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The irresistible Christopher Marlowe
What is it about Marlowe that captures our imaginations? He’s James Dean meets Lord Byron, Shakespeare’s mentor, the quintessentially Elizabethan combination of poetry, mystery, and action. The...
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Financial fiddles in Cambridge colleges
My last career before becoming a full-time novelist was managing a digital archive founded deep within the library system at the megaversity, the University of Texas at Austin. For most of those twelve...
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Every drunken man’s dream is a book
Every month or so we get another outcry against self-published fiction. Some are aimed at the Beast of Amazon, destroyer of standards and scourge of literature, like George Packer’s bitter lament in...
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Book review: Brags and Boasts: Propaganda in the Year of the Armada
Bertrand T. Whitehead’s Brags and Boasts: Propaganda in the Year of the Armada is one of the most intriguing and delightful history books I’ve ever read. If you want an varied, insightful, and lively...
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Chasing Francis Bacon around the winding stair
Nicolas Hilliard. Portrait of Francis Bacon (at 17), 1578. London, National Portrait Gallery. Used by permission. The philosopher Francis Bacon (b. 1561 – d. 1626) is the protagonist of my historical...
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Victorian: At the theatre
Yes, this is another post full of pictures but no, it’s not because I’m lazy! (Although I am often very lazy.) I set a deadline for my current project to keep me working apace and then things...
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Not quite a countess: Lady Elizabeth Russell
This is a short biography of one my favorite Elizabethans, Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell. She was the youngest sister of Francis Bacon’s mother. This post is derived chiefly from Chris Laoutaris’s...
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The Court of Wards
Robert Cecil presiding over the Court of Wards I can’t remember if I decided one of my Francis Bacon mystery series characters would become an orphan before or after I learned about the Court of Wards....
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