I’ve been fascinated by the early modern period–the Tudors and the Stuarts–since falling in love with Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth, Henry VIII, and his wives when I was a child. I graduated from Horrible Histories as a child to lengthier nonfiction and fiction books about the era as a teenager before gaining a BA Honours, a Masters, and a PhD focussing on Elizabethan language and literature. I now teach English Literature at Strathclyde University. Because I never lost the urge to read everything I could about the Tudors and Stuarts, I began writing about them, too, and because I devour both fiction and nonfiction, I write both!
I was utterly haunted and captivated by this book.
Morris fictionalises the life of Sir Walter Raleigh by putting us into his shoes. We follow him on his adventures, his cruelties in Ireland, and his imprisonment in the Tower of London. Throughout, we get a sense of Raleigh, the man behind the myth: he’s a flawed, turbulent, and eventually sad and out-of-place figure, surprised and bemused to find himself a living legend.
"In impressively muscular prose strongly reminiscent of Hilary Mantel, R N Morris packs the entire life of Sir Walter Raleigh into one breath-taking volume. This stunning tale grips from the first line to the last, brims with dazzling images, vivid characters, electric dialogue and unforgettable action." Peter Tonkin, author of A Verse To Murder
“This spell-binding story of Elizabeth I’s infamous favourite brings the adventurous, dangerous, and glittering world of late-Elizabethan England to life.” Steven Veerapen, author of A Dangerous Trade
I am a historian, curator, and writer born and raised in New York City, a place whose history intrigued me from an early age. With a mother who moved from small-town New Jersey to Greenwich Village in the 1950s, and a father who had childhood memories of World War I in the Bronx, I think my interest was sort of preordained. I remain fascinated by cities as engines of change, as flashpoints for conflict, and as places that are simultaneously powerful and vulnerable.
Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) endured one of history’s great sieges when Hitler’s armies surrounded it in 1941. By the time the Red Army liberated it in 1944, the city’s thriving population of 2.5 million had been reduced by evacuations, bloodshed, and starvation. Salisbury brings to life the harrowing experiences of ordinary men and women who managed to survive with their dignity and devotion to civilization intact. The book casts an ironic shadow forward to the ordeal of Ukraine’s city dwellers today. And if you want to understand Vladimir Putin—whose childhood was shaped by family traumas in wartime Leningrad—this is a good place to start.
The Nazi siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944 was one of the most gruesome episodes of World War II. Nearly three million people endured it just under half of them died. For twenty-five years the distinguished journalist and historian Harrison Salisbury pieced together this remarkable narrative of villainy and survival, in which the city had much to fear-from both Hitler and Stalin.
I’m a longtime Moscow correspondent, having worked there for The Baltimore Sun in the 1990s and for The Washington Post in the 2010s. It was an exciting time to be in Russia, and I couldn’t help noticing parallels between the Russian revolutions of 1917 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. I think American policymakers, in particular, profoundly misunderstood both events. In my newspaper career, I am a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the George Polk Award, an Oversea Press Club award, and other honors. In the fall of 2018, I taught for a semester at Princeton University.
Thompson was a photographer from Kansas who went to Europe to cover the First World War and found himself in Russia as 1917 dawned. His book is drawn from letters he wrote home to his wife Dot, and his eyewitness reporting is better than his analysis. His account of the day police opened fire on protesters in Petrograd with machine guns is chilling. Thompson believed that the Germans were behind the revolution, which wasn’t the case, but his photos of soldiers and barricades and protesters amount to a great visual document of the moment. Read this in conjunction with Runaway Russia, by Florence MacLeod Harper, a magazine reporter with whom he teamed up to cover the revolution.
A few years before I had been husking corn in Kansas. For a few seconds I could not speak a word. The first thing that came into my mind was this King Albert, I said, I have never met a king before in my life. (it was hard enough for me to hold a pair of jacks in a poker game.) I do not know what to say except to tell you that I am here and what I want to do. I then ex plained that the world at large would believe the…
I’m a longtime Moscow correspondent, having worked there for The Baltimore Sun in the 1990s and for The Washington Post in the 2010s. It was an exciting time to be in Russia, and I couldn’t help noticing parallels between the Russian revolutions of 1917 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. I think American policymakers, in particular, profoundly misunderstood both events. In my newspaper career, I am a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the George Polk Award, an Oversea Press Club award, and other honors. In the fall of 2018, I taught for a semester at Princeton University.
Houghteling was a young Commerce Department official who was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Petrograd. He arrived in January 1917, by sleigh across the border into Russian Finland, seemingly full of American self-confidence. Traveling back and forth from Petrograd to Moscow, he was surprised at how openly Russians were talking about impending revolution, and maybe a little surprised at himself for being so taken by the country and its people. Over just weeks, from the run-up to the revolution to the collapse of the regime, his writing became less arch and more penetrating, his jokes less inane, and his perspective more complex even as he retained his optimism about Russia. Houghteling’s account features prominently in Helen Rappaport’s wonderful book from 2016, Caught in the Revolution.
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I have always been drawn to the weird, fantastic, supernatural, and unexplained. Whether it’s film or TV (The Twilight Zone, the X-files, Ingmar Bergman) or gothic and speculative literature, I become mesmerized by the mysteries involved. I have written 10 books (poetry and fiction). Of the fiction, most is either speculative, as in magical realism, or somewhat gothic in nature. My newest novel, due out in 2025, is pure gothic and takes place in a haunted abbey inhabited by ghosts and the devil himself. And yet, behind it all is an exploration of human faith and frailty and a search for answers about our beliefs.
Like Kafka, Nikolai Gogol explores the human condition in new ways, new for his time period, that is. He speaks of social inequality and the desire and often inability of late 19th-century Russians to climb the social ladder. He dazzles with his approach to literature and, again, makes you think. He is another one of my influences.
Nikolai Gogol's short fiction, collected here as The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector and Selected Stories, deeply influenced later Russian literature with powerful depictions of a society dominated by petty bureaucracy and base corruption. This Penguin Classics edition is translated with notes by Ronald Wilks, and an introduction by Robert A. Maguire.
This volume includes a selection of Gogol's most admired short fiction and his most famous drama. A hilarious and biting political satire, 'The Government Inspector' has been popular since its first performance and was regarded by Nabokov as the greatest Russian play ever written. The stories…
This
is a wonderfully lively and revealing investigation into the life and work of Anton
Chekhov. The book is also partly the
story of Janet Malcolm’s pilgrimage to the cities in Russia where
Chekhov lived and worked.
Her reading
of Chekhov’s work is complemented by events from Chekhov’s personal life and
letters. I have been a fan of Janet
Malcolm for years because I’m captivated by her searing intelligence, her keen
eye, and her ironic wit.
On her
pilgrimage to Russia, Malcolm’s complicated relationship with her controlling Russian
guide offers some truly hilarious moments.
To illuminate the mysterious greatness of Anton Chekhov’s writings, Janet Malcolm takes on three roles: literary critic, biographer, and journalist. Her close readings of the stories and plays are interwoven with episodes from Chekhov’s life and framed by an account of Malcolm’s journey to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yalta. She writes of Chekhov’s childhood, his relationships, his travels, his early success, and his self-imposed “exile”—always with an eye to connecting them to themes and characters in his work. Lovers of Chekhov as well as those new to his work will be transfixed by Reading Chekhov.
Why do utopias fail? Why does the world of human dignity and equality they aspire to so often ossify into a mechanism of repression that strangles the very people revolutionaries attempted to liberate?
Victor Serge is, for me, one of the essential writers of the 20th and now 21st centuries. A rebel since adolescence, he watched the revolution he had become part of in Russia begin to devour itself through internal terror, while at the same time fighting against the White terror of its opponents.
This novel gives an insider view of St. Petersburg, once the Czarist capital of Russia under the Bolsheviks in 1919-1920. What is remarkable in all of Serge’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, is that in spite of being nearly killed by the revolution he worked for, he never turned away from his ideals and belief that a new form of society was possible.
1919–1920: St. Petersburg, city of the czars, has fallen to the Revolution. Camped out in the splendid palaces of the former regime, the city’s new masters seek to cement their control, even as the counterrevolutionary White Army regroups. Conquered City, Victor Serge’s most unrelenting narrative, is structured like a detective story, one in which the new political regime tracks down and eliminates its enemies—the spies, speculators, and traitors hidden among the mass of common people.
Conquered City is about terror: the Red Terror and the White Terror. But mainly about the Red, the Communists who have dared to pick up…
I particularly enjoyed writing this book about a city that I love and have visited many times (starting in the late 1970s, when I was a student), and whose history I know well too. Most books, by foreigners anyway, talk about the city from a distance; I wanted to write something visceral, about sounds and smells as well as sights, and above all, how locals themselves think about their city, the way in which its intense and in some respects oppressive past shapes St Petersburg’s life today – yet all the same, never gets taken too seriously. Readers seem to agree: as well as an appreciative letter from Jan Morris, whose travel writing I’ve always admired, I treasure an email message from someone who followed my advice and tramped far and wide – before ending up in the room for prisoners’ relatives to drop off parcels at Kresty (the main city prison) when he wrongly assumed he was using an entrance to the (in fact non-existent) museum.
This is a great anthology in the City Picks series, with lots of different literary and essayistic texts about St Petersburg, including recent and offbeat ones as well as the classics. You can get lost in the place even if, for the moment, you can’t travel there!
'Floating, lyrical, miraculous Petersburg ... Here's beauty built on bones, classical facades that cradled revolution, summers that lie in the cup of winter' - Helen Dunmore, The Siege Malcolm Bradbury guides us to the Hermitage Anna Pavlova describes her school days Vladimir Nabokov re-lives a Petersburg winter Helen Dunmore plunges us into the worst of times Serge Dovlatov shows some 'different' Petersburg film-making Dmitry Shostakovich reveals a musical secret Truman Capote takes Porgy and Bess to the Soviets Nikolai Gogol walks us down Nevsky Prospekt J.M.Coetzee reimagines Dostoyevsky ... over sixty writers on one of the world's most fascinating and…
I’ve always loved history, but there’s something extra-special about a novel that shows history and how that history is still relevant today. Dual timeline novels tell an historical event through the eyes of a character living it and through the story of a present-day character connected to that history. I'm the author of two published dual timeline novels. One of my greatest passions is to learn about the history of a place I'm visiting so that I can practically see the history all around me. I currently live near Seattle with my husband and two sons and, when I’m not writing, can be found outside walking or boating the Salish Sea.
I love a good mystery and a good story within a story. This book has both. Estranged sisters, Meredith and Nina, have never been close with their mother, Anya, until they finally have a chance to understand what made her so icy. As a deathbed promise to her husband, Anya agrees to tell their daughters her story, but it is so difficult for her that she must tell it little by little and as a fairy tale. From frozen, war-torn Leningrad to modern-day Alaska, the story changes this family forever.
For anyone who has secrets, or has someone in their life they just can’t understand, this powerful book helps you see that there is a way through. It also reminds us that everyone has a story that can thaw the hardest of hearts.
From the New York Times number one bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds, comes Kristin Hannah's haunting, heartbreakingly beautiful novel that illuminates the intricate mother-daughter bond and explores the enduring links between past and present.
Meredith and Nina Whitson are as different as sisters can be. One stayed at home to raise her children and manage the family apple orchard; the other followed a dream and travelled the world to become a famous photo journalist. But when their beloved father falls ill, these two estranged women will find themselves together again, standing alongside their cold, disapproving mother,…
"History can become a dull and uninteresting subject, but the stories of the past are far more interesting and inspiring than the very best fiction. These stories tell us about how our world came to be, and the paths that our predecessors travelled; and they show us that, despite the decades and centuries that separate us, they were driven and inspired by the same factors that drive and inspire us today." Prit Buttar was a doctor, first in the British Army and then a GP, until retiring in 2019. Less than a year later, he volunteered to go back to work during the current pandemic.
This is an unusual book, in that it is effectively a biography of a city – known through the years first as St Petersburg, then Petrograd, then Leningrad, and now once more St Petersburg. As he tells the story of the city that Peter the Great built in a desolate swamp, Lincoln brings together many of the different strands of Russian history and the strong-willed people who tried, with varying degrees of success, to direct that history in directions of their choosing. For anyone intending to visit St Petersburg, reading this book beforehand is an absolute must – it will make the experience of being there so much more valuable. If there is a flaw, it is that Lincoln sadly died when St Petersburg was perhaps at its lowest ebb following the end of the Soviet Union; it would be fascinating to know how he would have assessed the city…
For Russians, St.Petersburg has embodied power, heroism and fortitude. It has encompassed all the things that the Russians are and that they hope to become. Opulence and artistic brilliance blend with images of suffering on a monumental scale to make up the historic persona the late W. Bruce Lincoln's lavish biography of this mysterious, complex city. Climate and comfort were not what Tsar Peter the Great had in mind when he decided to build a new capital in the muddy marshes of the Neva River delta. Located 500 miles below the Arctic Circle, this area, with its foul weather, bad…
