On Writing, Waterstones, Westminster Abbey and the Wolfson

Updates, thank yous, and the history of a history prize

Where to start?

Well, first of all I’ve finally – finally! – reorganised my homepage here on Substack. Weeks and weeks I’d been putting it off, because it seemed so complicated and I’m such a procrastinator. Wondrous to report, it – of course – took about five minutes. With one click, the design template toggle worked its magic.

Whew. I suspect that’s as far as I can commit to the ‘w’s. Renewed respect to Georges Perec as I offer one more: welcome to all subscribers, brand-new, recent or OG. I hope the redesign will make it easier to see what’s what: you can head straight to the various series of posts I’m writing – a readalong of the Paston Letters, a deep dive into the life and death of Joan of Arc, an investigation of royal tomb-openings, tales of remarkable medieval women, and notes from my new project – or dip into the medieval miscellany of the archive, from the mystery of Richard II’s self-penned epitaph to the big cat once owned by Henry IV.

And for any of you who are writers yourselves, I have a different proposition. My husband Ken Babstock is a prize-winning poet and editor; you can read a couple of his poems here and (in a post of mine) here, and some prose here. He’s not on Substack yet – though watch this space – but he is working one-to-one as a freelance editor and mentor with writers (in English, anywhere in the world) who are developing, revising or polishing both poetry and prose. Just in case that’s you, here are his details:

Needless to say, though I’ll say it anyway: he comes highly recommended. Here’s a sample of a recent class he gave for the Conscious Writers Collective:

Demystifying Depth in Poetry

MEANWHILE.

I’ve had a big book-related week.

The beautiful Penguin paperbacks of The Eagle and the Hart were released into the world on Thursday 2 October. (The beautiful Avid Reader paperbacks will follow in the US and Canada on Tuesday 7 October.)

Not only that, but here in the UK Waterstones, in their great wisdom, have made the book one of their paperbacks of the month. I’m thrilled, and grateful, and incredulous at the piles that seem to be stacked up everywhere I look, even by the till.

I can exclusively reveal that every single copy of everything I’ve ever written that’s currently in stock at London’s Waterstones Piccadilly is now signed by the author, and I’ll be trying to repeat the feat at every other bookshop that’ll let me in.

Waterstones Piccadilly have drawn on Shakespeare for their table display:

… while Waterstones Cambridge have gone in a different direction:

I suspect Richard II would have loved the whole shebang, not least because, among the complete list of seven paperbacks of the month, there are two – a full 28.57% – which feature his badge of the white hart:

And before I get to another list that I’m delighted to be on, I should say that I’m in possession of a small stash of the best bookmarks in the world:

I have three pairs to give away, so any subscribers who’d like a couple in an envelope with a signed card, please raise your hand in the chat. If there are enough names to require the deployment of a hat, I’ll pull out three next Saturday, 11 October, and ask for addresses by DM.

Oh! and the coming week will involve lots of talking: at London’s Waterstones Gower Street on Tuesday (7 October), at Staines Library with my partner-in-crime Dan Jones on Wednesday (8 October), and in the extraordinary surroundings of Westminster Abbey on Thursday (9 October), where I gather there are still a small handful of tickets left. Please come if you can!

So, the other list: on Tuesday 30 September the Wolfson History Prize announced its 2025 shortlist. For me, it was a moment requiring a deep breath and a sit down.

Since 1972, the Wolfson Foundation has awarded an annual prize for works of history that combine the highest quality writing and research with readability for a general audience. The competition is judged by a panel of hugely distinguished historians. The roll-call of past winners and nominees makes one of the finest reading lists you could hope to imagine.

To combine the most rigorous research of which I’m capable with writing that might capture a reader’s imagination is everything I’ve ever aimed for in my work. To find The Eagle and the Hart on this year’s shortlist, therefore, is a deep honour.

The company I’m in is (unsurprisingly) excellent. There’s Eleanor Barraclough’s The Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age; Kieran Connell’s Multicultural Britain: A People’s History; Hannah Durkin’s Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade; Andrew Fleming’s The Gravity of Feathers: Fame, Fortune and the Story of St Kilda; and Sara Lodge’s The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective.

This kind of promotional graphic is known in the trade as an ‘asset’. It’s the nearest I’ll ever get to being Jason Bourne.

And the Foundation was kind enough to send me a copy of a short history of the Prize written on its fiftieth anniversary in 2022 by the chair of judges, David Cannadine. That, and an earlier account by Keith Thomas – whose Religion and the Decline of Magic won the Prize in 1972, and who served as a judge (and later chair of judges) from 1975 to 2015 – are fascinating. If you have a few minutes to spare, you can find links to them here. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s entry on Leonard Wolfson, the founder of the Prize – rightly described as ‘no ordinary philanthropist’ – is also well worth reading.¹

The history of the Prize is, in microcosm, a history of the discipline of history over the last century, and of the history of prizes. It takes its place as part of the ‘wild proliferation’ of prizes during the twentieth century, in the wake of the first award of the Nobel Prizes in 1901.² Originally conceived as one of a range of awards in various fields of scholarship and the arts, along the lines of the Nobel Prizes but not overlapping with them, the Wolfson History Prize from the very beginning sought to recognise scholarly, intellectual and literary excellence presented in a form ‘which can be enjoyed by a general readership and will stimulate public interest in history’.

(Hugh Trevor-Roper, in his 1957 inaugural lecture as the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, called this general public ‘the laity’, which always reminds me of Elizabeth Hurley referring to non-celebrities as ‘civilians’.)

The founding of the Prize in 1972 came at a time when the discipline of history was expanding and changing rapidly. In the grand scheme of things, history was a relatively young academic subject – it had been established as an independent degree in Oxford in 1872 and in Cambridge in 1873 – and, as David Cannadine writes:

… during the inter-war years, and on into the 1950s … there was only a small number of professional historians, largely concentrated in the Universities of London, Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester: many of them were medievalists, concerned with editing charters and producing scholarly editions and, like F.W. Maitland, they had ‘no desire to speak to the world at large’.

I’m extremely grateful to those scholarly medievalists. I’m also grateful that things changed in the 1960s: more universities; more academics teaching history; more undergraduates studying it; more, better and cheaper history books available to readers of all kinds; more public argument about why history matters and how it should be done. Cannadine goes on:

It was in this heady atmosphere, when the study of the past seemed energised and engaged as never before, and when more history books were being published to educate and enlighten, that discussions began which would eventually result in the creation of the Wolfson History Prize.

Exploring the past does matter. The whole project matters: attempting to see other times, other places, other lives, through different eyes, standing in different shoes; working out what questions, and questions about questions, we might need to ask; piecing together evidence in the search for answers that are as true as we can make them; communicating the results as lucidly, evocatively and comprehensibly as we can.

It’s a process that, in one form or another, has been going on for centuries. I feel profoundly lucky to be part of it.

1. Anyone who has a public library card can access the ODNB. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

2. David Cannadine quoting James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value (2005).