Leanda de Lisle

It is often fiction – a novel or a film – that first sparks an interest in history. Elizabeth Fremantle’s psychological thriller The Poison Bed is the kind of book that achieves just this. Described as The Miniaturist meets Gone Girl, it tells the true story of the most scandalous murder at the Jacobean court and will, I hope, bring more readers to the Stuart period. Gripping, and full of surprises and rich detail, it is a book you can’t fail to enjoy.

My next choice is a heavyweight biography of a character transformed in the public imagination by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Thomas Cromwell: A Life is an immersive read. Don’t feel guilty about taking your time. He brings Cromwell’s world to life with wit and warmth and sympathy for the old devil. It is the Tudor book of the year.

Finally, I offer a history book that will surely inspire future fiction. Nadine Akkerman’s Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain uncovers the extraordinary story of female spies from the reign of Charles I to the Restoration of Charles II. Some, like Lucy Hay – the inspiration for Alexandre Dumas’ Lady de Winter – I know well from my own work. Others, like the tragic Susan Hyde (sister of Charles II’s leading minister the Earl of Clarendon), who died in prison, are uncovered for the first time. A work of deep scholarship and clever detective work. Leanda de Lisle’s most recent book, White King: Charles I, Traitor, Murderer, Martyr (Chatto and Windus), won the Historical Writers’ Association Non-Fiction Crown for 2018