Friend of Elizabethan exiles: the colourful life of Jane Dormer
Thomas Cromwell’s biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch once told me that my father’s family, the Dormers, had been servants of the great…
Elizabeth I, queen of the waiting game
Women are ‘foolish, wanton flibbergibs, in every way doltified with the dregs of the devil’s dunghill’. So a cleric reminded…
Thomas Cromwell: more Tony Soprano than Richard Dawkins
The travel writer Colin Thubron once told me that to understand a country and its people he first asks, ‘What…
The Thomas Cromwell plays would be stronger if they made him weaker
Three things you might not expect of the RSC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels. First, Mike Poulton’s plays have…
Anne Boleyn’s last secret
Why was the queen executed with a sword, rather than an axe?
