For a little over twenty years, from the first campaigns of Revolutionary France in 1792 to the field of Waterloo in 1815, Europe was almost constantly at war. Armies marched from Lisbon to Moscow. Fleets fought from the Nile to Trafalgar. One man, a Corsican artillery officer, made himself emperor and redrew the map. No…

In 1783 a young army officer rides home to Cornwall from the war in America. His father is dead, his house is falling down, and the woman he hoped to marry is engaged to someone else. That is the opening of Ross Poldark, and of one of the best loved family sagas in historical fiction.…

Horatio Hornblower is the officer every other fictional sea captain is measured against. Created by C.S. Forester in 1937, he rises from seasick midshipman to admiral across eleven novels set during the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. The series has one famous complication: Forester did not write it in order. He began in the…

A good historical mystery gives you two books for the price of one. There is the puzzle, with its body, its suspects and its clever detective. And there is the world around it: a medieval abbey, a Roman back street, Berlin in 1936, a Victorian drawing room. The best writers in the genre make the…

No dynasty has fed historical fiction like the Tudors. In just 118 years, from Bosworth Field in 1485 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, England got six wives, two child monarchs, a break with Rome, a nine-day queen, the Armada, and Shakespeare. Novelists have been mining that material for more than a century,…

Colleen McCullough wrote two of the most ambitious historical novels of the twentieth century and then kept going. The Thorn Birds turned a sheep station in New South Wales into one of the most widely read family sagas ever written, and the seven-book Masters of Rome series rebuilt the last century of the Roman Republic…