The poet Lord Byron wasn’t the only member of his family to be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”, as Emily Brand found when she wrote The Fall of the House of Byron. She tells Historia about how she tried – but failed – to rehabilitate his notorious father. On 10 July 1823 the notorious […]
The Brontë Affair: researching the scandal that enveloped literature’s most famous family
Finola Austin had felt an affinity with the Brontë sisters for many years, but it was only while reading a biography of Charlotte that she became interested in their brother Branwell, who died young, like his sisters – but with his potential unfulfilled. His decline was blamed on a scandal involving Lydia, the older, married […]
Bigger than Profumo! ‘The scandal that history forgot’
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, […]
The Peer and the Gangster: A Very British Cover-up by Daniel Smith
In July 1964, the Sunday Mirror ran a front-page story headlined: Peer and a Gangster: Yard Enquiry. While the article withheld the names of the subjects, the newspaper reported that the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police had ordered an investigation into an alleged homosexual relationship between ‘a household name’ from the House of Lords and […]