I prefer to write historical fiction because so many fascinating stories have already happened in the past, and these tales are filled with real-life characters with rich backstories and personalities. I try to find the best historical figures and scenarios I can through exhaustive research and then stitch them together into thrillers that mesh seamlessly with the history I researched. My books are written to educate and entertain, and nothing makes me prouder than when readers follow the breadcrumb trails I leave behind for further research. I hope you enjoy the hunt!
It might surprise you to see a Christopher Marlowe biography over any book on William Shakespeare in this list, but Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy is seriously that good. It made me fall in love with the scoundrel now credited as co-author to Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays and who likely had a hand in several more. However, this book is also a captivating glimpse into the real-life exploits and suspicious murder of one of the greatest writers in English history. This book should have been made into several films by now. There’s just so much to like about Marlowe, his vices, and his many secrets. Please get yourself a copy and enjoy the rascal.
Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy is the most thorough and detailed life of Marlowe since John Bakeless's in 1942. It has new material on Marlowe in relation to Canterbury, also on his home life, schooling, and six and a half years at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and includes fresh data on his reading, teachers, and early achievements, including a new letter with a new date for the famous 'putative portrait' of Marlowe at Cambridge.
The biography uses for the first time the Latin writings of his friend Thomas Watson to illuminate Marlowe's life in London and his career as a…
I played rugby union for Durham University and at Rosslyn Park FC in London. Then I became a reporter and editor, for Rugby News magazine and on Fleet Street sports desks. In March 2002, six months after 9/11 and a year before the invasion of Iraq, my Park team played against the cadets of the United States Military Academy. Years later, settled in New York, I decided to find out what happened to those West Point rugby players in the 9/11 wars, and what their experiences might tell us about sports, war, brotherhood, loss, and remembrance.
Rather than pick Band of Brothers by Stephen E Ambrose, the World War Two classic, I’m going back to the source.
Henry V is my favourite Shakespeare play, in large part because in 1989 my mum took me to see Ken Branagh’s film. I was hooked. Later, an actual hooker – Brian Moore, of England – described how he used Henry V before epic rugby games with France, “tears of passion running down my cheeks as the Harfleur speech played”.
Harfleur is wonderful but when we think about why we play this stupid, violent sport, I and my rugby brothers and sisters come back to Agincourt on St Crispin’s Day: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;/ For he to-day that sheds his blood with me/ Shall be my brother.”)
The authoritative edition of William Shakespeare's historic play Henry V from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for both students and general readers.
Henry V is Shakespeare's most famous "war play"; it includes the storied English victory over the French at Agincourt. Some of it glorifies war, especially the choruses and Henry's speeches urging his troops into battle. But we also hear bishops conniving for war to postpone a bill that would tax the church, and soldiers expecting to reap profits from the conflict. Even in the speeches of Henry and his nobles, there are…
If We Were Villains is a tour de force! I began reading Rio's novel on a long flight, and the hours flew--full to bursting with suspense, mystery, and the fever-pitch passions among a group of young theater students at a Fine Arts college. These aspiring actors not only study and perform Shakespeare's plays: they live and bleed them, on and off stage, immersing readers in their own world of ambition, lust, jealousy, vengeance, sacrifice, and, possibly, love. The first scene opens with the narrator jailed for the murder of a fellow thespian, and the plot thickens, inexorably, from there on to the final curtain.
Oliver Marks has just served ten years for the murder of one of his closest friends - a murder he may or may not have committed. On the day he's released, he's greeted by the detective who put him in prison. Detective Colborne is retiring, but before he does, he wants to know what really happened ten years ago. As a young actor studying Shakespeare at an elite arts conservatory, Oliver noticed that his talented classmates seem to play the same roles onstage and off - villain, hero, tyrant, temptress - though Oliver felt doomed to always be a secondary…
I have long been struck, as a learner of French at school and later a university professor of French, by how much English borrows from French language and culture. Imagine English without naïvetéand caprice. You might say it would lose its raison d’être…My first book was the history of a single French phrase, the je-ne-sais-quoi, which names a ‘certain something’ in people or things that we struggle to explain.Working on that phrase alerted me to the role that French words, and foreign words more generally, play in English. The books on this list helped me to explore this topic—and more besides—as I was writing Émigrés.
This is a brilliant essay in literary criticism. It traces English ambivalence towards French language and culture in the centuries that followed the Norman Conquest. It does so by delving into major literary texts—by Chaucer and Shakespeare among others—that explore that ambivalence for what it is: the symptom of a fetish. I like the way Williams writes and I find her inspiring in her desire to remain faithful to the complexity of the texts she studies and their attitudes.
What was the impact of the Norman Conquest on the culture of medieval and early modern England? Deanne Williams answers this question by contending that not only French language and literature, but the idea of Frenchness itself, produced England's literary and cultural identity. Examining a variety of English representations of, and responses to, France and 'the French' in the work of Chaucer, Caxton, Skelton, Shakespeare and others, this book shows how English literature emerged out of a simultaneous engagement with, and resistance to, the pervasive presence of French language and culture in England that was the legacy of the Norman…
Fake news is not new. Biographies, in particular, are fraught with fallacies and fake stories. When fake news slanders individuals, reputations are ruined and lives destroyed. That’s what happened to Elizabeth Wydeville, Queen Consort to Edward IV, and mother of the two princes who disappeared during Richard III’s reign. When I discovered the slander that destroyed Queen Elizabeth’s reputation, I began a 5-year research project to set the record straight. Some fallacies are deliberate, originating in envy or power putsches. Others derive from historical laziness or incompetence. What I learned from my research has determined my choices of biographies, stories that tell previously unrevealed truths about individuals.
Critics argue that William Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him because he lacked the knowledge of classical myth and history basic to his plots and imagery. Jonathan Bates proves that the curriculum of the grammar school in Stratford-on-Avon provided an education sufficient to explain Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Bate reviews books in English and Latin that Shakespeare would have read and that created his rhetorical brilliance.
I treasure Bate’s biography because my own background originated in a rural, agricultural setting outside the social and economic circles that usually produce academic types. Bates disproves the fallacy that only the privileged and elite can survive and thrive in life and careers.
“One man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.”
In this illuminating, innovative biography, Jonathan Bate, one of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, has found a fascinating new way to tell the story of the great dramatist. Using the Bard’s own immortal list of a man’s seven ages in As You Like It, Bate deduces the crucial events of Shakespeare’s life and connects them to his world and work as never before.
Here is the author as an infant, born into a world of plague and syphillis, diseases with which he became closely familiar; as a…
Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by the early modern era–and I was always drawn to the big personalities and events: Henry VIII and his wives, Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. But, having made a career out of studying the era and its literature, I found that the drama didn’t end with Elizabeth in 1603 (and certainly not with Mary either when she fled Scotland or when she was executed in 1587). In fact, things became even more colorful under the riotous reign of King James. This led me to want to reassess his life and reign with a focus on the things that had historically been brushed over.
I have a soft spot for this book. It provides probably the most well-known modern pop culture image of the king–and James does not come off well. Though he’s presented as highly intelligent and calculating, he is also shown to publicly and constantly play the clown: expect to see him drooling, falling about, and squeaking with terror as he cowers behind others on seeing unsheathed swords.
This is absolutely not what the real James was like–and I imagine he’d have had Tranter’s head for suggesting it–but it is a fun, ahistorical read (which gets bonus points for delightfully ludicrous subplots about Shakespeare touring Scotland scouting for locations and Queen Anna engaging in a lesbian romance with the Countess of Huntly).
Son of the doomed Mary Queen of Scots, raised to rule two countries, James was one of the oddest kings ever to ascent any throne. Neither noble nor heroic, he confounded those who despised him by being shrewd enough to reign for fifty-eight years, survive countless plots and never go to war.
'A vastly entertaining addition to the historical novels of Scots author Nigel Tranter.' Glasgow Sunday Mail
Escape to the past and have a blast is definitely my motto as a Canadian young adult author. With a penchant for escapism fiction, I’ve always loved books that pull me into different places and adverse time periods. Enter time traveling and original storytelling. Legends, myths, and mysteries of the unexplained thrill me. A lover of anything arcane and ancient mysteries, I delve into our written past to give my fiction the facts I need to immerse readers into my imaginary universe—one book at a time.
This hilarious Shakespearean-style romantic romp hooked me from the moment the main character, Kenzie en Shareed marries the wrong guy. Filled with faux pas from the get-go, I found the cast of Unintended trying to right wrongs in the most hysterical and sometimes disturbing ways. I also loved the way the pair of imaginative authors created their fantasy world of Ismera. Sprinkled with the nostalgic feeling of Old World Scotland and Britain, coupled with their use of modern-day language to bridge the gap of the past and present, readers of this type of genre (think Outlandermeets a Shakespearean comedy) won’t be disappointed. This tale ends with a few surprises, leaving me feeling satisfied and ready for the next sojourn to Ismera.
Everything happens for a reason... Four people. Four very different lives. Four tales interwoven. Meet Kenzie en Shareed, the High Clan Chief's daughter who is sent south to fulfill a treaty by marriage only to marry the wrong man; Kadrean Authier, the Crown Prince who must come to terms with his new bride, even if he doesn't much like the idea; Garron D'Arbonne, a noble Lord who has been commanded to marry a cool and aloof princess he doesn't love; and Vivianne Chappelle, a young and ambitious woman who is in love with her abusive father's manservant and must find…
I’ve always loved all things Elizabethan, and I especially love spending time with books and manuscripts where voices from the period speak to us directly. Wanting to understand how Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood themselves led me to investigate their ideas about relations between mind and body, about emotions, about the imagination, and about the minds of women and those of other races. I’ve learned that the Elizabethans grappled with many conflicting ideas about the mind, from classical philosophies, medieval medicine, new theologies, and more – and that this intellectual turmoil was essential fuel for the extraordinary literary creativity of the period.
Renaissance writers were trained in rhetoric: how to use language to work through a problem or convey a state of mind.
Today, theories of cognition explore how linguistic devices relate to processes in the brain; for example, metaphor replicates how the mind understands something by associating or comparing it with something else. Lyne’s radical innovation is to bring together these historical and contemporary frameworks for understanding thought and language.
He explores points of contact between Renaissance rhetorical theories and present-day cognitive theories, then applies his insights to analyse works by Shakespeare. This offers a wholly fresh approach to understanding how Shakespeare translates thoughts – his own and those of his characters – into words; and how those words in turn work on our minds as readers or listeners.
Raphael Lyne addresses a crucial Shakespearean question: why do characters in the grip of emotional crises deliver such extraordinarily beautiful and ambitious speeches? How do they manage to be so inventive when they are perplexed? Their dense, complex, articulate speeches at intensely dramatic moments are often seen as psychological - they uncover and investigate inwardness, character and motivation - and as rhetorical - they involve heightened language, deploying recognisable techniques. Focusing on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, Cymbeline and the Sonnets, Lyne explores both the psychological and rhetorical elements of Shakespeare's language. In the light of cognitive linguistics and cognitive…
I was born to privilege in Manhattan. A seeker from the get-go, I perpetually yearned to see below the surface of the pond and understand what lay beneath and how the world really works. Not connecting with Western philosophy, religion, or culture, I turned to the wisdom of the East at a young age. I stayed the course through decades of training in Chinese martial arts, eventually reached some understanding of them, and realized my spiritual ambitions when I was ordained a Daoist monk in China in an official government ceremony. I write about China then and now and teach meditation and tai chi around the world.
There is an argument to be made that Jin Yong (aka Louis Cha) is modern China’s version of William Shakespeare. From Cha’s unimaginably rich and bottomless imagination come unforgettable stories and characters that have had a huge impact on not only contemporary China but the rest of the world. Writing in the category of wuxia (martial arts fiction) he sold 100 million copies of his books, making him China’s most famous author. Countless films and TV shows have been based on his stories, that typically portray the under classes struggling against overlords. One of my favorite memories of travels in China was sitting at the tea house inside Hong Kong’s Peninsula hotel and spending the day reading this book and munching on dim sum. If I’d stepped out and been hit by a bus, I would have died a happy monk.
This is the first of a three-volume picaresque historical romance by China's best-loved author. It tells the story of Trinket, an irreverent and comic anti-hero, and his adventures through China and Chinese history, spanning more than twenty years at the beginning of the Qing dynasty.
I am a historian of science who just completed a book on the role of perfume in the quest for the secret of life and vitality. While writing it, I became fascinated with the challenge of translating scent into language. While our nose can recognize a virtually infinite number of odors, there are only a few basic categories of description (“floral,” “woody,” “citrus,” etc.). To fully describe them often requires a poet’s touch – invoking a tapestry of memories, associations, and feelings to create the experience in the reader’s mind. These are some of the best books I’ve encountered for talking about the complex world of scent, and the importance of perfume in human history.
Aftel is the Alice Waters of natural perfume and here she shares the secrets of her craft while revealing their rich history.
She brings out the magic and alchemy in humankind’s long-standing efforts to capture the aromatic essences of plants, evoking a hidden world of natural fragrances and their ability to seduce, heal, intoxicate, and transport one to another state.
As long as there has been passion, there has been perfume. Wealthy Romans used to scent their doves while in Shakespeare's time, a woman in love would place a peeled apple into her armpit to saturate it with her scent and then present it to her lover. "Essence and Alchemy" resurrects the social and metaphysical legacy that is entwined with the evolution of perfumery, from the dramas of the spice trade to the quests of the alchemists. Aftel tracks scent through the boudoir and the bath and into the sanctums of worship, and along the way teaches us the art…
