Alice Loxton EleanorA 200-mile walk in search of England’slost queen352pp. Pan Macmillan. £22. Many are commemorated in stone, but few so grandly as Eleanor of Castile (d. 1290). Following her unexpec

Exaggerating her beetling monobrow and wispy dark moustache in self-portraits, the artist Frida Kahlo was a female force to be reckoned with, unafraid to pour her heart onto the canvas. Only last autu

For 11 or 12 days in 1654, Anna Trapnel, a self-styled prophet from Poplar, lay in a stupor in an inn near Whitehall. With her eyes shut and her body unmoving, she spoke and sang prophecies to the cro

You wouldn’t guess from the cover design—three songbirds silhouetted over swatches of picturesque Englishness—but Catherine Clarke’s A History of England in 25 Poems hits one of its sweet spots with a

A Queer Inheritance: Alternative Histories in the National ...

Daniel Anlezark Constructing the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles 310pp. D. S. Brewer. £95. Janet Bately, Joseph C. Harris and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, with Susan Irvine, editors and translators The Old Engl