Alexandra Walsh was writing her latest novel, The Wind Chime, she discovered some parallels between her fictional story and her own family history that were unexpected – even uncanny. The Wind Chime is a timeshift thriller set in the present day and the […]
When the Wars of the Roses got personal
What happens when you discover that an ancestor of yours was involved in the great moments of history which you’re writing about? It makes these events feel closer to you, but also it makes you think again about loyalties, as Nicola Cornick, the bestselling and award-winning historical novelist, tells Historia. In 2019 when I started […]
The true story of the man who broke the Monte Carlo bank: Joseph Hobson Jagger
When historian Anne Fletcher started looking into a family story about her great-great-great uncle, Joseph Hobson Jagger – that he’d gone from working in a Bradford woollen mill to breaking the bank at Monte Carlo – she found little evidence to back up the claim. But after ten years of research, she uncovered the true […]
From the Mill to Monte Carlo by Anne Fletcher
Among the men ‘who broke the bank at Monte Carlo’, Joseph Hobson Jagger is unique. He is the only one known to have devised an infallible and completely legal system to defeat the odds at roulette and win a fortune. But he was not what might be expected. He wasn’t a gentleman or an aristocrat, […]