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In 1837, the former Decembrist revolutionary, Nikolai Lorer, was serving on the frontline in Russia’s war in the Caucasus. Demoted from major to private, he had been sent to Circassia, a small, independent country in the north, on the shore of the Black Sea. One day, Lorer was summoned to see ...
This article first appeared in Historia magazine
Part one: love
In May 1867, a World Fair was held in Paris. Tsar Alexander II was there to show Russian support for France in the face of rising Prussian militarism.He also had his own private reasons for visiting the City of ...
This article first appeared in Historia magazineCrime and Punishment is one of those books. It has a unique power. The idea of it compels you even before you’ve read it. The stature of it too: it’s a masterpiece of world literature, a towering work that casts a long shadow. I remember how, ...
A slightly different version of this article first appeared in Historia magazineOnce upon a time I wrote four novels set in 19th-century Russia.My American editor said to me: “So you must be an expert on all things Russian?”I had to disappoint him.When I started out on the ...
A version of this article was published on the Inside History SubstackOn November 14, 1879, a young man was observed acting suspiciously at Odessa railway station. He was lugging around an obviously heavy suitcase but when a porter offered his services, he refused. This seemed odd. The man ...
Life hasn’t been kind to Col Newton. His fleeting moment of literary celebrity has long faded, and he’s living in a dismal bedsit with millennials half his age. When his old university pal Chris Lazenby turns up offering him £50,000 to write a novel, it seems too good to be true. And that’s ...
Some reads are simply unforgettable, and I guess we all have particular favourites, the kind of books that stay with us. Every year I add a handful of titles to my, now long list, living rent free in my mind.2025 was another great one for crime fans, the genre continues to be the most ...
Written In Blood is the third book by Fiona Forsyth featuring the poet Ovid. We first met Forsyth’s Ovid in Poetic Justice, as he begins his exile in Tomis, on the coast of modern-day Romania. He’s depressed, homesick, angry. He doesn’t understand why he’s there. No one has told him what his ...
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Author Interviews
Most of your books have been historical crime novels. Your latest, Cover Story, is a contemporary spy story. Why the change?I never meant to become a historical crime writer. I just had an idea for a novel that happened to be in that genre. That idea was to write a one-off book featuring Porfiry Petrovich, the investigating magistrate from Dostoevsky’s masterpiece Crime ...
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