Crossing the Lines that Divide Us by Nick Hayes 'The trespasser is the bogeyman of property, the personification of the threat to the cult of exclusion. By refusing to accept the rules of what Locke called “the foundation of all democracy”, the trespasser is the antithesis of natural order, a lunatic, left-wing opponent to common …
Category: British History
A Song of the Sea
The Wager by David Grann A Review 'Yet the Pacific did not live up to its peaceful name. As the Wager headed north off the coast of Chile, all the previous storms seemed to have combined into one climatic fury...... Cheap relentlessly drove the men onward - drove them even as they dumped overboard a …
Sisters at the Edge of the World
by Ailish Sinclair A Review 'Atunement. Living flesh, pulsing with the beat of life, touching stone that is also living and beating in another way. There is life within. And there is wisdom. And there is a throb of energy, gathered over time. And love. Yes, love.' The Roman historian Tacitus wrote of a great …
Dark Tides
by Philippa Gregory A Review 'He heard the clink of chains from the bones hanging at the gibbet .... and thought how hateful this place was. He hated Alys with a hot murderous fury, and for a moment, he even hated Alinor too. She had been his inferior in every way, his for the taking, …
Sistersong
by Lucy Holland ‘I am as light and am as dark, I am as birth and am as breath, I am as flesh and bone and brain, Look inside and know my name.’ Just as I was beginning to think no one writes stories like that any more, along comes Lucy Holland’s tale of war, …
Stormbird
by Conn Iggulden (Wars of the Roses) Set in England and France during the years after 1443, Stormbird is best described as an historical thriller. It has a large cast of characters, most of them real people, though the author, by his own admission, takes the odd liberty with them. The novel's main historical theme …
The Road to Bosworth Field
The Red Queen by Philippa Gregory A Review ' "You are a girl; girls have no choice. You could never choose your own husband; you are of the royal family .... It is forbidden for one of royal blood to marry their own choice." ' Margaret Beaufort knows she is chosen by God for a …
The Five
by Hallie Rubenhold The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper 'The victims of Jack the Ripper were never "just prostitues"; they were daughters, wives, mothers, sisters and lovers. They were women. They were human beings, and surely that, in itself, is enough.' During the late summer of 1888, death stalked the …
Tracing the Past
by Andrew G. Lockhart (taken from Tapestry, the Story of a Family) A few miles to the west of Edinburgh, and not far from the Firth of Forth, lies the village of Abercorn. It was a hamlet as early as the seventh century and is mentioned in the annals of the Venerable Bede, the Northumbrian …
An English Tragedy
Witchfinders by Malcolm Gaskill A Review 'Even the illusion of a diabolical saviour might be preferable to the certainty of God's damnation.' 'Most extraordinary were the complaints of parishioners at Brandeston - not that their minister John Lowes had been set up on a charge of witchcraft - and hanged like a dog, but that …
Magda Green Books 