A dangerous balancing act
Thomas Cromwell’s biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch once told me that my father’s family, the Dormers, had been servants of the great…
Gloriana waits and sees
Women are ‘foolish, wanton flibbergibs, in every way doltified with the dregs of the devil’s dunghill’. So a cleric reminded…
The Putney boy done good
The travel writer Colin Thubron once told me that to understand a country and its people he first asks, ‘What…
Putney boy come good
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?
